In which the police are astonished to learn that the criminal population isn’t content to sit around waiting for the police to shoot them first:
Authorities are worried a recent wave of police officer shootings may not be a coincidence. In just 24 hours, at least 11 cops were shot around the country.
The most recent incident at a fugitive’s house in St. Petersburg, Fla., left two officers dead and a U.S. marshal wounded Monday. Hours earlier, an Oregon officer was critically wounded after being shot multiple times during a traffic stop.
Monday’s violence followed a bloody Sunday that left an officer in Indianapolis critically wounded during a traffic stop shooting, four officers in Indianapolis wounded after a gunman opened fire in a precinct and two more officers in Washington wounded in a shootout in a Walmart parking lot.
“It’s not a fluke,” Richard Roberts, a spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations, told MSNBC.com. “There’s a perception among officers in the field that there’s a war on cops going on.”
There isn’t an organized “war on cops” anymore than there is an actual “war on criminals” being waged by the police. This is simply the natural reaction to the police unilaterally deciding to militarize their police operations and allow their officers to preemptively shoot people who aren’t shooting at them. It doesn’t take a whole lot of well-covered incidents where police shoot unarmed and even handcuffed men for criminals to realize that they are in a no quarter situation whenever they find themselves facing arrest.
The American police would be wise to ratchet down their violence and abandon the militarized posing or before too long they’re going to find themselves being hunted down in the same way that the police are hunted in Mexico and South America.