Concern About Police Use of Force is Not Advocacy of Violence Against the Police

Politicians and police leaders continue to falsely charge that citizens concerned over police use of lethal force are advocating violence against police, with Gov. Christie being the most recent.

An excellent report in the October 24, 2014 Washington Post on police use of force features the tragic death of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin Trooper Trevor Casper.

Trooper Casper was one of the 31 officers killed this year.

Trooper Casper was  murdered by a European-American bank robber and not by a politically motivated African-American.

How Trooped Casper died is probably how most of the other 30 died.

The only politically motivated murders of police this year of which I am aware are by right wing European-American extremists. (That is from my memory as I did not review the year's news for this post.)

This year two African-Americans who may be suffering from mental illness murdered police officers. If their psychotic delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia included political concerns, that does not change that their behaviors were related to their mental health problems and not to political ideology.

The Washington Post's data makes clear the central issues:

• 10 to 26% of the approximately 800 citizens killed by police this year were not have armed and were not have attacking either a police officer or civilians. 

• 25% of the civilians killed by police were African-American. African-Americans are 13.2% of the population. Their rate of death by the police is almost twice their percentage of the population.

Asking for changes in police procedures to end the police killings of unarmed citizens not attacking police or civilians and ending the racial disparity in law enforcement which is has resulted in African-Americans being killed by the police at twice the rate then their percentage of the population is not advocating violence against the police.

Misrepresenting our advocacy dishonors and disrespects the service and sacrifice of officers such as Trooper Trevor Casper.

When politicians and police leaders make such false allegations journalists need to ask them to cite specific attacks on police where such a link has been established. However a friend has repeatedly reminded me that may be expecting an awful lot of our current crop of journalists.

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A Wisconsin trooper faced down a gunman who planned to go out fighting

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/10/24/on-duty-under-fire/

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