Why the Left’s Anti-Cop Sentiment is Dehumanizing and Wrong

The best way to lower the temperature in a neighborhood — to decrease the chances for the kinds of encounters that result in unarmed civilians dying to police gunfire — is to continue to engage in the law-enforcement and criminal-justice practices that we know can and do dramatically lower the rate of violent crime. And that means focusing on getting violent criminals off the streets. I strongly recommend Kevin Williamson’s piece on this point. Who commits murders? People with prior, violent criminal records. And so long as violent criminals are on the streets, police on those streets — who are properly and naturally more aggressive than civilians — will make exactly the kinds of decisions in the “fog of war” that cause anti-police radicals to chant for their deaths. It’s inevitable.

Kipling, in his classic poem Tommy, spoke of “makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep,” and the police-hatred of the last few months is truly “makin’ mock.” To make this point is not to excuse true wrongdoing or to relieve police officers from accountability for their mistakes, but we must take care not to hold them to unattainable standards of immediate pacifism when pacifism is warranted and immediate aggression when aggression is warranted. Life is not that neat and clean, and the constant threat of danger has real effects. Those who doubt this reality should don a uniform, take their own turn on the wall, and report back with the results.

This article first appeared on National Review Online

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