A Former Top Cop Blasts Black Lives Matter

Garry McCarthy, who lost his job as the superintendent of the Chicago Police following a controversial shooting last year, blasted the Black Lives Matter movement in a radio interview Sunday. In a conversation with New York radio host John Catsimatidis, McCarthy said the movement was directly responsible for a rise in violent crime in many of our cities.

“So what’s happening, and this is ironic, is that a movement with the goal of saving black lives at this point is getting black lives taken, because 80 percent of our murder victims here in Chicago are male blacks,” McCarthy said. “Less than half of 1 percent of all the shootings in this city involve police officers shooting civilians.”

McCarthy said that BLM-sponsored protests in Baltimore, Charlotte, and elsewhere around the country were creating a “political atmosphere of anti-police sentiment.”

McCarthy lost his job in the midst of widespread criticism over how the city handled the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Dashboard video showed the young man being shot multiple times while walking away from police. The officer responsible for the shooting has been charged with first-degree murder.

The former top cop did not try to justify the shooting, but he said that one or two unfortunate incidents did not give the federal government cause to preside over local law enforcement agencies.

“We are very clearly going down the wrong path,” he said. “I think the Trump election quite frankly is a reaction to that. I think the people are tired of career politicians who’ve never really had a job telling us how we should think and how we should act.”

This is really the biggest problem with the entire Black Lives Matter movement, insofar as it has infected the Obama administration. We have too many people out there demanding and implementing policy without even one day’s experience as a police officer. Granted, we have the same problem in many other areas of the government, but this one has the potential to send our entire society careening into violent chaos.

This is not principally an Obama problem or even a Black Lives Matter problem. This is a media problem. The mainstream coverage of these police shootings has been even more biased and reckless than the Trump coverage. They play these emotionally-charged videotapes on a loop, pontificate endlessly on the case without having their facts straight, and make it clear to the viewer that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

If the reporting were a bit more responsible, we could treat these isolated incidents on a case-by-case basis and stop making broad judgements about thousands of good police officers.