According to the FBI, the number of police officers killed in the line of duty nearly doubled from 27 to 51 between 2013 and 2014. That is nearly one murdered police officer a week during 2014, which was also a little over a year after the mainstream media began its coordinated hate campaigns to demonize America’s law enforcement officers.
The FBI report is a terrible and tragic setback for police officers. Losing 27 fellow officers in 2013 was a tragedy. But it was also a 35 year low. Things were unquestionably moving in the right direction. Since 2011, the number of police officers killed in the line of duty had been on the decline.
Suddenly in 2014, everything changed for the worse. The number jumped back up to the highest number since 2011. What also changed for the worse is the mainstream media’s obsession with smearing police officers as hyper-militarized racist occupiers on the hunt for black men.
The seeds of this hate campaign were planted as early as 2009, when, without caring about the facts, President Obama publicly lashed out against a white police officer for arresting Professor Henry Louis Gates, a black Harvard professor. The officer did nothing wrong.
Things were ratcheted up a notch in early 2012 after George Zimmerman, a Florida community watchman, shot and killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense.
Before the facts could get in the way of the community organizing, racial tensions were intentionally enflamed by the President with the help of his “race man” Al Sharpton, and an obliging media. Before a jury acquitted Zimmerman the following year, all of that time was used by the media (especially CNN and NBC News) to launch numerous toxic racial and anti-police narratives.
Although he is Hispanic, Zimmerman was labeled a “white man” by almost all of the media. The man shot and killed while attacking Zimmerman was black. For the better part of a year, the “open season on black men” narrative was everywhere in the media, and it was frequently tied to the local police.
Again and again the message went out that if Trayvon Martin were white, Zimmerman would have immediately been arrested by the police, not released.
The media relentlessly suggested Zimmerman had been given a pass by a racist police force that had no interest in properly investigating a black man’s murder. ABC News, CNN, and NBC News went so far as to fabricate evidence against Zimmerman — and by extension the police who “overlooked” it.
Not to belabor the point, but Zimmerman was not white, the forensic science backed his self-defense story, a Justice Department investigation found no evidence Zimmerman was motivated by racism, and after months of the media attempting to float the idea that Zimmerman was cozy with the Sanford Police, we learned that even that was a lie.
Although every Media Narrative surrounding Zimmerman was premised on a lie, the media still used the case to further the racially-inflammatory idea that the police intentionally target and persecute blacks with racial profiling.
CNN even floated the idea that cops are “subliminally racist.”
This cynical and intentional stirring of the racial pot against the police by the media and President Obama occurred throughout most of 2012 and 2013.
Once the Zimmerman case ran out of Narrative steam after his acquittal in July on 2013, the media’s hate campaign against police officers moved to coverage of the New York City mayor’s race. Here’s de Blasio stirring up hate against the police just hours after Zimmerman’s acquittal:
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Throughout the summer and fall of 2013, the tip of de Blasio’s campaign spear was to demonize the police as racial-profiling racists who use the stop-and-frisk policy to persecute black people.
The national media obviously ate it up, poured gasoline all over it, which in turn stoked hate and mistrust and fear…
By the end of 2013, the Obama administration and its media allies had turned America’s police officers into racist assassins.
The following year, 2014, we had riots in Ferguson, Baltimore, and a near-doubling of the number of police officers killed in the line of duty.
Coincidence?
Or just good old-fashioned community organizing?
This post has been updated.
John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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