By Michael Snyder,
Can you imagine going to work each day knowing that there are lots of people out there that would love to see you dead? Despite what a lot of Americans may think, it takes real courage to be a police officer in this country today. Every time you put on that uniform and walk out the front door, it might be the very last time that you ever see your spouse and family. Yes, there is a whole lot of needless police brutality in the United States in 2015, and I am going to address that later in this article. But most police officers are just regular people that are trying to do their jobs and serve their communities. And on Wednesday, we got a reminder of just how dangerous those jobs can be. At around midnight on Wednesday, two Ferguson police officers were ambushed. A 32-year-old officer named Webster Groves was shot just beneath his right eye, and another 41-year-old officer was hit in the shoulder. Sadly, this is probably only just the beginning. Racial tensions continue to escalate, and we are on the verge of a great financial crisis which will cause economic conditions in our cities to deteriorate rapidly. By the end of this decade, I fully expect civil unrest, rioting, looting and mindless violence to become commonplace in large cities all across America. In such an environment, it will be extremely dangerous to be a police officer.
The good news for the two police officers that got shot in Ferguson is that it looks like they are going to be okay.
But the same cannot be said for many other police officers that have been ambushed over the past year.
According to CNN, the number of police officers that were shot to death increased by more than 50 percent in 2014…
The number of law enforcement officers shot to death in the line of duty is up by more than 50% this year, and the leading method of those shootings was ambush-style attack.
That’s according to the nonprofit Washington-based National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which released its findings Tuesday.
And like I said, this is probably only just the beginning.
Sadly, a whole lot more police are going to die before this is all over.
You can try to blame this latest incident in Ferguson on a “deranged individual” if you want, but I think that the reactions that we saw on social media to these police shootings say a whole lot about where we are as a country.
In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, a lot of people were actually celebrating. The following is a sampling of comments from Twitter…
-#ChiefJackson steps down and two pigs get shot? Best day #Ferguson has had in years
-im glad 2 pigs wounded in #Ferguson lol
-#Ferguson kill the pigs
-serves those two pigs right, i hope organized public militancy continues #ferguson
-#Ferguson pigs shouldnt grab ppl; thugs deserved it. Wish it was #DarrenWilson. Sound familiar? #MichaelBrown #VonderittMyers #AntonioMartin
-Racist cops shot not gonna cry 4 pigs #Ferguson
-I heard two pigs in #Ferguson got shot? We’re they left on the ground bleeding out and dead like Mike Brown?
-hopefully they’ll be off the street for a long time. two less pigs out harassing & kidnapping people. #Ferguson
Could you imagine trying to be a police officer in Ferguson in this kind of environment?
And it isn’t as if we didn’t see this coming. Just consider an excerpt from an article that I authored a while back entitled “It’s WAR On The Streets Of America“…
The mainstream media and many national leaders on the left end of the spectrum have been stirring up strife and division for months on end. So now a toxic environment has been created which is inevitably going to lead to even more violence. At some recent “protest marches”, we have heard demonstrators enthusiastically chant extremely threatening slogans such as this: “What do we want? Dead cops!” And when news broke that Ismaaiyl Brinsley had brutally murdered two NYPD police officers, lots of very twisted people on Twitter were actually celebrating.
The sick thing is that there are a lot of people out there that actually want to turn this into a full-blown war. Some want a race war, some want a “war on cops”, and others just seem to want a general excuse for crime, looting and mayhem.
Unfortunately, if I am right, this is just a small preview of what we can expect in the years ahead. Just like we have witnessed in Ferguson, I anticipate that we will eventually see a number of our larger cities burn.
And it never had to be this way.
Why can’t we all just love, respect and honor one another?
Yes, police brutality in the United States is wildly out of control. In many areas of the nation, police officers are actually trained to bark orders, act like thugs and physically abuse people at the drop of a hat. Our entire culture of policing needs to change.
I think that John W. Whitehead put it very aptly in one of his recent commentaries…
For those of us who have managed to survive 2014 with our lives intact and our freedoms hanging by a thread, it has been a year of crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.
We’ve been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those representing us, tossed aside, and taken to the cleaners.
As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we’ve had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in a shambles.
We’ve had our children burned by flashbang grenades, our dogs shot, and our old folks hospitalized after “accidental” encounters with marauding SWAT teams. We’ve been told that as citizens we have no rights within 100 miles of our own border, now considered “Constitution-free zones.” We’ve had our faces filed in government databases, our biometrics crosschecked against criminal databanks, and our consumerist tendencies cataloguedfor future marketing overtures.
Now a large segment of our population either detests the police or is extremely fearful of ever dealing with them.
Is that a recipe for a healthy society?
Police brutality has become a permanent part of our culture, and that has got to change. If it doesn’t, protests against the police are going to get worse and worse.
But what most protesters don’t seem to understand is that we actually need the police.
Without the police, our society would descend into utter chaos very rapidly. Thanks to unchecked illegal immigration, there are approximately 1.4 million gang members roaming our cities now. And the moral decay that we see all around us is getting worse with each passing year. We are a nation that is absolutely teeming with addicts, sickos, perverts and psychopaths. I don’t even want to imagine what our society would look like without police.
Like I said, most police officers are just average people that are trying to do their jobs and serve their communities.
Unfortunately for them, their jobs are becoming a lot more difficult and a lot more dangerous.
So what do you think? Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…