NY Police Union Chief Erupts on Lawmakers: 'Stop Treating Us Like Animals and Thugs'
It’s a rage every American should recognize.
After almost two weeks of the nation’s media being dominated by “peaceful protesters” turning cities into war zones, and endless video of endless grievances against the country’s law enforcement, one police union leader got a chance at the microphone.
And his words were electrifying.
WATCH ? New York police boss Mike O’Meara went off on the media today:
“Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect … Our legislators abandoned us. The press is vilifying us. It’s disgusting.” pic.twitter.com/CXOPARKff7
— August Takala (@AugustTakala) June 9, 2020
The moment came during a news conference Tuesday in New York City, the scene of some of the worst urban rioting the country has experienced in the current spasm of nationwide “unrest” sparked by the death of a Minneapolis man in police custody on May 25.
Mike O’Meara, president of the New York State Association of Police Benevolent Associations, had had enough.
“I read in the papers all week, we all read in the papers, that in the black community, mothers are worried about their children getting home from school without being killed by a cop,” O’Meara said.
“What world are we living in? That doesn’t happen!”
Check out the whole statement here. O’Meara spoke for just over two-and-half minutes, but it’s worth listening to every second.
O’Meara blasted Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer accused of second-degree murder in the death of George Floyd, and stressed that no police officers should be judged by Chauvin’s actions.
“I am not Derek Chauvin. They are not him,” he said, gesturing at the police officers assembled behind him.
“He killed someone. We didn’t.”
Then O’Meara got rolling.
“Everybody’s trying to shame us. The legislators, the press. Everybody’s trying to shame us into being embarrassed about our profession,” he said.
Obviously, he isn’t embarrassed — he’s furious.
“Stop treating us like animals and thugs,” O’Meara said. “And start treating us with some respect. That’s what we’re here today to say.”
At one powerful point, O’Meara pulled his police badge from his pocket and displayed it for the cameras.
“This isn’t stained by someone in Minneapolis, it’s still got a shine on it,” O’Meara said, about the 1:15 mark of the video above. “And so do theirs.”
There was a time not that long ago when the idea of treating police officers with respect wouldn’t require an impassioned statement in front of a full news conference.
But that was before the overwhelmingly liberal national media decided to treat the relatively few undeniable stories of police officers overstepping their bounds, occasionally seriously injuring or even killing an innocent person, as though they were typical of every man or woman who’s ever worn a badge or wielded a gun.
Since Floyd’s death, and the days of utterly unacceptable looting and mayhem that have followed, the tendency of the media and liberal lawmakers to cover the police in blanket guilt has only grown – resulting in the recent, ridiculous support for the idea of “defunding” police departments around the country.
Only a liberal could think removing police officers would solve the problem of crime in the country.
To most sane Americans, O’Meara’s rage should be understandable — and it’s hard to think of anyone who would disagree. But a look at some of the snarky, sometimes-obscene Twitter responses gives a clear look at the mindset of a segment of the country that’s probably not as big as its social media impact, but is still too big.
Are there police officers who should never have worn a badge? Of course. There’s not a field of human endeavor where there has not been bad men and women – humans are a fallen species, that isn’t going to change in this life.
Does the United States have a history of shameful treatment of individuals based on their race? Of course.
Slavery was an institution in the early colonies and in the country itself for far too long after independence. (It might help the critics’ cause if they occasionally acknowledged that anti-slavery forces, led by a Republican president, fought a long and bloody war to put an end to that.)
Even in the contemporary world, there are doubtless problems when it comes to race, but this is 2020 – 12 years after the United States elected a black man to the most powerful office in the world; eight years after he was re-elected.
The Black Lives Matter gripe that the country’s police are uniquely racist, or that black Americans face a substantially greater risk of death at the hands of police officers than white Americans is simply not borne out by statistics, as noted by a Michigan University study published long before the Floyd incident.
Details like that likely don’t matter to the average looter, of course. To a certain brand of lowlife, the chance to steal without consequence is its own explanation.
But more troubling is that it obviously doesn’t matter to the mainstream media, which has spent three years fomenting phantom accusations against President Donald Trump and his administration. And it clearly doesn’t matter to the leaders of the Democratic Party, who are desperate to use any weapon to defeat the man who crushed their dreams of a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016.
It would matter, of course, to men and women who had either patriotism or integrity — but here we are.
There will likely never be a time when the country is free of racial problems. But there’s zero chance that the current outbreak of fake outrage, the current extrapolation of an unfortunate incident in Minneapolis into an indictment of the entire social and government system of the United States will move the country one inch toward the direction of racial peace.
Was O’Meara’s outburst the level of discourse the country should be aspiring to? Of course not. But the frustration is understandable, given the level of vitriol police have been subjected to.
The current duty of every American of goodwill, every responsible citizen of the greatest country that’s ever been, is to use the tools at hand — in personal interactions, in social media posts — to try to help improve the situation.
That’s the polar opposite of the path liberals are taking, because what the current unrest is stoking – unrest not anywhere close to justified by the actual conditions of the United States – isn’t peace, or progress, it’s rage.
When Mike O’Meara took the microphone at that news conference on Tuesday, that was the rage he was venting.
It’s a rage every American should recognize.
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