Image Credit: Becker1999 / CC
Op-ed originally appeared on The Blaze. Reprinted here by permission from the author.
By Daniel Horowitz –
It’s the vicious, degenerative cycle of focusing on police tactics rather than deterring career violent criminals. It goes something like this. The more activists cry racism, the more the criminal justice system releases criminals early, the more pervasively police are confronted with violent criminals on the streets, the more they have to use deadly force, the more likely some will make mistakes or overreact, the more this induces cries of racism and spawns affirmative action hiring, the less skilled the police are with dealing with the criminals, the more the criminals get emboldened, the more tragedies occur on both sides, as more calls for more leniency on criminals accelerates. This is the true lesson of the Tyre Nichols tragedy – the opposite of what the political system and the media want you to believe.
There’s no doubt that police brutality exists among the 28.8 million police-initiated interactions with civilians a year, and clearly the deadly beating of Nichols was one of them. However, to focus exclusively on the cops and police training and their response to crime – wrong or right interactions – and not focus on the brutality of crime itself and how to deter it will just continue perpetuating the vicious cycle of false cries of racism, which ultimately leads to more black civilians being killed. Of course, this failed narrative is most evident in the Nichols case, where all five officers involved were black and some appear to have been affirmative action hires.
