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Kathianne
04-20-2016, 07:56 AM
Ok, I was reading this thread, last couple pages about surging crime and BLM:

http://www.debatepolicy.com/showthread.php?54595-Chicago!&p=812046#post812046

No doubt I was looking for some POV regarding the issues, I came across this:

http://city-journal.org/html/back-bedlam-14403.html


Back to Bedlam

Violent crime has shot up due to the nonstop war on cops waged by Shaun King, Black Lives Matter, and the ACLU.Heather Mac Donald (http://city-journal.org/contributor/heather-mac-donald_122)
April 19, 2016

​Will the anti-cop Left please figure out what it wants? For more than a decade, activists have demanded the end of proactive policing, claiming that it was racist. Pedestrian stops—otherwise known as stop, question, and frisk—were attacked as a bigoted oppression of minority communities. In March 2015, for example, the ACLU of Illinois accused (http://www.aclu-il.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ACLU_StopandFrisk_6.pdf) the Chicago Police Department of “targeting” minorities because stops are “disproportionately concentrated in the black community.”Equally vilified was Broken Windows policing, which responds to low-level offenses such as graffiti, disorderly conduct, and turnstile jumping. Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King launched a petition (https://www.change.org/p/u-s-senate-we-demand-national-change-to-protect-citizens-and-communities-from-police-violence-and-misconduct) after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder “meet with local black and brown youth across the country who are dealing with ‘Zero Tolerance’ and ‘Broken Windows’ policing.”

Well, the police got the message. In response to the incessant accusations of racism and the heightened hostility in the streets that has followed the Michael Brown shooting, officers have pulled back (http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-nationwide-crime-wave-1432938425) from making investigatory stops and enforcing low-level offenses in many urban areas. As a result, violent crime in cities with large black populations has shot up (http://city-journal.org/html/stat-crimes-matter-14277.html)—homicides in the largest 50 cities

rose (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/2015-homicides/) nearly 17 percent in 2015. And the Left is once again denouncing the police—this time for not doing enough policing. King now accuses (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-incompetent-police-costing-lives-chicago-baltimore-article-1.2597721) police in Chicago of not “doing their job,” as a result of which “people are dying.” Stops in Chicago are down (https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160331/bronzeville/chicago-police-stops-down-by-90-percent-as-gun-violence-skyrockets) nearly 90 percent this year through the end of March, compared with the same period in 2015; shootings were up 78 percent and homicides up 62 percent through April 10. Over 100 people were shot (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/120-people-shot-chicago-10-days-2016-article-1.2493741) in the first ten days of 2016. King scoffs at the suggestion that a new 70-question street-stop form imposed on the CPD by the ACLU is partly responsible for the drop-off in engagement. If American police “refuse to do their jobs [i.e., make stops] when more paperwork is required,” he retorts, “it’s symptomatic of an entirely broken system in need of an overhaul.” This is the same King who as recently as October fumed (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ferguson-effect-lie-article-1.2415208) that “nothing happening in this country appears to be slowing [the police] down.”

...


I read it all, agree with nearly its entire thesis. You might wish to read the whole thing too!

Then I clicked a link that brought me to this:

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/about-obamas-receding-tide-of-war/?singlepage=true


About Obama's Receding Tide of War... BY CLAUDIA ROSETT (https://pjmedia.com/columnist/claudia-rosett)APRIL 19, 2016

Years ago, looking out at the Pacific surf from a beach in Chile, a friend -- alert to the ways of tsunamis -- gave me some advice about what to do if suddenly the water all went away. "Run. Run for your life. Because it's all coming back."

That advice has come to mind all too often since President Obama made his 2012 reelection campaign proclamations about the receding tide of war. Not that the tide of war has receded anywhere except perhaps in the fantasies of Obama and his followers. But after more than seven years of U.S. policy predicated on such propaganda, it's getting ever harder to read the daily headlines without the sense that there's a deluge coming our way.

Just a modest sampling of some of the latest warning signs:

-- Russian warplanes have been demonstrating that they can with impunity buzz (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3422583/Russian-Su-27-jet-fighter-flies-20-feet-surveillance-aircraft-unsafe-unprofessional-interception-Black-Sea.html)our military aircraft (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/04/18/russian-jet-conducted-barrel-roll-50-feet-from-us-spy-plane-pentagon-says.html) and ships (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36039703). Which is by now no surprise, because Russian President Vladimir Putin has already learned -- in the flexible era (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsFR8DbSRQE) of the Obama "reset" -- that the U.S. is no serious obstacle to such stunts as Russia swiping the entire territory of Crimea from Ukraine, moving back into the Middle East, propping up Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and offering fugitive Edward Snowden a home after the grand hack of the National Security Agency.

-- China, while brushing off U.S. protests, keeps pushing its power plays and territorial grabs in East Asia -- and has just landed a military jet on an island it has built, complete with runway, (http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/18/politics/chinese-military-jet-lands-on-island/) in the South China Sea.

