This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, December 28, 2015:
English: Derivitive of File:Grey SS uniform.jpg showing the Gestapo field uniform with police colors. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Operating as Adolph Hitler’s Number Two man in charge of the Prussian police department, Hermann Goering began filling it with Nazi Party members. When it was merged with other local police departments, Goering wanted to name it the Secret Police Office but decided that its initials – GPA – looked and sounded too much like the Russian GPU. So instead he named it Geheime Staatspolizei – the Gestapo.
German tradition had favored local police, so when Goering demanded that the Gestapo have authority over all police departments in the country, he had to get permission from Hitler. Hitler agreed. Local police departments, for all intents and purposes, disappeared.
Is that what progressives and their allies in the media, the White House, and the Department of Justice really want? Heather Mac Donald raised that very question in an article of hers published by the Wall Street Journal on Christmas Day, “Trying to Hide the Rise of Violent Crime.”
A little background. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and had written earlier about the rise in violent crime as a result of the so-called “Ferguson effect.” That was the term first used by St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson a year ago to describe the backing off by police in enforcing law against minor infractions for fear that BlackLivesMatter, using the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014 as a foil, would instantly gather protestors to videotape, harass and often interfere with the officers. Although Wilson was exonerated and Brown exposed as a two-bit thug, the damage was done. Brown became a cause célèbre in a world where facts don’t matter. Organized by a Marxist and two assistants, BlackLivesMatter developed the art of police harassment and intimidation to a fine point, and with chapters in major cities around the nation, is able to roust out a crowd of protestors at a moment’s notice.
The natural and expected effect was, of course, an immediate and substantial rise in violent crime. As Dotson noted at the time, with the relaxing of a reticent policy force, the “criminal element [was] feeling empowered.”
And not just in St. Louis, either. As Mac Donald pointed out, in Baltimore, for example, the per capita homicide rate is the highest in its history, with 54 homicides per 100,000 residents. Shootings in Cincinnati, lethal or not, were up 30 percent through mid-September compared to a year ago. Homicides in St. Louis were up 60 percent by the end of August this year compared to last year. In Los Angeles, violent crime has increased 20 percent while shooting “incidents” in Chicago are up 17 percent through the middle of December and headed to a “record” year.
In October it became obvious to FBI Director James Comey that the “Ferguson effect” was causing a dangerous rise in violent crime and he posed a couple of rhetorical questions to an audience at the University of Chicago Law School:
In today’s YouTube world, are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime? Are officers answering 911 calls … avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns?
He answered his own questions:
I don’t know whether this explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year. And that wind is surely changing behavior.
That chill wind from the Ferguson effect was causing crime to rise, said Chuck Rosenberg, acting chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA):
I rely on the chiefs and sheriffs who are saying that they have seen or heard of behavioral changes among the men and women of their forces. The manifestation of it may be a reluctance to engage [with criminal suspects].
These observations were immediately met with substantial cries of denial by the White House and parties in its executive branch. On October 27, President Obama accused Comey of “cherry-picking” the data in order to promote his own personal “political agenda” (Comey is a Republican). Obama’s press secretary said that Rosenberg had “no evidence” that violent crime was on the rise thanks to the Ferguson effect. And Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, told a House committee that although “there might be anecdotal evidence there, as we all have noted, there’s no data to support it.”
These denials no doubt infuriated Mac Donald who provided proof of such rises in crime, and then went after the compliant media when it tried to trivialize them. Her opportunity came when a left-wing think tank, the Brennan Center for Justice, published a report, Crime in 2015: a Preliminary Analysis, which proved the point: Violent crime in some 25 large cities around the country had risen an astonishing 11 percent in just the last twelve months. The media, however, tried desperately to downplay the report and Mac Donald had a field day shredding it. She concluded:
An 11 percent one-year increase in any crime category is massive; an equivalentdecrease in homicides would be greeted with high-fives by politicians and police chiefs.
Yet the media have tried to repackage that 11 percent homicide increase as trivial.
She rolled out all the ways the media tried to discount the report: ignoring the numbers, or comparing them to times long past when violent crime was much higher, as Brennan authors did:
Today’s murder rates are still at all-time historic lows. In 1990 there were 29.3 murders per 100,000 residents in these cities. In 2000, there were 13.8 murders per 100,000. Now, there are 9.9 murders per 100,000 residents.
Averaged across the cities, we find that while Americans in urban areas have experienced more murders this year than last year, they are safer than they were five years ago and much safer than they were 25 years ago.
But Mac Donald was unable to answer her own rhetorical question: Why did the media try to neutralize, discount or otherwise downplay the obvious? She wrote:
The media and many politicians decry as racist law-enforcement tools like pedestrian stops and broken-windows policing – the proven method of stopping major crimes by going after minor ones.
Under such conditions, it isn’t just understandable that the police would back off; it is presumably what the activists and the media critics would want. The puzzle is why these progressives are so intent on denying that such depolicing is occurring and that it is affecting public safety.
Why, indeed?
When Cleon Skousen, a former Salt Lake City police chief, learned that the communists had created an instruction manual on how to gather and energize a mob to attack local police officers, he wrote The Communist Attack on U.S. Police (which is still available at Amazon). The advertising flyer for the book reads:
This captured manual outlined in detail the procedure to be followed in leading a mob against the police. Numerous charts demonstrated how a police blockade could be smashed, how a milling crowd of unorganized marchers or protestors could be mobilized into an overwhelming force of organized violence, how the thin line of police protection in any given area could be overrun or out-maneuvered by a few well-trained agitators directing the movements of a crowd.
We know that Goering knew that local police departments had to give way to a national police force. We know that Black Lives Matter was founded by a Marxist and two sympathizers who no doubt know about the mob-creating instruction manual, and who also no doubt know that local police forces are a stumbling block to a national or federal police force – a Gestapo. Now we also know that progressives are taking the phony story from Ferguson and blowing it out of proportion, which forces local police officers to back off from doing their job and produces the now-documented spike in crime. So the question remains: Do those progressives really know what they are going?
In plain English, do they really want a Gestapo here in the United States?
Sources:
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer
The Wall Street Journal: Trying to Hide the Rise of Violent Crime
Breitbart.com: ‘Ferguson Effect’: America’s New Crime Wave Is All Part of the Plan
ABC News: DEA Chief Backs FBI Director on Whether ‘Ferguson Effect’ May Be Real
The Wall Street Journal: The New Nationwide Crime Wave
Newsmax.com: ‘Ferguson Effect’ Divides Obama, FBI Director
Los Angeles Times: Opinion: A bum rap for FBI Director James Comey on the ‘Ferguson effect’
American Thinker: Progressives desperately trying to hide ‘Ferguson effect’ rise in crime
New York Post: ‘Ferguson effect’ on cops is real, says DEA chief
Amazon: The Communist Attack on U.S. Police by Cleon Skousen
Brennan Center report: “CRIME IN 2015: A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS”
Background on the Brennan Center for Justice
The New American: Chicago Averaging Eight Shooting Victims Every Day; Obama Blames Indiana
The New American: Is America Embracing the 10 Tenets of the Communist Manifesto?
The Communist Takeover Of America – 45 Declared Goals
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