THE PROGRESSIVE WAR AGAINST THE COPS THAT PROTECT US

The war on cops imperils us all

By Miranda Devine

New York Post
August 21, 2019

Even before the firing of ¬Officer Daniel Pantaleo, there were signs on the street that cops are backing off — and who can blame them?

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio — and the city’s increasingly progressive district attorneys — they feel -unloved and under siege.

The street no longer fears the NYPD, and the disrespect of the summer’s cop dousings inevitably turned violent last weekend when three officers were injured in Brooklyn as people hurled heavy objects rather than water.

Now New Yorkers are sharing anecdotes like this: On Aug. 14 at about 9 p.m. in the West Village, a woman is punched in the face by a stranger as she steps outside her apartment to give her dog a potty break. The injury is mild but the addled perp remains across the street, so the victim’s husband calls the cops. A squad car arrives but the officers decline to make an arrest, despite the presence of several witnesses.

“When someone is calling and they need help, officers are going to run in,” Joseph Imperatrice, founder of pro-cop group Blue Lives Matter, said Wednesday.

“But the days of proactive policing are completely done.”

You don’t need Sherlock Holmes to tell you why cops would be reluctant to take risks. They know they are on their own.

Patrick Lynch, the fearsome Police Benevolent Association boss, urged cops this week to “proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job.”

Lynch is ripping Police Commissioner James O’Neill for doing de Blasio’s bidding, rather than backing his troops.

O’Neill admitted on Monday when he announced he was firing Pantaleo that in a 13-year career that included 289 arrests, Pantaleo had never injured anyone.

But on that summer’s day in 2014 on Staten Island, illegal-cigarette seller Eric Garner was an obese time bomb of poor health who made the fatal decision to ¬resist arrest.

Pantaleo tried to subdue him with two departmentally approved restraint moves that proved useless. A bystander video shows the officer shifted his grip for seven seconds to the banned “chokehold” position after the struggle smacked him against a glass storefront window that visibly ¬began to buckle.

Given the possibility of both men crashing through the window with potentially fatal consequences, Pantaleo did what he knew would bring Garner under control. What he did not know was that Garner had heart problems that contributed to his tragic death.

So now, in a city made safe by broken-windows policing, we face the irony of a cop fired because he tried to avoid a broken window.

As a consequence, broken-windows policing is kaput, which is exactly what social justice progressives like de Blasio always wanted.

But, as this city knows from life pre-Giuliani, if police give up the relentless daily battle, then violence, lawlessness and fear take over.

You just have to look at high-crime Baltimore and Chicago to see what happens when cops feel unsupported and back off.

But all is not lost. At least the federal government still supports law enforcement.

In a brilliant speech last week at a conference of the national Fraternal Order of Police in New Orleans, Attorney General William Barr blamed an “increasingly vocal minority’’ of activists that “regularly attacks the police and advances a narrative that it is the police that are the bad guys rather than the criminals.

“Whenever there is a confrontation involving the use of force by police, they automatically start screaming for the officers’ scalps, regardless of the facts.”

The left’s long march through the institutions that we used to rely on to “inculcate values and self-restraint” means a rise in ¬social pathology.

And who is left to pick up the pieces when other institutions fail? Cops, of course.

But the progressive war on law enforcement is getting in their way.

In district attorneys’ offices across the country, plans are underway to dismantle the criminal justice policies that have served us so well for a generation.

The gun siege and wounding of six police officers in Philadelphia last week by a career criminal didn’t just happen in a vacuum, any more than did the contagion of disrespect for police.

It happened because Philadelphia has embarked on a dangerous experiment in lax law enforcement with America’s most progressive prosecutor, Larry Krasner, as district attorney. The former public defender is more interested in emptying jails and ending the so-called war on drugs than in keeping the streets safe. In the progressive worldview, Lady Justice is not blind; she is a racist.

We’re lucky New York dodged a bullet this month when Krasner fellow traveler Tiffany Cabán, a democratic socialist, narrowly lost the primary for Queens DA.

But she is part of an ideological movement on the march against law enforcement.

“This is a difficult job,” O’Neill said Monday. “Next time you’re walking down the street and feel safe, thank the NYPD.”

The problem is, he and de Blasio are making the job so difficult, we’re not going to feel safe much longer.