The End Result of the Left's Anti-Police Narrative

On January 7^th, a man named Tyre Nichols was pulled over by Memphis Police for an alleged traffic violation. For reasons still unexplained, the five officers at the scene pulled Nichols out of his vehicle and attempted to detain him. Nichols somehow escaped and ran from them. The officers quickly caught up with him and beat him so viciously, he died three days later.

I have watched the body cam footage of this incident, but quite honestly, I could not watch more than a few seconds of it. It reminds me a great deal of the Rodney King incident in 1991, except King didn’t die from his beating. Of course, because this is 2023, and because race has to be at the forefront of every issue in America, the other difference between these two cases is that all five officers involved in Nichols’ beating are black.

That last fact in evidence is more than likely the reason why we haven’t seen the extensive protests, rioting, looting, murders, assaults, and property damage that we saw in the wake of the George Floyd incident in 2020. The left immediately made Floyd’s death a racial issue even though race had nothing to do with it. In the case of Nichols (who is also black, by the way), the races of the officers don’t fit the leftist narrative, so they aren’t nearly as outraged as they were about Floyd’s death.

The circumstances of Floyd’s death suggest that the officers’ actions on his fateful day were merely a contributing factor to his death – arguably not even the main cause of it. There is zero question, however, that Nichols was brutally murdered by those five cops. Another key difference between the two cases is that the four officers involved in the Floyd incident were all fired the very next day. In the Nichols case, it took nearly two weeks for the Memphis PD to fire those five officers.

If police brutality were the actual cause of the George Floyd protests, then we should see a lot more anger in the streets of America today than we saw in 2020. If “justice” against the offending officers were the true cause of the protests, then people should be a lot more outraged about the delay in justice in the Nichols case. The fact that the public response has been a bit more muted in this more recent case speaks volumes. It was never about police brutality. It was never about accountability or justice. It was always about advancing a false narrative.

This false narrative arguably began in 2014, when Michael Brown was shot dead by a cop, allegedly after he put his hands in the air and begged the officer not to shoot him. That, we now know, was a lie. Brown did no such thing. He charged at the officer, moments after attempting to wrestle the officer’s gun from his holster, when he was shot. The officer, Darren Wilson, acted appropriately in that situation, as determined by a jury of his peers.

The left continued to repeat the “hands-up, don’t shoot” lie long after it was revealed to be a lie. As the old saying goes, a lie told often enough becomes the truth. The lie itself proved to be far more useful, in this case, than the truth. A lot of people earned a lot of money by advancing that lie. One of them was a football player named Colin Kaepernick. He became a cultural icon when he began kneeling during the National Anthem in 2016. Nike rewarded him for his unpatriotic behavior with an extremely-lucrative endorsement deal. How lucrative? We don’t know for certain, as neither Nike nor Kaepernick is obligated to disclose that figure. Insiders speculate that it is at least “millions per year,” plus royalties.

When critics dared to point out the disrespectfulness of Kaepernick’s kneeling, he and his supporters claimed that he was not disrespecting the flag or our troops or anything else but the police. If that were true, however, you would think he would have kneeled in front of his local police department. Instead, he chose to do it at a time when patriotic Americans stand with our hands on our hearts. His kneeling act never had anything to do with law enforcement. It had to do with advancing a false leftist narrative.

Let me explain what I mean by false narrative. This narrative claims that black men are disproportionately shot and killed by police in America. That is true only if you dishonestly disregard the disproportionate percentage of black people who commit crimes. Black people comprise roughly 12% of the U.S. population, but commit roughly 30% of all crimes and over 50% of all murders, according to FBI statistics. People who commit crimes are far more likely to interact with police than people who don’t. People who interact with police are far more likely to be shot and killed by police than people who don’t. This very simple logic destroys the narrative.

Despite having far more interactions with police, black people are far less likely to be the victims of lethal force than white people. This is a fact, which has been validated by numerous studies including this one and this one. According to a study by the Center for Policing Equity (which is, needless to say given its name, a left-leaning group), police are 42% less likely to use deadly force on a black suspect than a white suspect.

The reason why this is true is rather obvious, given the reaction whenever a white (or black!) police officer shoots and kills a black suspect. Officers who do so are raked through the mud by the media, their superior officers, and their local politicians. More often than not, they are forced to resign or are outright fired. Almost always, they are not given a fair trial. Sometimes, they are imprisoned for their actions. The decision to pull that trigger is difficult enough without adding these consequences on top of it. As a result, not only black people getting shot at a lower rate than expected, but more police officers are dying in the line of duty, having failed to take the first shot.

Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the false narrative continues to be pushed throughout the media and by our leftist political superiors. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ex-bartender-turned-legal-scholar, added her shrill voice to that narrative when she claimed this past weekend that “police killings in the U.S. reached a record high in 2022.” She cited the number of people killed by police as 1,176 in 2022.

Any time a leftist cites a statistical figure, you know that it is filled with caveats and skewing and missing context. This is no exception. For starters, AOC’s claim is based on a number published by The Guardian (a left-wing British rag that is equivalent to our National Enquirer), which only looked at police data dating back to 2013. The crime rate in the 1970s was far higher than it is today, so this “record” would have been decimated had they only looked a little further back in history. Not to mention, population increases make the raw total rather irrelevant. A per capita rate would have been more illuminating. That aside, there were more people killed by police in 2021 than 2022, so even in raw numbers it isn’t a record.

Omitted from AOC’s tirade was any mention of why police are suddenly killing more people than they were a few years ago. Gosh, what could it be? What has happened over the past, say, three years, that would have caused police to kill more dangerous criminals? Could it be the nationwide efforts by people just like AOC to defund the police and replace them with social workers? Could it be the exodus of good cops from major cities where their mayors have handcuffed police from doing their jobs? Could it be all of the people like AOC who have spent the past three years demonizing all cops and accusing them of racism and murder?

Even in the cities where some good cops have remained, those cops are far less willing to venture into the inner cities and stop crimes from happening, knowing those criminals will simply be released back into the streets within days – or even hours. Leftist District Attorneys nationwide have made the jobs of policemen so pointless that we’ve seen a mass exodus of good cops over the past three years. Those good cops are often replaced with poorly-trained and inexperienced cops – perhaps the types of cops who beat Tyre Nichols to death.

Police departments nationwide saw an 18% increase in resignations in 2021, and a 45% increase in retirements. There is an excellent and rather obvious reason for that. Why would anyone volunteer to put their life on the line to enforce laws that are never prosecuted, all while putting up with the constant harassment of being called a racist by the left? Is there any wonder why only 7% of police officers who responded to a 2020 poll would recommend becoming a cop?

It is worth noting that as a result of the Nichols incident, the Memphis Police Department has permanently deactivated a specialized police unit known as the SCORPIONS. This unit was formed in 2021 as a response to the alarming increase in violent crime in Memphis. The SCORPIONS are credited with taking over 500 violent criminals off the streets of Memphis in only three months. The Nichols family lawyer penned an open letter to the media, calling for the end of this unit, and his demands have been met. The people of Memphis no longer need to worry about living in a safer city with fewer violent criminals.

After a while, you have to wonder if leftists prefer crime and violence to peace and safety. What else could possibly explain their behavior? What we are witnessing, and what the Tyre Nichols case demonstrates, is the end result of leftist policies regarding law enforcement. It is also the end result of their decade-long campaign to push a false narrative on the American public. The people in these cities who continue to believe in this narrative, and who continue to re-elect the leftist politicians who advance this narrative, will continue to suffer the consequences. Will they ever wake up and realize their mistake? Or will they continue to suffer in blind ignorance?