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Mayor Pete takin’ it to the street…

Police work was hard enough when I was carrying a badge and gun back in the 1400s.  Now, it’s insane.  I was about to write I couldn’t imagine how bizarre it is to be a police officer today, but I can imagine it all too well.

Have you wondered, gentle readers, why Democrat-controlled cities are such cesspools of crime, disease, degradation, violence and general squalor?  The simplest answer is: they’re ruled by Democrats.  How, you may wonder, does this relate to the police?  That’s simple too.

Democrats have always hated the police.  They resent authority and believe themselves intellectually and morally superior to anyone not in their self-imagined elite, political class.  Need I say the police are not in that class, nor are normal Americans, from whose ranks the police come?

But what about the police Chiefs of Democrat-controlled cities? Not one of them gets that job without being politically reliable.  Many of them are female, or black, or gay, or… you get the picture.  They are not loyal to their officers, but to the politicians who hold their pre-inscribed pink slips.  None of this is by accident.

In the past, Democrat mayors and other politicians would at least give lip service to enforcing the law–to the rule of law–while they stealthily hamstrung their police forces and operated under social justice.  But as any sentient being must have learned watching the Democrat candidate “debates” last Wednesday and Thursday, Democrat’s support of criminals, and their disdain for the police, have gone covert. They no longer bother to pretend to support the men and women who risk their lives for us all.  We’re going to become socially just if it kills us.

This brings us to South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete “I’m Gay!” Buttigieg.  Fox News reports on a crisis that erupted before the first debate:

The South Bend, Indiana police union is accusing the city’s mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg of making decisions on an officer-involved fatal shooting ‘solely for his political gain.’

The charge from the South Bend Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #36 comes as Buttigieg – who’s soared from a long-shot to a top-tier contender for the Democratic nomination – is facing the first serious test of his presidential campaign.

The union spoke out on Monday night after Buttigieg supported a call for a special prosecutor to investigate the fatal shooting June 16 of a black man by a white police officer. Their move also comes after Buttigieg said he would contact the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to request an independent investigation.

In a blistering statement on Monday night, the union claimed that ‘Mayor Buttigieg’s focus on this incident is solely for his political gain and not the health of the city he serves.

And what has Buttigieg done to deserve this accusation?

Buttigieg wrote that the shooting highlighted that ‘all police work and all of American life takes place in the shadow of racism, which hurts everyone and everything it touches. Historic racism, present-day racism, and generational racism – they all secrete a kind of poison into the bloodstream of this country.

This was occasioned by:

…the shooting death of 54-year old Eric Logan. He was shot by Sgt. Ryan O’Neill, a 19-year police department veteran. O’Neill was responding to reports of someone breaking into cars downtown when he encountered Logan, who authorities say was allegedly armed with a knife.

I’ll explain what Buttigieg should have done shortly, but let’s see what he did:

At the emotional meeting, he was pelted with criticism from angry residents – some of whom questioned whether the mayor had done enough during his tenure to reform the police department and reach out to the city’s minority communities. Buttigieg faced criticism during his first term as mayor over the firing of the city’s black police chief.

In defending his record, Buttigieg spotlighted ‘the institution of bias training, civil rights training, community policing efforts that have been going on for years, transparency online.’

He also touted ‘we’ve acted to have a more professional promotions process. And to raise the discipline standards which as you know have included officers being removed from the force for misconduct.’

But he acknowledged some failures, saying ‘the effort to recruit more minority officers to the police department, and the effort to introduce body cameras have not succeeded. And I accept responsibility for that.

In other words, from the beginning, Buttigieg threw the South Bend Police Department under the campaign bus.  During the second debate, Buttigieg was specifically asked about the incident, and the moderator framed it in standard Leftist statistical disparity terms, observing that the number of black officers on the SBPD did not match the proportion of Blacks in South Bend, which they claimed was some 26%. They were not asking a hard question, but serving up a softball.

Buttigieg immediately offered a politically sincere mea culpa, saying he had not yet been able to get everything he wanted to do with the SBPD done, implying it was the fault of those racist hicks, but he’s nobly taking political responsibility, because that’s just the type of gay guy he is.  He claimed he could not comment on the shooting, because “I can’t take sides,” and immediately did just that, telling the audience that we must root out the “systemic racism” in policing.

Please keep in mind I have no idea what happened in South Bend. I do not know if the officers were justified in shooting Eric Logan, but until we know otherwise, they deserve the benefit of the doubt.  All police officers do unless we have reason to believe otherwise.  The racial makeup of a police force tells us exactly nothing about what happened in any given incident.  Obviously, Buttigieg knows little more than I do.  There has not been time for a competent investigation.

