Who Says We Can't Protect Both Cops and Civilians

Philando Castile, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, Alton Sterling, Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa. All seven men were men with families, friends, and futures. They all died violently last week — with the violence all the worse because it was preventable.

To honor the dead, we shouldn’t succumb to panic and fear, or pit the victims against each other. Instead, we should separate and address two entirely different problems, both magnified in the social-media age: terrorist mass shooters and bad policing.

Ahrens, Krol, Smith, Thompson, Zamarripa — all police officers assassinated Friday night in Dallas. They were killed policing a Black Lives Matter rally.

Shooter Micah Johnson, also now dead, told cops he wanted to murder white people, especially white cops.

But don’t blame Black Lives Matter for Johnson’s five murders — and don’t blame recent cop shootings of civilians, either. To do so is to take responsibility away from the shooter.

Once Johnson started killing, whatever he had to say about anything became irrelevant.

He’s just another mass shooter who proved himself indifferent to all life — joining Omar Mateen, who targeted gay people in Orlando; Adam Lanza, who targeted children in Newtown; Dylann Roof, who targeted black people in Charleston; and Marc Lepine, who, in 1989, targeted women in Montreal.

If Johnson had wanted to improve the world, he would’ve joined the Black Lives Matter protesters, or posted to Facebook. He would’ve exercised his constitutional rights, as New York protesters were doing Thursday night.

On Fifth Avenue, one protester screamed at the police, “you should be ashamed, arresting innocent people” — a perfectly legitimate exercise of speech. Another screamed “f–k the police” — rude and unhelpful, but not mass murder.

How do we stop mass shootings? It sure would be easier if extremists didn’t try to force false choices on us.

It’s OK to worry about ugly ideologies — including white, black or Islamist supremacy — and worry about how easy it is for anyone to get a hold of weaponry that can kill dozens within minutes. We do not have to pick one or the other.

Before yet another mass shooting interrupted the American discourse, the public was shocked by two videos:

• In Minnesota, Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook stream of Castile, her fiancé, dying from police wounds after complying with police instructions.
• And in Baton Rouge, Sterling shot by police while already under their control.

A matter that got far less attention, but was no less important: The New York Times’ investigation of extreme neglect of prisoners during transport — neglect that has led to at least a dozen deaths.

With police and justice-system brutality, too, we don’t need to make false choices. We can be for competent policing — including the kind of policing that the NYPD was doing last week. When officers tried to apprehend an 18-year-old turnstile jumper in The Bronx, the suspect fled, leaving his backpack with a loaded gun.

Cops didn’t chase after him or shoot him. They tracked him to his home, where they made a peaceful arrest.

Overall, the NYPD has kept crime down — murders are at record lows — while sharply reducing stops and summonses. That’s in part because of protester pressure — and it’s what should happen.

Dallas police, too, have good relations with the citizenry, The Washington Post reports — and the city has a record-low murder rate.

Indeed, we should always be against incompetent, negligent or willfully malicious policing. And we can also be aware that though social media helps the cause of justice, it makes the present harder to compare to the past.

Ten years ago, no one outside of Minnesota would’ve heard of a police killing in Minnesota. This change is good — but it also allows us to forget that, over time, we’ve become less violent.

We need better data on police shootings. But overall, the nation’s homicide rate has fallen by half in the past 25 years.

In 1980, black men could expect to live to be 64, falling victim to crime, accidents and disease. Today, they can expect to live to be 73, because of better policing, fewer accidents and better health.

Can we do better? Of course. But not by insisting we have to be for the cops or the criminals.

We must assess the facts, not slot them into partisan talking points — and reduce injury and death to everyone so that more people don’t suffer. Reason matters.

This piece originally appeared in the New York Post

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post