The cowardly assassination of five Dallas police officers and wounding of six others is unspeakable beyond words and will shift the world of law enforcement in America on its axis.
The savagery of these murders has been clarifying. It has cast a powerful light on the dangerous intersection of politics and law enforcement nationally; an intersection where agenda-driven ideologies, shameless posturing and manufactured racist propaganda collides with the everyday world of policing: a world of honor, valor and commitment to protecting the public.
As we have seen before in the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, when provoked or even assaulted, law enforcement remains color-blind. The race-baiting hate mongers sold a narrative that was patently false, a narrative that was disproved by forensic evidence and the sworn testimony of credible witnesses.
Words can have consequences. And in the case of the recent police shooting in Dallas, those consequences can prove deadly. Sadly, there were no lessons learned after the brutal assassinations of Police Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in Brooklyn in December 2104, during a bizarre and terrifying chapter of city history after Mayor de Blasio added fuel to the fire raging in the wake of the Eric Garner grand jury decision.
De Blasio's poisonous rhetoric simultaneously empowered the racial hate-mongers and dehumanized members of the NYPD.
Images of a frenzied crowd chanting "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!" are forever seared into the minds of Americans.
Like de Blasio's irresponsible rhetoric, a recent statement by Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton was dangerously premature and incendiary. He suggested that the shooting of Philando Castile by a St. Paul police officer was race-driven.
"Would this have happened if the driver were white, if the passengers were white?" he asked. "I don't think it would have."
Likewise, President Obama, never one to wait for the facts before coming to his conclusions, stated this concerning the recent police-related shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota: "When incidents like this occur, there's a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts, and that should trouble all of us," Obama said on Thursday. "This is not just a black issue, not just a Hispanic issue. This is an American issue that we all should care about."
Yes, the Big Lie, that America's black youths are being killed indiscriminately by white police officers, once again promulgated by ideologically driven hatemongers, by individuals who refuse to acknowledge irrefutable facts.
Black youths are not being deliberately and illegally murdered in America; in fact, there were 238 white felons shot and killed by police nationally so far this year compared to 123 black felons, according to The Washington Post's Fatal Force database. Inconvenient facts for the racial hatemongers.
As the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan often said, "You are entitled to your own opinion. But you're not entitled to your own facts." Race relations and policing in America would be greatly improved if the Black Lives Matters folks, and the elitists who fan the flames, took heed of this sage advice.
Patrick J. Brosnan is a retired NYPD Detective and CEO of Brosnan Risk Consultants