Leftist Cop-Hate

From Heather Mac Donald, at the New York Post, "Fueling cop-hate: How politicians fan the flames":

Government-fueled cop hatred has claimed more victims. Two St. Louis-area police officers were shot Wednesday night during a protest outside the Ferguson, Mo., police department, one in the face, the other in the shoulder.

Both are expected to survive, unlike the two New York City police officers assassinated in December.

Such violence is the sadly predictable outcome of the lies about the police that government officials and the media have stoked for the last year.

US Attorney General Eric Holder has done all he can to keep tensions at a boiling point in Ferguson.

This, though his own Justice Department demolished the hoax that a pacific Michael Brown was killed in cold blood by Police Officer Darren Wilson in August.

The Justice report on the Brown shooting, released last week, demolished every myth around the shooting.

It confirmed virtually everything Office Wilson had testified to, including that Brown had attacked Wilson, tried to grab his gun, then charged at Wilson after the officer exited his car.

The iconic “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan? Most certainly a fiction.

The report explained why Brown lay for four hours in the street before being taken away: “Kill the cops”-screaming protesters kept barging in on the crime-scene investigation, while gunfire rang around the perimeter. The detectives had to constantly put their work on hold while waiting for more backup.

The Brown report should have forced a massive reconsideration of the virulent anti-law-enforcement campaign that sprang up in the wake of the shooting.

Instead, Holder paved the way for the report’s marginalization by calling, a few days before its release, for a lower standard of proof for civil-rights cases.

Implication: Only an artificially high standard of proof prevented Justice from prosecuting Wilson.

This implication was utterly false. Wilson couldn’t be convicted under any standard of proof, since there is no credible evidence against him.
Yet the media ran with this “burden of proof” angle and buried the report almost as soon as it was released.

Meanwhile, in a stunning bait-and-switch, Holder presented a new report to justify last year’s riots and the ongoing anti-police campaign.
That report claimed that the Ferguson Police Department engages in a “pattern or practice” of violating blacks’ civil rights.

Where the Brown report was measured and thorough, this second report was disingenuous and agenda-driven.

Its most disturbing allegations consisted of anecdotes of apparently unconstitutional stops and arrests by officers acting boorishly toward suspects.

If those anecdotes are true and represent standard procedure in the Ferguson PD, then Ferguson’s force is abysmally trained, with little understanding of the Constitution and a great need for a refresher in courtesy and respect.

But after the evisceration of the Brown hoax, it‘s folly to take stories against the police at face value. Yet there’s no indication that the Justice lawyers double-checked any victim accounts.

Moreover, though the report calls such apparently bad stops “frequent,” it makes no attempt to quantify them in relation to the overall number of stops and arrests, and so establish a “pattern or practice” of civil-rights violations.

The rest of the report goes downhill from there. Its alleged statistical proof of race-based stops and arrests wouldn’t earn its authors a D in Statistics 101, since it lacks a valid benchmark for its stop and arrest data.

That benchmark would include, at a bare minimum, crime rates...

Still more.