American Wire News
WASHINGTON. “When the public needs help, they call the police. When the police need help, they call SWAT.” Or so it was before anti-police hysteria raged across the nation in the wake of petty criminal George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer on May 25. The violent criminals hijacking countless George Floyd protests have been leading violent and destructive riots, looting stores, and burning individual businesses in the poorest areas of each city.
They demand immediate defunding of police departments nationwide. The immediate response of cowardly, mostly Blue State officials: full agreement. Perhaps it’s time for police and law enforcement officials to answer such dangerous nonsense with a massive case of the Blue Flu.
By Hungryogrephotos – 20200528-_DSC8078, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90755099
Resigning en masse
Here in South Florida, the ten-member Hallandale Beach SWAT team resigned en masse after seeing Police Chief Sonia Quiñones and “members of the Command Staff taking a knee in solidarity” with anti-police demonstrators/rioters in recent days. It is important to note, the officers left the SWAT team, not the police force.
In their letter of “collective resignation,” the officers wrote:
“The risk of carrying out our duties in this capacity is no longer acceptable to us and our families. The anguish and stress of knowing that what we may be lawfully called upon to do in today’s political climate combined with the team’s current situation… leave us in a position that is untenable… The team is minimally equipped, under-trained and often times restrained by the politicization of our tactics to the extent of placing the safety of dogs over the safety of the team members.”
Chief Quiñones dismissively told the Miami Herald she’ll meet with the officers on Monday, “collect their equipment and thank them for their service.” She said other local law enforcement agencies will provide SWAT services for her city should the need arise.
Hallandale Beach Police Chief and staff kneel with protesters. ABS News, Miami affiliate WPLG 10, screen capture.
Good shoots, bad politicians
SWAT officers cited Hallandale Vice Mayor Sabrina Javellana for making “ignorant and inaccurate statements attacking the lawful actions of the city’s officers and SWAT team both from the dais and her social media accounts.”
Those statements involve a 2014 shooting of Howard Bowe, a 34-year-old African-American while serving a search warrant. Police recovered 18.5 grams of crack cocaine from the Bowe residence. A Broward County grand jury later determined Bowe’s death “was the result of the justifiable use of deadly force.”
A bad case of Blue Flu?
NYPD officers turn their backs to Mayor Bill de Blasio at the funeral of officer Rafael Ramos. CBS News screen capture.
Resignations remain the most forthright response to this provocation. That holds true even in light of the fact that the law prohibits most police departments from striking. But nothing in the law prevents them from calling in sick, an action long described as the “Blue Flu.”
But in 2015, New York’s finest took a decidedly different tack under a very real provocation. They showed up for work, but simply refused to do their jobs.
The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell observed the following.
“For two weeks now — since the despicable, vigilante-style execution of two colleagues — police have essentially stopped enforcing the law. They’ve halved their arrest rates and all but ceased issuing tickets or court summonses… DWI arrests were down to 70 from 231 during the same period a year earlier. Just 22 people were arrested or ticketed for jumping a subway turnstile, compared with almost 1,400 a year ago… Presumably, the only party unambivalently pleased is the city’s committed, and newly less fettered, criminal element.”
The slowdown occurred in response to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s well-known anti-police rhetoric. It further infuriated the men in blue following the execution-style shooting deaths of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.
Another de Blasio blunder
In reaction to the recent George Floyd riots in his city, and doubling down on his anti-police stance, de Blasio announced:
“I said in our State of the City speech, quote, ‘Our young people don’t need to be policed. They need to be reached.’ And that is the spirit of the reforms we’re going to talk about today and beyond. We will be moving funding from the NYPD to youth initiatives and social services… that will happen literally in the course of the next three weeks.”
Mayor de Blasio suffers from the delusional assumption that remains so much a part of leftist thinking. Namely, throwing taxpayer money at thugs can buy their love, transforming them into docile, model citizens. But paying protection money to the mob doesn’t pacify those ham-fisted brutes with cauliflower ears.
It only fires their greed for more.
Our false sense of security
George Orwell.
Author George Orwell is alleged to have said:
“We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us.”
Perhaps police officers across America should announce a collective onset of Blue Flu. Such a malady, would require their social distancing from those who take for granted that “rough men” in uniforms with guns will always materialize “to protect and to serve.”
Then we can all see how the kneeling politicians and their fake-news media pimps rise to meet a real crisis.
Time for a Blue Flu pandemic?
A massive Blue Flu outbreak might finally tell those who would defund police departments precisely what the Hallandale SWAT team told their toothless city fathers.
“Until these [current] conditions and sentiments are rectified and addressed, we cannot safely, effectively and in good faith carry out our duties in this capacity without putting ourselves and our families at this needless increased level of risk.”
That statement neatly answers the question as to the reason why “there’s never a cop around when you need one.”
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https://www.pexels.com/photo/three-firemen-standing-near-trees-2348809/
