War on Police is Real

Jack Dunphy again:

• Writing in the Washington Post thirteen months ago, Radley Balko assured his readers that, contrary to widespread belief, there was no “war on cops.” He cited a Rasmussen poll taken the week before that found 58 percent of respondents believed there was indeed such a war while just 27 percent did not. Public opinion was at odds with the truth, Balko wrote, and he had the data to support his position: FBI statistics showed that officer deaths from gunfire and non-fatal assaults on police had been declining for years. Balko wrote that 2015 was “shaping up to be the second safest year for police ever, after 2013.”
  
  It’s good to be reminded when the actual statistics run counter to public perception. Police work is after all concerned with seeking the truth, and law enforcement is not served when hysteria is fomented by misleading information. That said, what would Balko say about this year? Has the war whose existence he denied last year now begun?
  
  According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, 46 police officers have been shot to death in the United States so far this year, a staggering 55 percent increase over the number seen at this time in 2015. Balko would perhaps argue that this is an aberration, a statistical blip on an otherwise downward trend, like a brief rally in a long-term bear market. And maybe it is, but whatever the multi-year trend may be, a 55 percent increase surely bears examination. Even the skeptics of the “war on cops” must admit that there has been a change in attitudes regarding crime and policing over the last several years, a change that became all the more pronounced with the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Lest we forget, the officer who shot Brown was acting completely within the law when he did so. Despite this, the Brown shooting brought the Black Lives Matter movement to prominence, and despite its origins in the poisonous lie of “hands up, don’t shoot,” it continues to shape both perceptions and policy in American policing.

The leftist media is always using statistics from years ago, ignoring present day trends to pretend everything is great. McJerseyShore's CompStat does something similar, comparing certain weeks or months or holiday weekends against whichever number made the current mayhem number look like an improvement. We and our readers had a fun time finding the discrepancies, like if a holiday weekend one year didn't relate to a holiday weekday the next.

There was always some statistical manipulation - does anyone believe Chicago ever had two years worth of double-digit crime reductions? As we pointed out, Chicago would end up owing the future a certain number of robberies, rapes, arsons and murders. Dunphy calls out the left's tendencies to look at the long view while ignoring the current trend staring them in the face.