“Law and Order” Becomes a Campaign Issue

As the violent protests that erupted at both the Republican and Democratic national conventions recently have shown, tensions in America are rising around multiple issues that have caused more attention to be paid of late to law, order and policing for communities in the United States.

It isn’t just the blistering heat of the season that’s got America worked up. The cold-blooded killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge in July following a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in the city earlier in the month. This was in the wake of the assassination of five police officers in Dallas by an ex-Marine sniper amidst a BLM protest there the previous month.

These were just two of the latest events in a long string of violent incidents plaguing the country. In December of last year, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, both Muslims who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, went on a rampage in San Bernardino, California (already the most violent city in the state), killing 14 and injuring 22 before being killed by police themselves.

This June, another Muslim pledging allegiance to ISIS, Omar Mateen, killed 49 clubgoers and injured 53 more in the worst mass murder attack in U.S. history in Orlando before being killed by a SWAT team there. In the interim, more than 375 Americans have been killed in more than 270 mass shootings in the country.

As confirmed by the FBI, crime statistics for most major U.S. cities are up over 2015, and in many cases, 2015 was worse than 2014. Despite President Obama claiming that violent crime is down overall, statistics belie his statements.

A survey of police chiefs in major cities in the U.S. reported an increase of murders from 2,001 in the first six months of 2015 to 2,308 for the same period in 2016, a 15 percent increase. For 2015, there was a similar increase of 17 percent.

Murder rates are way up in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities, especially those that have gang and youth delinquency problems. Los Angeles alone saw a murder rate spike of 27 percent for 2016 so far, following a 10 percent surge in 2015. Other violent crimes, such as assaults, surged as well.

Obama has taken withering criticism for his “stigmatize-and-federalize” approach to law enforcement, which has blamed police officers first for shooting victims and has mandated that local police departments follow federal rules and recommendations or risk losing federal grants. But following top-down rules may not necessarily inspire trust in local communities.

The Marshall Project, a progressive nonprofit group focused on crime, listed a 14.5 percent increase in murders in major U.S. cities for 2015, saying in a report, “Multiple studies have demonstrated that, controlling for other factors, when communities view the police and criminal justice system as illegitimate, they become more violent. When people believe the system is unwilling or unable to help them, they are more likely to take the law into their own hands, creating the cycles of violent retribution.”

In 2015, a Gallup poll showed that people’s confidence in local police forces had indeed fallen to its lowest level in 22 years. In Obama’s hometown of Chicago, the murder rate this year is so bad that numerous prominent citizens have publicly announced their intention to leave the city.

As many as 47 people were shot on a recent weekend in Chicago, bringing the total number of shooting incidents in the Windy City to 2,300 so far this year — an increase of almost 33 percent over 2015 — amidst gang violence there that any reasonable observer would term epidemic.

And Chicago isn’t the only city to report large numbers of shootings over the course of a weekend or sometimes even in a single place; in Fort Myers, Florida, a weekend party in July erupted into violence as 18 teenagers and young people were shot (two fatally) within minutes outside a nightclub.

There have been reports that police forces in Virginia and Texas have been training to quell full-scale race riots in their states, and calls by President Obama to restrict guns amidst the nation’s violence have only driven sales of weapons to greater heights. This isn’t a recipe for peace; this is a recipe for turning up the heat on an already-hot stove.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has repeatedly taken the side of BLM protesters and those with grievances against the police. At the DNC she offered speaking time to mothers of criminals shot by police officers. Coincidentally, there were assorted reports that uniformed police officers were not allowed to work the floor at the Democrats’ convention.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has homed in on this issue, saying that the need to protect and defend law enforcement officers and their actions is paramount and greater than ever.

At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump declared, “I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order our country… I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job done. In this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate.”

~American Liberty Report


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