By Ron Martinelli, Oh.D.
Officer.com
October 4, 2016
The law enforcement community is currently experiencing the most intense scrutiny and community dissention since the Vietnam war of the late 1960’s – early 1970s. Law enforcement and city administrators increasingly find themselves up against the wall as citizen protests mount; occasionally transitioning into violence, riots and the destruction of city property and privately owned businesses. Worse yet, as the police officer assassinations in Dallas (TX) and Baton Rouge (LA) demonstrate; police officers who are defenders of the Rule of Law and the Thin Blue Line of safety between the criminal elements and innocent civilians have become human targets for disturbed, lone-wolf, ticking time bombs influenced by the emotional rhetoric born from false narratives of officer-involved death cases.
Taking the center stage spotlight in the war against police and the democratic rule of law is the militant, revolutionary Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). The BLM is an organization reborn from the Vietnam war era, with a political ideology steeped in Marxism and Black Nationalism. Literally all of the heroes of the BLM founders identified as Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, are former convicted cop-killer Black Nationalist revolutionaries from the old Black Panther, Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground organizations. These black revolutionaries include the likes of Huey Newton and Assata Shakur and others whose backgrounds are virtually unknown to the current generation of American youth and young adults. However, to those of us from that era of law enforcement; these names and their evil deeds are well remembered.
The Black Lives Matter organization is not some current political fad born of social media; but a large, organized, well-planned and funded political action group with international outreach extending to Cuba, Northern Ireland, Europe and the Middle East. The BLM is a tentacle of a Marxist, revolutionary Global movement referred to as “One World – One Struggle.” Significant funding sources for the BLM comes from international currency manipulator and convicted criminal George Soros through his Open Society Institute, which is a funding front for far leftist and revolutionary movements and organizations such as the secret Tides Foundation, MORE (formerly known as ACORN), MoveOn.org, Democracy Alliance, the National of La Raza and others. Much of Soros’ money into the BLM coffers pays for outside mercenary protesters who suddenly enter a city, create havoc and then leave. Police in cities such as Ferguson, (MO) Baltimore, (MD) and now Charlotte, (NC) have identified upwards to 70% of arrested violent protesters as having no ties to the cities they were protesting in.
Additionally, major music entertainers and celebrities such as Jay Z and Beyoncé Carter have provided tens of thousands of dollars to BLM movement members and supporters for transportation, food and bail following the riots, lootings and the burning of commercial businesses in Ferguson, Baltimore and other major cities in which the Black Lives Matter movement has protested. You might recall that Beyoncé performed an anti-law enforcement, pro-Black Panther Party half-time show at the 2015 Super Bowl that was right out of the BLM playbook.
The Black Lives Matter organization is relatively transparent in its intent to create a new Marxist style policing and criminal justice paradigm. However, their less than transparent and ultimate goals to achieve this objective are to disenfranchise and diminish law enforcement officers in the eyes of the low-informed and disengaged general public and media. Next they seek to de-fund proactive, anti-crime community policing programs. The movement’s ultimate objective is to eventually dissolve law enforcement and the criminal justice systems as we know them today in favor of their own programs.
Black Lives Matter’s more transparent plan forwarded through its public demands, protests; its media spotlight and through its naïve politician surrogates is referred to as “Campaign Zero.” Components of the Campaign Zero plan have already been espoused by Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former candidate and avowed socialist Bernie Sanders. These demands include an end to “broken windows policing,” stop and frisk and other proactive policing programs that have been repeatedly proven to reduce violent crime in the inner cities of New York, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland and other cities.
The rhetoric of the leaders, followers and political surrogates of the Black Lives Matter movement is replete with vague and ambiguous Marxist-style rhetoric of “police oppression of the people” and “social justice.” While they chant that “black lives matter” and claim that their designs are peaceful; their rhetoric does not reconcile with their documented actions.
Factually, leaders and members of the BLM have been videoed marching down city streets and highways they have shut down while yelling, “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!” and “Pigs in a blanket. Fry’em like bacon.” Not exactly peace-loving chants. Young girls of the movement are observed to be wearing T-shirts inscribed with “Assata Taught Me,” which is a reference to Marxist revolutionary, Black Panther and Black Liberation Army soldier and convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur. Shakur assassinated a New Jersey state trooper during a car stop in the 1970s; escaped prison and has been living in exile in communist Cuba under the protection of the Cuban government ever since.
