#The truth about ‘racism’ & cops: Devine

Who would want to be a cop in America? 

It’s open season on anyone who wears a badge, so no wonder recruitment is down, retirements are up and the streets grow ever more violent. 

By swallowing the false narrative of systemic racism, we have demonized and criminalized police while turning criminals into civil-rights martyrs. This won’t end well. 

By all accounts, the police shooting of a black man, Daunte Wright, Sunday during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center was a stupid, horrible accident. But it’s not racism. 

The fact that it happened just 10 miles from where a former police officer, Derek Chauvin, is standing trial for the killing of George Floyd just makes the calamity unfathomably worse. 

The threat of extreme violence if Chauvin is acquitted already had the country on tenterhooks. 

But Wright’s death ensured the riots and looting came early. You would think, at such a time, that our nation’s leaders would find a way of lowering the temperature. But no. 

Former President Barack Obama, who could wield more influence for good than anyone, did the worst possible thing. Instead of using the opportunity to teach young men not to resist arrest, he fanned the flames of fear by falsely asserting that Wright’s death was racially motivated. 

It was “yet another shooting of a Black man . . . at the hands of police.” It showed “just how badly we need to reimagine policing and public safety in this country.” 

Yeah, well, we’ve been reimagining police for almost a year and the result is soaring crime, with black neighborhoods the worst hit. 

Democratic US Rep. Rashida Tlaib fanned the flames further. She tweeted that Wright’s shooting “wasn’t an accident. Policing in this country is inherently and intentionally racist . . . No more policing incarceration and militarization. It can’t be reformed.” 

So says the woman whose workplace is surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by thousands of police and military. 

These are the facts: This year to April 12, 52 black people were fatally shot by police, just three of whom were unarmed, and 109 white people suffered the same fate, five of whom were unarmed, according to a Washington Post database. 

Yet the media and allied activists only scream when police kill a black person. This leads to a distorted understanding of the problem, as a February survey by the Skeptic Research Center found. 

The majority of Americans, especially liberals, wildly overestimates the number of unarmed black men killed by police. For instance, 53.5 percent of those reporting “very liberal” political views estimated the number to be 1,000 or more deaths in 2019, when the actual number of unarmed black men fatally shot by police was 12. 

A lot of the media is invested in this false narrative and will not let it go, no matter how much mayhem it unleashes. 

For instance, before he resigned, Brooklyn Center Police chief Tim Gannon gave a press conference in which he mentioned the riots the previous night, and was shouted down by activists posing as reporters. “Don’t do that,” they scolded him. “There was no riot.” 

“There was,” he replied. “An officer was injured, hit on the head with a brick [and] was transported to the hospital.” 

Gannon was trying to be upfront when he released Potter’s bodycam footage and said she had mistaken her gun for her Taser. 

But the media was only interested in reinforcing their racism narrative. Wright was “driving while black” was a favorite headline. 

A Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist wrote that Wright was pulled over because he had air freshener dangling from his mirror. Still shots from the bodycam video show no air freshener existed from the start to the end of the police interaction. 

Pulling Wright over wasn’t racist. He was driving with expired license plate tags. 

Arresting him wasn’t racist. He had an open warrant related to an armed-robbery case for a case in which he allegedly choked a woman and threatened to shoot her. 

Wright should not have died, but racism had nothing to do with it. 

When he resisted arrest, jumped back in his car and attempted to escape, police had good reason to try to stop him. 

Kimberly Potter, the officer who shot Wright, clearly intended to Taser him and not shoot him with her gun. 

The video shows her calling out, “Taser, taser, taser!” before firing. 

She was charged Wednesday with second-degree manslaughter. 

Due process is being followed. 

But the mob that showed up at her house baying for blood demands a different sort of justice, which the cowardly City Council won’t refuse. 

The council fired Brooklyn Center City Manager Curt Boganey Monday because he said Potter should not be hung, drawn and quartered by the mob, but deserved “due process.” 

Councilmember Chris Lawrence Anderson admitted she voted to fire Boganey for fear of reprisals from the mob. “He was doing a great job,” she told the Star Tribune. “I didn’t want repercussions at a personal level.” 

Of course, neither Floyd nor Wright deserved to die. It is a tragedy for everyone involved. 

But it’s worth noting that before their fatal encounters with police, both men had been charged over crimes involving aggravated violence to women. 

Floyd served five years in jail after entering a woman’s home and pressing a gun into her stomach during a robbery. 

The two victims called the police because that’s what we do when a crime occurs. Police are the thin blue line between violent criminals who take what they want from the weak. 

Yet now people protected by wealth or the security apparatus of the state are telling those victims that they are on their own. 

A world without law and order is a very scary place. 

No one knows that better than the migrants streaming over the southern border. They’re escaping from countries where the rule of law is a joke, but they haven’t yet figured out we’re on the same lawless trajectory.

INTELLIGENCE FOOLS’ HUNTER FLUB

Fifty former intelligence bosses put their reputations on the line when they wrote an open letter last October declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. 

Now that Hunter has admitted the laptop “certainly” could be his, they are exposed as partisan propagandists who were instrumental in suppressing the Post’s accurate story. 

“Can we get these 50 fools . . . to now sign a letter stating they were wrong, the laptop was Hunter Biden’s and apologize to Rudy Giuliani?” asks reader Daniel. 

He’s right. But the real question is why anyone pay attention to a group whose members are responsible for some of the worst intelligence failures in US history. 

Many of the signatories failed to heed warnings about the 9/11 attacks, pushed the “weapons of mass destruction” fiction that justified the Iraq war and morphed into Trump-haters who peddled the fake Russia-collusion story. 

Jim Clapper, former President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, for instance, played a key role in the fraudulent intelligence used to justify the Iraq war when he ran the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He also admitted perjuring himself before Congress, when he denied intelligence agencies were spying on Americans. 

Clapper’s CNN stablemate, ex-CIA director John Brennan, played a central role in the Russia-collusion scam and was caught out lying about civilian deaths by CIA drone. 

Gen. Michael Hayden ran the National Security Agency in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. 

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta said of that war “the price has been worth it.” 

Mike Morell, a former CIA deputy director, at least admitted the agency was wrong to assert that Saddam Hussein had “chemical weapons . . . biological weapons [and was] restarting his nuclear-weapons program. We were wrong on all three of those.” 

Chalk up Hunter’s laptop as yet another blooper, just not as deadly. 

At some point we have to stop listening to these fools.