A City of Mourning and Demonized Police

From Dorothy Rabinowitz, at WSJ, "Shunned by cops, allied with Al Sharpton, incensed by criticism: New York’s mayor begins his second year":

As demonstrations over the grand-jury decisions in Ferguson, Mo., and New York’s Staten Island gathered momentum, Smith College President Kathleen McCartney felt herself obliged on Dec. 9 to issue a campus-wide apology. Her offense? Having said, in a message of support for the protests, that “all lives matter”—for which she became a target of enraged rebukes charging her with insensitivity and with minimizing the concerns of blacks.

What President McCartney’s instant apology said about the moral spine and leadership on the nation’s campuses today needs no spelling out. It wouldn’t be long, however, before the impact of two nonblack lives snuffed out with murderous deliberation would come blasting into the continuing carnival of staged “die-ins,” blocked highways and chanting marchers, including the contingent shouting “What do we want? Dead cops.”

Nothing more instantly transformed the atmosphere in New York than the Dec. 20 killing of police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, shot as they sat in their police car. It broke the hearts of New Yorkers, it demolished whatever shard of public sympathy was left for the marches and denunciations of the police. The murders had, in addition, caused a glaring light to be cast on the mayor of New York, whose central campaign theme when running for the office had been devoted almost exclusively to the evils, the racial bias, in the stop-and-frisk tactic practiced by the police.

Once in office, Bill de Blasio made clear his view of the police as a power that required watching and re-education. To which end he summoned Al Sharpton , the longtime race hustler whose lifetime career pressing fraudulent bias claims, inciting racial conflagrations, was apparently no deterrent to Mayor de Blasio, who described Mr. Sharpton as the nation’s foremost civil-rights leader. The general attitudes emanating from the de Blasio administration were, the police concluded, distinctly unsupportive.

The most important cause of all for that glaring light, of course, was the fact that the two police officers had been killed by an assassin inspired by the antipolice fervor of the demonstrators and by the image of police as a major danger to young black men.

The killer had attended one of the rallies. He had also made certain that there would be no mystery about his motive. He had posted online an explicit declaration of his aim to kill the police, and of the reason: “They Take 1 Of Ours...... Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice.”

This didn’t prevent immediate efforts on the part of the press sympathetic to the protests, and to the mayor, to dismiss the murders of the police officers as one more case of mental disturbance. The murders had nothing to do, really, with any response to the cases of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York—or, more to the point, with any incitement by the nonstop flow of accusations by demonstrators casting the police as racists and killers.

Much like an echo of the politically driven instinct to play down acts of terrorism as the product of mental illness, family dysfunction and life’s disappointments, regular media portraits of the murderer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, ascribed his act to a turbulent personal life and mental illness.

The idea that deranged individuals with, say, a history of disturbed relationships and a tendency to violence shouldn’t be seen as genuine representatives of a cause, an ideology, is decidedly odd if not itself a kind of deranged thinking. When the cause itself is a grab bag of pathologies, it isn’t surprising that it attracts the disturbed...

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