Black Lies Matter – A movement born of falsehoods
No matter how hard the Black Lives Matter movement tries, they just cannot get behind the right suspect “victim” profile when protesting so-called “police injustice” and what they refer to as “extrajudicial killings” of young black men.
As I have written about in my book, “The Truth Behind the Black Lives Matter Movement and the War on Police,” the BLM was initially founded upon the false narratives they forwarded in the high-profile shooting death cases of Trayvon Martin (Sanford, FL) and Michael Brown (Ferguson, MO). Investigations in both cases revealed conclusive forensic evidence that both Martin and Brown were committing violent felony assaults upon their victims when they were ultimately shot and killed in self-defense. In the case of Trayvon Martin, it was by civilian George Zimmerman and in the case of Michael Brown, by police officer Darren Wilson. In fact, one of the BLM’s favorite slogans, “Hands-up; don’t shoot!” was a proven false narrative emanating from the Michael Brown shooting case. It simply never happened; but that hasn’t stopped members of Black Lives Matter from perpetuating this lie each time they protest. Hands up gestures have been picked up by professional athletes in the NFL who are obviously ignorant of the forensic facts in the Michael Brown shooting case.
Since the Michael Brown case in 2014, the leaders, members, political and celebrity surrogates have forwarded other false narratives that have been forensically proven to be factually incorrect and/or misleading. For instance, Freddie Gray (Baltimore, MD) was not beaten by police in the back of a transport van. His death was more likely than not self-inflicted when the drug influenced, agitated and chaotic Gray slammed his head backwards into an exposed bolt in the back of a police van. Anton Sterling (Baton Rouge, LA) was not “unarmed” as the BLM claimed. He was in fact armed with a concealed handgun that he was reaching for when he was shot/killed by police. But that fact did not stop the BLM from holding violent protests falsely claiming that police shot an unarmed black man. This rhetoric no doubt contributed to the ambush murder of three Baton Rouge police officers and five more police officers in Dallas, Texas one week later during BLM inspired protests.
Most recently in Charlotte (NC), Black Lives Matter members and their surrogates forwarded the false narrative that deceased officer-involved shooting suspect Keith Lamont Scott was “unarmed” when he was shot by police. This lie resulted in week long protests and riots that devastated the city, shut down streets and a highway; and damaged city and commercial property. The riots that ensued were directly responsible for the shooting death of one protester by another. However, the initial false narrative that was screamed out to the impressionable media by members of the BLM was that it was the police who killed victim Justin Carr with a “rubber bullet to the head.” The BLM simply dropped this lie after police arrested the real suspect Rayquan Borum, 21, who was identified by both a surveillance video and a nearby witness as Carr’s killer. Yet, another incident of black on black homicide. There were no apologies to police and no sympathetic protests of Carr’s tragic death made by Black Lives Matter afterwards. Mr. Carr’s death as a black man simply didn’t matter to the BLM because it’s not part of their false narrative that police indiscriminately kill young black men.
Although police could have significantly mitigated the level of public dissention and riots by mostly outside anarchists and BLM members by releasing a police video(s) of the encounter, they initially chose not to. The city’s police Chief Kerr Putney later reversed his initial ill-considered decision to release police videos several critical and riotous days later, but only after Black Lives Matter had firmly planted the seeds of deceit that police had unjustifiably “murdered” an unarmed Keith Scott and then “planted” a gun next to his body. Police had to counter the BLM’s damaging false narrative by releasing forensic evidence that confirmed that the fully loaded Colt Mustang 9mm semi-automatic pistol recovered near Scott’s body had his blood, DNA and fingerprints on it; they had arrested a burglar who stole the gun and admitted selling it to Scott; and Scott was found to be wearing an ankle holster when he was shot by police.
In addition, public records reveal that Scott had thirteen prior arrests, including two for aggravated assault with weapons; child and spousal abuse. In fact, after Scott’s wife Rakeyia released her cell phone video where she was yelling to police that Scott wasn’t armed; public records document that she had filed a restraining order last October against her husband writing in the affidavit that Scott “had a black 9mm; says he’s a killer” and “threated to kill me.”
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Anton Sterling and Keith Scott are the types of people that Black Lives Matter champions over the tens of thousands of young black men and women murdered during the past five years nationally in black on black homicides. The very name of their movement “Black Lives Matter” is in fact a blatant lie. Not all black lives matter to these militants; just certain lives that fit into their anti-police, anti-democratic government political designs.
