AG Barr Warns: Don't Respect Police, You Might Not Get Protection You Need
When Attorney General William Barr made comments about “communities” that don’t respect police losing “the police protection they need” earlier this week, you can guess the outrage.
Barr made the remarks Tuesday to a room full of law enforcement at a Justice Department event honoring cops, according to The Washington Post.
“Today, the American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves,” Barr said, comparing protests against police officers to those against returning Vietnam War veterans.
Barr said that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.”
“In the Vietnam era, our country learned a lesson,” Barr said.
”I remember that our brave troops who served in that conflict weren’t treated very well in many cases when they came home, and sometimes they bore the brunt of people who were opposed to the war,” he said. “The respect and gratitude owed to them was not given. And it took decades for the American people finally to realize that.”
Barr added that police were “fighting an unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society” and that “[w]hen police officers roll out of their precincts every morning, there are no crowds along the highway cheering them on, and when you go home at the end of the day, there’s no ticker-tape parade.”
So, cue the outrage.
“The Attorney General isn’t being subtle and that shouldn’t surprise us considering this administration’s record,” Jeb Fain, a spokesperson for the liberal super PAC American Bridge, told HuffPost. “When it comes to communities of color, he sees justice and equal protection under the law as subject to conditions.”
“Barr’s words are as revealing as they are disturbing — flagrantly dismissive of the rights of Americans of color, disrespectful to countless law enforcement officers who work hard to serve their communities, and full of a continuing disregard for the rule of law.”
Meanwhile, Scott Shackford over at Reason said what Barr was really telling us was that we should stop complaining about bad cops, not just cops in general.
”The assumption that Barr wanted to leave us with is that the same police the Justice Department honored yesterday (officers who had done things like help break up gangs and rescue a kidnapped baby) were exactly the same police officers who invite outrage and abuse by aggressively intruding on the private lives of citizens, violating their rights, and beating them up at the slightest provocation,” he wrote.
“He’s trying to flip the ‘one bad apple spoils the bunch’ metaphor by claiming that our right to be served good apples requires us to eat the rotten ones as well. If we attempt to pick and choose, Barr says we’ll get none.”
If Shackford is as good at other aspects of farming as he is at building straw men for scarecrows, he should consider low-level agriculture as a sideline. Of course, the most abundant straw man out there was that this was really all about communities of color:
Ah, so the attorney general of the united states believes police are not sworn officers of the law, civil servants bound by an oath, but a gang running a protection racket. https://t.co/E9VF0ZPPkz
— Adam Serwer? (@AdamSerwer) December 4, 2019
Except a) Barr is right and b) the people who are going to be hurt by anti-cop sentiments are actually those in marginalized communities.
In September, ABC News reported that a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum found a serious issue with police departments across the United States: fewer applicants, more hires leaving and those who stay opting for early retirement.
This isn’t just an issue of 10 or 15 percent in terms of the lower hiring numbers, either. The survey found that among agencies participating, they were receiving 63 percent less applications.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, allegations of racial profiling have been a major issue in terms of recruiting new officers, according to the then-acting police chief.
“I can’t ignore that that’s a factor. When you do a job that’s being highly criticized on a daily basis, we have to ask ourselves, how do we find good candidates that really want to be under that type of scrutiny,” Marcus Jones, who has since taken over the role full time, said.
“If you feel like you’re being scrutinized all the time, then this may not be the career that you want, so we understand that that may be a roadblock for us.”
More than half of the residents of Montgomery County are either black, Hispanic, Asian or multiracial.
This isn’t to discount allegations of racial profiling, merely to say that whatever blowback good policemen have received for the allegations have made it more difficult to recruit.
Meanwhile, in Detroit, the Detroit Police Officer Association held protests back in 2012 called “Enter At Your Own Risk” to complain about being stretched too thin.
“Detroit is America’s most violent city, its homicide rate is the highest in the country and yet the Detroit Police Department is grossly understaffed,” DPOA attorney Donato Iorio told WWJ at the time.
In other words, this isn’t just a hypothetical.
This isn’t just hyperbole. And it’s certainly not an attack on people of color.
If you constantly disrespect the people in a profession, particularly a dangerous one, what do you think will end up happening to the number of people entering that profession?
And when that profession is absolutely necessary to keep the fabric of society from rending, where do you think this progresses 10 or 15 years down the line?
This isn’t difficult, at least not logically.
For those who have to deal with the consequences of an environment where law enforcement is constantly denigrated, there’s going to be a difficulty of a different sort.
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