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Cop Killers Serve No Cause

Cop Killers Serve No Cause

How can anyone ever explain this to Mason?

He’s only 4 months old, so that moment still lies years in the future. Still, at some point, too soon, he will ask the inevitable questions, and someone will have to tell him how his dad was shot to death for being a police officer in Baton Rouge.

Montrell Jackson was not the only cop killed Sunday, nor the only one who left a child behind. Officer Matthew Gerald and Sheriff’s Deputy Brad Garafolo also had kids. And it’s likely that in killing five police officers earlier this month, a sniper in Dallas robbed multiple children of their fathers, too.

So there are a lot of people having painful discussions with a lot of kids just now. But Mason’s father was the only one of these eight dead cops with the maddening and paradoxical distinction of being an African-American man killed in protest of police violence against African-American people. He left a Facebook post that gave a glimpse into how frustrating it was, living on both sides of that line — being both black and a cop and therefore, doubly distrusted.

“I swear to God,” he wrote, “I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat.”

“Please,” he pleaded, “don’t let hate infect your heart.”

Nine days later, he was dead.

Counting two New York City policemen murdered in 2014, this makes at least 10 cops randomly killed in the last two years by people ostensibly fighting police brutality. But those madmen could hardly be bigger traitors to that cause.

One is reminded of something Martin Luther King said the night before his assassination, when he explained “the problem with a little violence.” Namely, it changes the discussion, makes itself the focus. King had been protesting on behalf of striking sanitation workers in Memphis when unruly young people turned his march into a riot. “Now … we’ve got to march again,” he said, “in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be.”

These cop killers leave us a similar dilemma. Instead of discussing the violence of police, we are now required to discuss violence against police and to say the obvious: These killers serve no cause, nor does any cause justify what they did. They are just punk cowards with guns who have changed the subject, thereby giving aid and comfort to those who’d rather not confront the issue in the first place.

But if we don’t, then what? One often hears men like Rudy Giuliani and Bill O’Reilly express contempt for the Black Lives Matter movement of protest and civil disobedience; one is less likely to hear either of them specify what other means of protest they would suggest for people whose concerns about racially biased and extralegal policing have been otherwise ignored for decades by government and media. If not Black Lives Matter, then what? Patient silence? Acceptance of the status quo?

That isn’t going to happen, and the sooner the nation understands this, the sooner it moves forward. Sadly, that move, whenever it comes, will be too late for Mason and dozens of others left newly fatherless, sonless, brotherless, husbandless and bereft. Still, we have to move. The alternative is to remain stuck in this place of incoherence, fear, racial resentment … and rage. Always rage.

But rage doesn’t think, rage doesn’t love, rage doesn’t build, rage doesn’t care. Rage only rends and destroys.

We have to be better than that. We have no choice but to be better than that. We owe it to Mason to be better than that. He deserves a country better than this mad one in which his father died, and life is poured out like water.

Jocelyn Jackson, Montrell’s sister, put it best in an interview with the Washington Post. “It’s getting to the point where no lives matter,” she said.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

 

Photo: Police officers attend a vigil after a fatal shooting of Baton Rouge policemen, at Saint John the Baptist Church in Zachary, Louisiana, July 17, 2016.  REUTERS/Jeffrey Dubinsky

Ex-U.S. Marine Kills Three Policemen In Baton Rouge

Ex-U.S. Marine Kills Three Policemen In Baton Rouge

BATON ROUGE, La. (Reuters) – A decorated ex-U.S. Marine sergeant opened fire on police in Baton Rouge on Sunday, killing three officers, nearly two weeks after the fatal police shooting of a black man there sparked nationwide protests, one of which was shattered by the massacre of five Dallas policemen.

The suspect, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, was himself shot to death minutes later in a gunfight with police who converged on the scene of a confrontation that Mayor Kip Holden said began as an “ambush-style” attack on officers.

Two Baton Rouge Police Department officers and one sheriff’s deputy were killed, and one sheriff’s deputy was critically wounded. Another police officer and one other deputy suffered less severe wounds and were expected to survive.

Colonel Mike Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, told a news conference the gunman was believed to have acted alone, contrary to early reports that police may have been looking for other shooters.

It was not immediately clear whether there was a link between Sunday’s bloodshed and unrest over the police killings of two black men under questionable circumstances earlier this month – Alton Sterling, 37, in Baton Rouge on July 5, and Philando Castile, 32, near St. Paul, Minnesota, on July 6.