-- Iran, having pocketed the Obama-legacy rotten nuclear deal, has continued testing ballistic missiles, with Iran's Fars News Agency advertising that two of the missiles launched just last month were emblazoned in Hebrew with the phrase "Israel must be wiped out." Presumably these missiles are being developed just in case Iran feels a need to propel toward a target some highly unpeaceful products of its "exclusively peaceful (https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign-policy/iran-deal)" nuclear program? Meantime, Iran is wielding the nuclear agreement itself as a threat. Just this past week, we had the head of Iran's Central Bank in Washington threatening that Iran will walk away (http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/04/18/where-irans-complaint-about-banking-integration-misses-the-mark/)from Obama's cherished nuclear deal unless the Obama administration provides yet more concessions -- in this instance, a U.S. welcome mat for Iran's banking transactions, so Iran, the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, can avail itself of easy access to dollars.

-- Saudi authorities have been threatening (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-warns-ofeconomic-fallout-if-congress-passes-9-11-bill.html?_r=0) that if Congress passes a bill allowing the Saudi government to be held responsible for any part in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they will dump hundreds of billions worth of U.S. assets. (What's most arresting here is less the prospect of a self-defeating Saudi fire sale on U.S. assets than the reality that the Saudis -- beset by everything from relatively low oil prices to regional tumult, including an aggressively expansionist Iran -- feel free to try to bully the U.S.).

-- And oh, by the way, North Korea, has been visibly preparing for a fifth nuclear test. If they carry it out during the grand window of opportunity provided by Obama's final nine months in office, this would be the fourth North Korean nuclear test on Obama's watch. That's not a good trend, especially given North Korea's history of marketing its weapons and nuclear know-how to places such as the Middle East.

(ME: She missed Cuba and a few others, but you can fill in those.)

That's before we even get to the carnage and refugee flows spilling out of such places as Syria and Libya; such terrorist outfits and networks as ISIS, the Taliban, Hezbollah, al Qaeda...and the mix-and-match extent to which various states not entirely friendly to the U.S. tend to officially deplore terrorism while also sponsoring or abetting it, as convenient.

Obama likes to lecture us that all these things are transient problems, speed bumps on the road to wherever that utopian arc of history finally bends toward some great big pot of justice at the end of the rainbow. In his view, as he told NBC's Matt Lauer this past January, "there are no existential threats (http://dailycaller.com/2016/01/12/obama-no-existential-threats-facing-the-us-video/)" confronting the U.S. today. Thus, as Fox News reported earlier this month in a superb documentary on "Rising Threats, Shrinking Military (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/04/01/tune-in-to-fnc-for-fox-news-reporting-rising-threats-shrinking-military.html)," Obama is both gutting the U.S. military and reshaping it, the priorities here being not to win wars, but to be, above all, eco-aware and gender malleable.

In a televised inteview April 10, with Fox News host Chris Wallace, Obama opined (http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2016/04/10/exclusive-president-barack-obama-on-fox-news-sunday/)
that if you just step back and look at the big picture, there's not much to worry about: "America's got the best cards. We are the envy of the world. We have the most powerful military on earth, by a mile."

That's true, but it's not a product of Obama's brand of leadership, and it's not enough to have the best cards if your leaders are busy throwing them away. America's greatness is the incredible legacy of many generations of work and sacrifice under a system of capitalism and freedom, and of leaders willing at crucial moments to stand up for this country. It takes a lot of effort to run that down, but this is what Obama has been doing, with the apology tours, the terrible deals, the fading red lines, the hollow speeches, the inert declarations about standing "shoulder-to-shoulder" with the "international community," the insults to America's allies and the come-hither courting of America's enemies.

What's happening locally is also being played out on the international stage. The police in urban areas are working in a reactive manner, it's what the public demanded and the administrators react. The police want to go home safe and they also want to take care of their families, that won't happen if they are accused and tried by the media and left to hang alone by their administrators. So they too react to the pressure, leaving the small things go and responding to calls from the public to incidents they want the police for-of course the chances that the incident becomes serious and involves innocents is often a result of reacting rather than proactive involvement.

As Rosett writes, 'it's certainly true' that the US military is the best trained, equipped, and funded military in the world. Where the problem comes in is that it is now reacting at best, sometimes not even then. Proactive would be a presence in some of the dangerous neighborhoods-a presence that would be 'known' to become more with provocation. But, while often 'there,' it often doesn't react-by orders of the administrators. Rosett laid out some of the more recent acts that actually deserved a 'response' but failed to. Indeed, as I pointed out yesterday while speaking with Putin and asking for 'his cooperation,' Obama never brought up the provocations of our war ship being buzzed by Russian fighter jets. No mention. That's not even 'reactionary.'

What is sown will be reaped.