The manner in which BLM did not protest the Charlotte murder of black victim Justin Carr; and their historic refusal to protest the thousands of homicide victims of black on black homicides in Chicago alone is a testament to the hypocrisy of their movement, ideology and ideals.
It’s time to take a stand and publicly disavow, disassociate from and dissolve BLM
As a forty-year active participant in the law enforcement and criminal justice communities, I must confess that one of the things that I have found disappointing about my communities is their often archaic thinking regarding pressing issues and threats to destabilize a system that protects citizens by enforcing the Rule of law. It is as if none of our police and sheriff administrators, prosecutors and judges ever watch TV or read a newspaper. While some police chiefs and sheriffs espouse the “proactivity” of their department mission statements towards community policing; they are factually well behind the tidal wave of public dissent of law enforcement currently being created by the Black Lives Matter movement.
The truth is that the vast majority of our law enforcement leaders are leading from behind when it comes to assertively addressing the significant dangers of a political movement called Black Lives Matter that seeks to destroy law enforcement; usurp the Rule of Law and endanger our communities. It is the same issue for municipal, state and federal politicians. For God’s sake people, wake up!
While Black Lives Matter, Marxists, Communists and anarchists are marching in our streets, shutting down freeways, isolating cities, burning police cars, looting and burning commercial businesses and assassinating our police officers; our law enforcement leaders and municipal, state and federal politicians do nothing. To make matters worse, a low-informed and overtly biased against police mainstream media is complicit in allowing Black Lives Matter and its political surrogates to forward their blatant lies about police-citizen encounters without challenge or journalistic scrutiny.
My dad once told me, “Life is tough; but it’s a lot tougher when you’re stupid.”
What is going on here?
While it is both a civil right and often appropriate to protest perceived “injustices;” there are boundaries and legal guidelines to such demonstrations and dissent. That is exactly why we have the Rule of Law and why governments train and entrust law enforcement officers with the authority to maintain and enforce those laws. We simply cannot have violent anarchy founded upon and precipitated by the spreading of false narratives by any quasi-political organization.
This is not rocket science. Politicians and law enforcement administrators have got to get their collective heads out of their Ostridge holes and educate themselves on the growing menace of the Black Lives Matter movement. Our federal leaders and one political candidate for Presidential office are not only deliberately not speaking out against the BLM; but have incredibly brought leaders of the movement into their political camps as advisors. This nonsense must stop.
Municipal law enforcement administrators, prosecutors, mayors and state politicians must take a public stand against Black Lives Matter; and their violent, anti-police, anti-government inflammatory false rhetoric that is specifically designed to create and widen chasms between the law enforcement, criminal justice and minority communities. We simply don’t need people or an exploitive Marxist political movement that seeks to destroy our national identity from the inside out.
Instead our law enforcement and municipal leaders need to diminish Black Lives Matter as a destructive movement by working closer with credible minority leaders, positive role models, social organizations and the religious community to bring about the positive changes we need in contemporary policing and in building a better criminal justice system.
Finally, law enforcement needs to be a leader in the education of our youth, young adults and our low-informed mainstream media as to the role of law enforcement in society; their civil rights; and appropriate behavior during police encounters. The fact that our country no longer educates it youth and citizens in these critical areas is a national disgrace. It has also proven to be a central theme in deadly police encounters. We need to understand that the federal government has no interest nor any desire to accept this important responsibility. Therefore, it is up to local law enforcement resources to educate our citizens as a “community care taking” responsibility.
My stern warning to my law enforcement colleagues and politicians is that if you don’t lean forward with heroic courage to face Black Lives Matter head-on; publicly disavow this movement and its leaders; and get ahead of the tidal wave of their false narratives by being more transparent and leading in the field of civil rights education; we as a nation will fall victim to increasing civil unrest and the eventual destruction of our once proud nation.
About the Author
Ron Martinelli, Ph.D., CMI-V, is a nationally renowned forensic criminologist and police practices expert who directs the nation’s only multidisciplinary Forensic Death Investigations & Independent Review Team. Dr. Martinelli, is a retired San Jose (CA) police detective who has investigated nearly 300 police and civilian-involved death cases. He is the author of the new book, “The Truth Behind the Black Lives Matter Movement and the War on Police,” (Amazon.com). His forensic site is found at: www.DrRonMartinelli.com.
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