Police did not name the suspect. But a U.S. government official told Reuters the gunman was identified as Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri. Long, who was black, was reported by other media to be 29 years old.

According to Long’s military record, released by the Pentagon, he served in the Marines from August 2005 until August 2010, achieving the rank of sergeant. Listed as a data network specialist, he was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 until January 2009, earning several medals and commendations.

Authorities declined to offer a possible motive for Sunday’s attack in Louisiana’s capital, a city with a long history of distrust between African-Americans and law enforcement that was further inflamed by Sterling’s slaying.

Social media postings linked to an individual named Gavin Long and a Kansas City address cordoned off by police on Sunday included a YouTube video saying he was fed up with mistreatment of blacks and suggesting only violence and financial pressure would bring about change. He also said he had been to Dallas to join in the protests there.

“It’s only fighting back or money. That’s all they care about,” he said to the camera. “Revenue and blood, revenue and blood, revenue and blood.”

PANDEMONIUM CAUGHT ON RADIO

A second government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators had reason to believe an emergency 911 call may have been used to lure Baton Rouge police into harm’s way.

Edmonson said several officers came under fire as police were responding to a report of a man dressed in black standing behind a store holding a rifle shortly before 9 a.m.

In the ensuing pandemonium caught on a recording of emergency radio traffic, police are repeatedly heard reporting: “Officer down” and “deputy down” as officers swarmed the area searching for and ultimately confronting the gunman.

The episode was over in about eight minutes, according to Edmonson’s account. At least one of the three officers killed was known to be black.

President Barack Obama condemned the attack, vowed that justice would be done and called on Americans to focus on rhetoric and actions that united the country rather than divided it.

“We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence on law enforcement,” Obama said in televised remarks from the White House.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called the shootings an “unspeakable, heinous attack” that served no purpose.

“There simply is no place for more violence. That doesn’t help anyone, it doesn’t further the conversation, it doesn’t address any injustice, perceived or real. It is just an injustice in and of itself,” he told reporters in Baton Rouge.

Obama has sought to balance concerns about police abuses, largely against African-Americans, while paying tribute to fallen officers.

He attended a memorial service last week for the five Dallas police officers killed by a black former U.S. soldier who opened fire at the end of an otherwise peaceful protest on July 7 denouncing the Sterling and Castile slayings.

Those two killings and the reprisal attack on Dallas police by a suspect found to have embraced militant black nationalism renewed national tensions over racial justice and gun violence just as America’s presidential campaign was kicking into high gear. The Dallas gunman, Micah Johnson, 25, was killed by police deploying a bomb-carrying robot against him.

The wave of violence has also heightened security concerns across the country, notably in Cleveland and Philadelphia, hosts to this week’s Republican National Convention and next week’s Democratic National Convention, respectively, which are expected to formally nominate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for the Nov. 8 election.

WORRIES AROUND CONVENTION

“We demand law and order,” Trump said in a Facebook posting on Sunday afternoon.

In a statement, Clinton urged Americans to “stand together to reject violence and strengthen our communities.”

The head of a Cleveland police union called on Ohio Governor John Kasich to declare a state of emergency and suspend laws allowing for the open carry of firearms during the Republican convention.

“I don’t care what the legal precedent is. I feel strongly that leadership needs to stand up and defend these police officers,” Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, told Reuters in an interview.

Loomis said he was concerned about copycat shootings at the Republican convention.

A spokeswoman for Kasich said the governor did not have the power to suspend the open-carry law.

Sunday’s shootings occurred about a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where dozens of people were arrested this month while protesting Sterling’s death. The father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers.

A witness to the Baton Rouge shootings, Brady Vancel, told CNN he saw a man dressed in black clothing and a ski-type mask running through a parking lot amid a hail of gunfire.

Vancel said the gunman “looked up and saw me. We stopped. I froze, he froze for a second, and he turned around and ran in the opposite direction the same time I turned around and ran in the opposite direction.”

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert, Ian Simpson, Tim Gardner and Julia Edwards, Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Writing by Paul Simao and Steve Gorman; Editing by Mary Milliken and Peter Cooney)

Photo: Police officers attend a vigil after a fatal shooting of Baton Rouge policemen, at Saint John the Baptist Church in Zachary, Louisiana, July 17, 2016.  REUTERS/Jeffrey Dubinsky