When The Police Depolice

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The guys in patrol react in several ways to perceived threats and injustices. One of the favorites was to to stop writing parking tickets which was a major source of revenue for the city. The citizenry was not endangered as the overwhelming majority of illegally parked cars do not represent a threat to public safety. Our commanders might thunder but since everyone was doing it they could not single anyone out for retribution. However what is transpiring now is completely different; it’s on a whole new level and it is not going to be quickly addressed.

The WashTimes reports:

EXCLUSIVE: FBI report finds officers ‘de-policing’ as anti-cop hostility becomes ‘new norm’

An unclassified FBI study on last year’s cop-killing spree found officers are “de-policing” amid concerns that anti-police defiance fueled in part by movements like Black Lives Matter has become the “new norm.”

“Departments — and individual officers — have increasingly made the decision to stop engaging in proactive policing,” said the report by the FBI Office of Partner Engagement obtained by The Washington Times.

The report, “Assailant Study — Mindsets and Behaviors,” said that the social-justice movement sparked by the 2014 death of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, “made it socially acceptable to challenge and discredit the actions of law enforcement.”
FBI spokesman Matthew Bertron said the study was written in April.

“Nearly every police official interviewed agreed that for the first time, law enforcement not only felt that their national political leaders [publicly] stood against them, but also that the politicians’ words and actions signified that disrespect to law enforcement was acceptable in the aftermath of the Brown shooting,” the study said.

There are several of my readers who understand completely what is going on. You guys know who you are. This is a major sea change that will drive crime rates up. All crime rates will go up, not just homicides, as police officers take a few steps back.

This is no longer your grandfather’s America where a healthy dollop of respect for authority and accountability was infused into young people. That is gone, particularly in minority communities. Generations of haphazard child-rearing have seen to that as fathers fled the families as government moved in. In many minority communities – yes, black neighborhoods – police are mistrusted. Cooperation with authorities is stymied by prideful attitudes like “stitches for snitches” that stop investigations dead in their tracks. People do get away with murder.

Police officers are subject to violence, but that has always been the case. Look at the following chart that depicts police officers killed in the line of duty for the past 51 years. A total of 9,313 officers lost their lives, an average of 183 per year.

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Look at the spike in  officer deaths that started with the 1967 race riots. That didn’t begin to calm down until the mid 70′s. Interestingly, cops started wearing Kevlar vests about that time too. The spike in 2001 is self evident. But there was still a downward trend until the tail end of the chart. The lowest point is 2013 (the lowest number of officer deaths in 50 years), the year before the events in Ferguson.

Of course not all of these officers were murdered.
In the last ten years 1,511 officers were killed. The most common causes of death were:

• 612 (41%) officers were killed in automobile, aircraft and boat accidents
• 553 (37%) officers were murdered
• 270 (18%) officers died from illness – deaths from 9/11 diseases were not listed.

But in the last four years – since the 2014 riots in Ferguson and the subsequent attacks of Obama’s Justice Department –  the number of officers murdered (shot, stabbed, beaten and strangled) has almost doubled; a 92% increase from 36 to 69  and the number of officers murdered in the past year (2016 vs 2015) has jumped 57%, from 44 to 69. Only eight of these 201 murders did not involve a firearm; the number of police shot to death since Ferguson has increased 94%.
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So, are officers concerned?