During web browsing today my eyes were assaulted yet again by the twin media propaganda efforts of dramatizing shootings without context and another favorite, promoting the campaign to hamstring law enforcement by pulling shut the purse strings.
In a perverse way, those who would seek to move forward their agendas based on these events love to cherry pick their examples.
Particularly clear on the subject of police defunding is the attempt to paint the issue as a racial demand, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Let us begin with gunfire. In recent days we’ve had extensive national coverage of shootings in New York City (Times Square) and Colorado Springs.
Three people, all reported bystanders, were shot in the New York City incident Saturday, including a four-year-old girl, but all are said to have non life-threatening injuries. The alleged shooter is black. He reportedly was trying to shoot his brother during an argument.
On Sunday, a man, his race yet to be reported widely, shot and killed six people at a birthday party in Colorado Springs, then killed himself. It’s unarguably tragic; a horrible addition to a weekend of violence.
But even as these incidents in New York City and Colorado Springs were occurring Saturday and Sunday, Chicago had yet another violent weekend that somehow slipped beneath the radar of the national news.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, five people were killed and 21 wounded in shootings across Chicago over the weekend. A search of CNN.com found no reference to those Chicago numbers.
But there were plenty of CNN stories from Colorado and even a wrapup of various mass shootings from around the nation this past weekend that didn’t even mention Chicago.
CNN’s explanation for this no doubt would be that the wrapup story was of mass shootings, an arbitrary statistic that requires a total of four people killed or injured in one incident. I’m thinking that five dead and 21 shot in a city in one weekend is notable, no matter your cutoff line.
A cynic might argue that a report of a child being wounded in New York City, or adults being killed in front of children at a birthday party, paints a much stronger psychological image when you’re trying to get guns taken away from the law-abiding masses, as CNN and others like it are.
But regardless of how you come down on the matter of gun confiscation, these reports of widespread violence and killings are not the stuff of a backdrop that suggests a need for less police presence.
And yet, right on cue, a column from The New Yorker showed up as a promo today with the headline: “The Emerging Movement For Police And Prison Abolition.”
Again, this is an issue long on alleged racism, as in blacks can’t trust police to be even-handed with them and so police should not exist and ostensibly we should be left to fend for ourselves.
Does anyone in their right mind think fewer police would result in less crime?
But the issue goes beyond that. An August 2020 Gallup poll found that 81 percent of black Americans questioned wanted as much (61 percent) or more (20 percent) police presence in their communities.
These often are the people who have to deal with neighborhood violence firsthand, not merely use it to make anarchistic, left-wing radical arguments. They’re black and they welcome police in their neighborhoods doing their jobs.
More recently, a March 2021 USA Today/Ipsos poll found that only 18 percent of the population at large supported the “defund the police” movement while just 28 percent of black respondents backed that plan.
So why do national media outlets, most notably cable news propaganda outlets, continue to treat this as though it is a popular solution, particularly among the black population?
And what can be done about that distortion?
First of all, people who don’t back defunding the police need to become more vocal, more visible, more in-your-face with those who do want law enforcement reduced or eliminated.
The police also could give the idiots among us a graphic lesson, merely by withholding services. To make it effective – to give all criminals ample notice to plan ahead for cop-less carnage – announce the dates in advance.
Nationwide, for one week, or more, all police could succumb to the blue flu and fail to show up for work. If it’s too hard to organize nationally – shouldn’t be the case in these days of electronic communities – make it by city, county or state.
I’m thinking that after that hellish week we might expect the passive supporters of the police to become much more high-profile, and those ridiculous morons who posit eliminating police as the answer to our societal ills just might be forced back into their caves.
What a wonderful sight that would be, on both counts.
Sam Ross Jr's site 