The "war on cops" that wasn't

At first it was called "The Ferguson Effect" -- the notion that police officers were intimidated by the increasing prevalence of phone cameras recording their behavior in doing their jobs.   When leading civil rights figures, including NY Mayor Bill De Blasio and President Obama, spoke about the number of unarmed young black men being killed by police, police unions retaliated, claiming lack of support for the police.   Some even turned their backs on the mayor as he was speaking at the funeral of a fallen officer. 

They also used selective statistics of increased crimes in a few cities to claim that crime was increasing because cops were avoiding getting out of their cars, lest they be videod and accused of wrong-doing -- and hence, they said, crimes increased.   All the fault of those people with phone cameras.

Only it turned out that statistics do not show that there is actually a Ferguson effect.   Those few isolated cities with increasing crime are balanced by the rest of the country, and overall there is a decrease in crime.

Then there were a few, highly publicized cases in which police officers were killed in the line of duty;  and they began to refer to "the war on cops."    That meme got a huge boost in September when Lt. Charles Gliniewicz called Fox Lake, Illinois headquarters to say that he was chasing three suspects and called for backup.   When other officers arrived, they found Gliniewicz, dead from bullet wounds.   Then began one of the most intense, highly publicized manhunts since the televised O. J. Simpson chase.

Despite the array of police forces and helicopter camers involved in this very expensive manhunt, no trace of suspects was found.   And Lt. Gliniewicz became a national hero and the icon of the "war on cops" story.   But . . . there's more to the story.

As reported by Matt Ferner and Nick Wing of the Huffington Post, 

"Investigators revealed this week that [Lt. Gliniewiecz] had been stealing and laundering public money from a youth mentor program for seven years, and took his own life in what they called a 'carefully staged suicide' because he feared his scheme would be discovered. . . . 

"This puts a number of pundits and politicians in an awkward spot. Immediately after Gliniewicz’s death, many seized on reports that he'd been brutally ambushed . . . .  They took to the airwaves and Internet to blame the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups calling for police reform, arguing that Gliniewicz -- a loving husband and father of four who was revered in his community -- was the latest tragic casualty of a so-called "war on cops." . . .

"But a look at the data reveals that this year is actually shaping up to be one of the safest on record for police.  A total of 31 officers have been killed by nonaccidental gunfire so far this year . . . .  And while each of these deaths is one too many, together they represent one of the lowest annual totals in decades. . . ."

And then Ferner and Wing quote Mark Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who has analyzed police deaths from gunfire: 

"Most importantly, despite all of the sensational (but exaggerated) media hype, and despite the overwhelming (but false) public opinion, there really is no 'war on cops' in America today. . . . As the data… show, there’s never been a time in US history when it’s been safer to be a US police officer than it is today."

Please note:   This is from the American Enterprise Institute, that bastion of conservative think tank study and policy.   So this is in no way liberal propaganda.

And the fact is that these statistics would still be true -- no increase in cop killing -- even if Lt. Gliniewiecz had been killed by criminals. It just would have been 32 instead of 31, still one of the lowest in decades.

Ralph