Has liberal governance ever been more neglectful and incompetent?
By Dov Fischer
The American Spectator
May 31, 2020
I am a big “Blue Lives Matter” guy. I
love the police, and I love first-responders. Nevertheless, I have
encountered bad apples, too. I have met cops who have lied, cops who
have slapped “Resisting Arrest” on a person who did not resist arrest
just so that there would be an extra misdemeanor charge that would scare
an innocent arrestee to plead guilty to something lesser, and we all
have our own respective stories about traffic cops who were unfair,
nasty, or even cruel. Because I am an Orthodox Jew who always wears a
knitted yarmulke, I also have had two experiences in my life with cops
who were outright anti-Semitic. If that is the price of worshipping G-d
as I am commanded, I can handle it.
I taught my kids at a young age to respect the police, and when the
kids were ready to take aim at California’s freeways and get their
driver’s licenses I taught them that, if they ever are stopped by a cop,
just be respectful and do whatever the cop says. Don’t argue with the
cop, because he or she has a gun. And if the cop asks you for your
automobile registration and proof of insurance, tell the cop where you
are about to retrieve it from, and ask permission. So if the papers are
in your glove compartment, tell him or her, “Officer, the papers are in
my glove compartment. May I have your permission to open that
compartment and get them?” If the papers are in your inner pocket in
your jacket, tell the cop and ask permission. You never know when you
have the bad luck to be up against an antsy cop who sees you innocently
going for your inner pocket or glove compartment and thinks you are
going for a gun. If the cop is abusive or nasty, don’t respond. If the
cop makes an anti-Jewish comment, don’t respond. Just do your best to
remember the nameplate and the badge number. We’ll deal with it later.
How does such an overwhelmingly left-of-liberal government, with Blacks
in charge of police and statewide law enforcement, manage to preside
over such a police force?
So that is my love affair with the police. I respect them. They
protect my home, my neighborhood, my city. Without them there would be
chaos. Most of them cannot be fully certain, when they leave for work
each day, that they will be coming home unscathed or at all. They are
brave. They are heroic. They save people all day. They answer domestic
violence calls and put themselves in mortal danger. They go into
dangerous places on drug busts. Even when they simply are sitting at
Krispy Kremes or Dunkin Donuts, they are in danger of some mental case
taking a shot at them. So I really love cops and firefighters and all
first responders.
When the Michael Brown Ferguson lie first emerged — “Hands Up! Don’t
Shoot!” — my first reaction was, “Could be. Lemme see. Don’t rush to
judgment like Obama and Eric Holder.” It did not take long before the
whole thing was exposed as the quintessential Fake News Big Lie. It
turned out that Michael Brown was a violent, vicious thug who held up
convenience stores and decided to wrestle a cop for his gun. When a cop
is arresting someone, and that guy starts to wrestle for the gun, all
bets are off because any cop with even half a brain knows that the
criminal, if he wins the grappling game, will shoot the cop to death.
It’s not a game of jacks. It’s not Penn & Teller: “Thanks for
letting me wrestle away your pistol. Now watch me make a rabbit come out
of the barrel.”
Michael Brown got exactly what he deserved. A grand jury refused to
indict Darren Wilson, the policeman who defended himself against that
thug. And, although the Ferguson rioters on the left seemed to have a
wonderful time burning down their own neighborhoods and the stores they
frequented that gave their communities life, the state of Missouri soon
enough not only elected a Republican governor but threw out Claire
McCaskill and elected a Republican U.S. senator, Josh Hawley.
It was similar when the George Zimmerman thing happened in Florida.
Here was a lily-White racist who had murdered a sweet innocent boy of 12
or 13 merely because he was wearing a hoodie. My first reaction was,
“Could be. Lemme see. Don’t rush to judgment like Obama and Eric
Holder.” Soon enough, it turned out that Zimmerman is Hispanic, born of a
mother from Peru with African ancestry, too. Turned out that the 911
recording that NBC played over and over, in which George Zimmerman
seemingly was a racist, actually had been
edited and doctored maliciously by NBC
to make Zimmerman seem like something he was not. Turned out the media
were showing a four-year-old picture of a 17-year-old. More recent
photos of that sweet boy showed him, instead, pointing his middle finger
in his camera pose. At the time of the shooting, he was serving a
10-day suspension for having a marijuana pipe and an empty bag
containing marijuana residue. He had been suspended twice before, for
tardiness and
truancy and marking up a door with graffiti. When his backpack was searched by a
Miami-Dade School Police
officer, the officer found a dozen pieces of women’s jewelry, a watch,
and a screwdriver. In the end, Zimmerman was acquitted. The state of
Florida soon enough not only elected a Republican governor but threw out
Bill Nelson and elected a Republican U.S. senator, Rick Scott.