Experience in researching the Erik Scott case and writing the definitive book on that case  have convinced me that no Las Vegas officer deserves the benefit of the doubt, so deep is the corruption in that agency.  Research into the death of Justine Damond in Minneapolis quickly convinced me the officers involved did not deserve the benefit of the doubt.  However, in the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, MO, and the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore, the officers were blameless.  What’s interesting about those cases is a black officer killed Damond, and the Minneapolis political elite did all they could to protect him. Thankfully, real, rather than social justice prevailed.  The same result happened in Ferguson and Baltimore.

Buttigieg, from the very beginning, should have said one thing, and one thing only: “I will have no comment on this incident until a complete and fair investigation has been completed.”  But because he is a Democrat, because he is running for president, he had to pander to Bback race hustlers.  He had to imply to the world that his officers were undertrained in diversity, inclusion and race, and that they were racists.  He took political responsibility, but blamed what very well may be an entirely justified police shooting on them.  Of course, as a Democrat, his natural tendency would be to throw the police to the wolves at the slightest provocation.

What’s “political responsibility?”  It’s the height of insincerity, but gives every other Democrat the ability to say: “See?  He took full responsibility!  What more do you want?”  Hillary Clinton did that several times, knowing she would face no consequence whatever. Democrats seldom do.

At the same debate, Kamala Harris attacked Joe Biden–the vice president of the first black president–saying he wasn’t a racist, and then accused him of being a racist.  Poor Joe wasn’t able to defend himself, and he tried to explain shortly thereafter, to demonstrate he was hip with the whole black thing:  

We’ve got to recognize that kid wearing a hoodie may very well be the next poet laureate and not a gangbanger.

Cory Booker, who never misses an opportunity to play the race card replied:

This isn’t about a hoodie. It’s about a culture that sees a problem with a kid wearing a hoodie in the first place. Our nominee needs to have the language to talk about race in a far more constructive way.

Even though he’s a Democrat, poor Joe doesn’t realize he can never speak about race without an “authentic” black person like Booker or Harris, calling him racist.  During the debate, it was Harris who said race was not being discussed with “truth and honesty.”  It was the idiotic NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio who repeated–he often does this–the story about his black–adopted–son, and how he has had fatherly talks with him about how the young man is constant deadly danger from the police, who apparently want to kill all black men.  The NYPD is not fond of De Blasio.

Both evenings of debate revealed as never before Democrat’s utter lack of respect for the law.  One after another, they not only argued for ignoring all immigration law, and attacked President Trump for honoring his oath of office and actually enforcing it, many also played the race card, throwing every officer in America under the bus.

Since the advent of “Black Lives Matter,” any unwoke Democrat politician what has tried to say “all lives matter,” has quickly been introduced to wokeitude.  And since then, police officers have been ambushed, even killed, by black racists.  In Baltimore, officers have retreated to doing as little as possible, particularly declining to deal with black criminals.  Crime rates have skyrocketed, and the BPD is having so much trouble recruiting, they’ve dramatically lowered hiring standards.  Around the nation, particularly in Democrat-controlled cities, the same patterns are occurring.

Officers are taking a defensive crouch, knowing that any contact with a black person could end their career or see them prosecuted.  Proactive policing, the entirely lawful kind that suppresses crime, is a thing of the past. Officers that can leave, have left, and recruiting standards have been lowered and altered to favor minority candidates, even if they are drug users and have arrest records that would, in professional agencies, have them shown the door.  The results are predictable: the people most affected by all of this are the poor, black residents, the people most victimized by black criminals, and the people most in need of police protection.  Hiring unqualified, psychologically unfit officers makes life for residents far more, not less, dangerous, and further decreases the public’s deference toward the police, which leads to more crime, which leads to…sensing a pattern gentle readers?

Police officers understand the symbolism of the “thin, blue line.”  They cannot do their jobs, they cannot survive, unless most of the public is willing to obey most of the laws most of the time.  If criminals learn they have little or nothing to fear from the police, they’ll run rampant, and because the police, out of enlightened self-preservation, avoid them, the black community upon who they principally prey, will suffer most.

But never fear, gentle readers, Mayor Pete, who is gay; you don’t need to ask him–he’ll tell you–is on the job.  He’s going to rid America of the “systemic racism” of the police in South Bend, and everywhere, and so will every other Democrat on those debate stages.  The rule of law will be abandoned for social justice, but on the up side, Democrats will own the coveted felon vote