Where is the body-worn camera footage from when the cops got shot?
Last year, when 295 American police officers were murdered in the line of duty, that video, why wasn’t that on the evening news?
You know the footage I mean.
The grainy, jerky, frantic video we see from the front of an officer’s vest. Running and fighting and the split second flash of a muzzle blast.
We’ve seen it time after time as officers have killed suspects. We’ve dissected it and slow-motioned it and played it over and over and over again. Especially if the cop got it wrong. If what looked like a gun wasn’t a gun or if the gunman was fleeing or if it was cut and dried a bad shoot.
We get that drilled into our heads.
We watch that death repeatedly.
But we never see cops die. We never see the evil in the face of their killers, hear the moans of their last moments, understand the treachery and violence of their attackers. We get people saluting ambulances and smiling portraits in uniform, but we don’t see reality.
The reality that made 2020 the second-deadliest year ever in American law enforcement.
Last year, 295 American cops were killed in our service. The only year worse was 1930, when it topped out at 312. Of course, in 1930, Prohibition was on and crime was organized and the bad guys carried Thompson submachineguns. And we didn’t have ambulances or emergency rooms.
And we didn’t have body-worn cameras. We didn’t have an unblinking eye staring death in the face from the center of every officer’s chest.
We also didn’t have a society being told that the cops are the bad guys, that they are the enforcers of white supremacy, klansmen in tin badges at war with America’s minorities.
Those lies hadn’t been made up yet.
Back then, we were smart enough to know that our defenders were our heroes, that those who fight for us deserve support from us, that good guys were good and bad guys were bad.
But those truths are inconvenient for the political forces of evil and chaos, the agenda of anarchy and the disciples of discord. Those truths are rejected by the propagandists who have taken over the evening news and the college classroom.
And they need to be refuted. The true story needs to be told.
By the video.
By the body-worn camera video.
We need to begin releasing the body-worn camera video of police officers being murdered. No story is understood by the telling of just one side, and the reality of policing America is not understood by seeing just half of the videos.
Depicting American policing as a war against people of color is a lie best refuted with truth, visual truth, that shows what officers face and how they fall. That shows officers as human beings at their most human, and vulnerable, as their lives are stolen by criminal deeds.
That may sound harsh and hurtful, but the truth isn’t always easy.
And the simple fact is that for every video on the evening news of an officer taking a life, there are many more to be shown of an officer losing a life. And America will never understand what we ask police officers to do until we see what we ask officers to face.
It’s not bagpipes and saluting children, it’s back alleys and living rooms, traffic stops and ambushes, beastly hate and bleeding out alone on the side of the road.
That’s what’s behind that number – 295. That’s what’s placed on the altar by America’s protectors, that’s what’s currently kept from America’s eyes.
When you don’t tell the whole truth, you unavoidably tell a lie. And by not telling the whole truth of the war against America’s law-enforcement officers, we are enabling the lie that is told about them and their profession.
Let Americans see the last things their officers see. Let them glimpse the evil.
Let’s tell both sides of the story.
Last year, save for one, more police officers were murdered than in any other year in American history, more than doubling the number killed the year before. And this year, we are on track to beat last year’s total. When the politicians and the press, the activists and the actors, the professors and the protesters, tell us to hate the police, some of us do.
And that costs lives.
We should see the impact of the progressives’ anti-police rhetoric.
We should see the body-worn camera video of the murder of our officers.