And then there was Freddie Gray. Long story short: Although the
Baltimore rioters on the left seemed to have a wonderful time burning
down their own neighborhoods and the stores they frequented that gave
their communities life, practically egged on by as incompetent a mayor
as America has proven itself capable of devising, the Hon. Stephanie
Rawlings-Blake, every single cop who was put on trial was acquitted — by
a Black judge, Barry Williams.
So I do not rush to judgment when the usual suspects accuse the cops of racism and worse.
Nevertheless, when I saw the film out of Minnesota, something was
different right away. I never actually saw Michael Brown saying, “Hands
up! Don’t shoot!” I never actually saw the George Zimmerman scuffle. I
never actually saw what happened to Freddie Gray inside that police van.
I just knew what the Left media wanted me to hear, even if they had to
doctor the recordings, and what they wanted me to see, even if they had
to play games with the photos. But this time I saw what seemed to be
happening. As I was watching the news film for the first time, I
actually found myself yelling at the TV: “Get your knee off that guy’s
neck, you #$&%!” And now I read that the cop’s wife is filing for
divorce. Meanwhile, three other cops are standing there, watching, and
not one walks over to Chauvin to whisper, in a face-saving way, “OK,
Derek, that’s enough.”
Because I have been exposed to so many media lies for so long, I
still have a voice in me that whispers, “Lemme see. Don’t rush to
judgment.” Every person deserves his day in court and his right to be
deemed innocent until proven guilty. It certainly does seem that the
defense will argue that George Floyd was drunk with an enormous alcohol
content and that he had other causes contributing to shortness of breath
and his death. But unless Derek Chauvin’s lawyers come up with
something akin to what saved Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, the five
officers in Baltimore, and George Zimmerman — a revelation that the
truth is different from what a nation has seen — he deserves as severe a
punishment as Minnesota has on its books. And the other three officers,
perhaps frozen by a sudden moral crisis that forced them unexpectedly
to choose between standing up for the right thing versus not publicly
upbraiding a brother in blue, chose terribly wrong. No one has a greater
responsibility to spit such miscreants out of our midst than do
unabashed supporters of our first responders. Assuming the facts prove
to be as they seem. Let’s see.
But I am not done.
There remains a disconnect for me. The horrific racist images from
1950s and 1960s Alabama and Mississippi came out of a climate of its
place and time. But what I don’t get is how Minnesota keeps making
national news with these bad apples. In Alabama in the 1960s, one man —
the famous L. B. Sullivan of “
New York Times versus” — was the
Commissioner of Police. And the Commissioner of Fire Safety. And the
Commissioner of Cemeteries. And the Commissioner of Weights and Scales.
But look at who is running Minnesota and its law enforcement. The state
attorney general is one Keith Ellison, a Muslim Black radical who made
quite a
nice name for
himself as a
Jew-hater
not all that long ago. The governor is another in a long line of
Democrat liberals. The mayor of Minnesota is a radical-left poster boy.
The Jew-hater Ilhan Omar comes out of that same city’s muck. And the
police chief of Minneapolis, Medaria Arradondo, is Black and has been in
charge for three years.
How does such an overwhelmingly left-of-liberal government, with
Blacks in charge of police and statewide law enforcement, manage to
preside over such a police force? Where is the training? Where is the
insistence on excellence after a series of scandalous police shootings
in recent years like the
Justine Ruszczyk Damond
killing by Officer Mohamed Noor, the Philando Castile killing by
Officer Jeronimo Yanez, and others? It is not as though Officer Chauvin
had one inexplicably bad day. Rather, he has had
17 complaints against him in 19 years. Where is the oversight? Where is the insistence on rudimentary
competence?
What it points to is this: In the community of the Left that wallows
in Identity Politics, too many too often select people based on criteria
other than simple competence. Nowhere is this more evident than in
cities that Democrats rule, as if by divine right, as one-party towns
for decades uninterrupted. There is a terrible price to be paid when
voters so lose their independence of thought that they mindlessly vote
for sub-mediocrity no matter what the one and only party in power
throughout their lifetimes throws at them. Such cities are governed with
consistent incompetence, and everything that such governments touch
emerges inferior: commerce, public safety, education, health services.
When political parties perceive that they do not have to offer the best,
but simply the next one in line for patronage, or the one who has the
right Identity for the moment, a price is paid. In Minneapolis, it
reaches national news when another of its poorly trained police officers
abuses his or her authority under the color of law. An officer who
answers to Medaria Arradondo who answers to the likes of Jacob Frey and
Keith Ellison.
On a national scale, the presumptive Democrat standard-bearer has
made clear that he is not looking for the best person he can find to be
his running mate, but for the best woman of color he can find. As he has
been the first to note, there is no
guarantee
he will be around in four years. Moreover, there is no guarantee that
the 25th Amendment will not catch up with him sooner than that. Imagine
if the United States were to be led by two incompetents and bumblers
with the competence levels of the fools who have been running
Minneapolis, its police department, and its statewide law enforcement.
