I hate to disagree with Cris Carter, who I love, but this was about as far from the NFL's finest moment as a thing can be. This was a disgrace.
And as I've said before, it's not because the flag or the national anthem are sacrosanct. Symbols are just that. Symbols. It's also not because of "the troops and veterans." They are not the ones being disrespected here.
This is, and always has been, about the police. It was about the police when Colin Kaepernick started it all last year. It's about the police now. Anthem-kneelers may tell you it's about Donald Trump, but if that's true then their actions are not only disgraceful but juvenile to the point of total embarrassment. If you make a spectacle of yourself just because someone tells you that you shouldn't, then you've let that person manipulate your behavior every bit as much as if you were following his orders.
Trump does have a way of evoking insane reactions to his trolling, and this may have been the greatest example of it yet.
But the protests started before Trump said a word about it. If you joined them yesterday because of Trump, that doesn't change the fact that you joined them as they were. And while we're told that these protests are peaceful and don't hurt anyone, that is decidedly not true. These protests are contributing to a very dangerous environment for police officers who are trying to do the right thing and protect us every day.
How, you ask?
Talk to police officers. They will tell you. I have.
One thing I've learned about the current environment is that cops feel pulled between their training and the public perceptions of what they do. One cop told me that when a suspect resists arrest or otherwise becomes belligerent, their training says they should employ certain tactics to bring the suspect under control. But they're tempted not to use those tactics because, as he put it, "As soon as we do, the news shows up."
And when the news shows up, they're going to be shooting out-of-context video and presenting it to the public without any accurate explanation of how and why cops are trained to handle situations like this.
This has become a gigantic problem with the way the media report these stories. Any time there is an incident in which the officer is white and the suspect is black, the media - particularly the Washington Post - lead the story by identifying the races of those involved because that fits the established narrative. This causes social justice activists to jump to the conclusion that an incident must have been racial in nature when in fact it may not have been.
Witness what happened in St. Louis, where officer Jason Stockley was on trial for murder in the shooting of a black motorist. Because of the way people reported the incident, activists went so far as to threaten riots if the judge in the case didn't find Stockley guilty of murder. That is an astonishing assault on our system of justice and on the idea that suspects are presumed innocent. And indeed, when the judge found Stockley not guilty of murder, the riots went on just as threatened.
When Kaepernick claimed that nothing is done when black people are killed by police, this is what he meant. Darren Wilson wasn't convicted. The charges against the Baltimore cops were dropped. Jason Stockley wasn't convicted. This is why Kaepernick and his defenders think they're justified in disrespecting the national anthem - because they see the justice system, and by extension the country in general, denying justice to black victims of police violence.
But they're jumping to conclusions in these situations instead of waiting for all the facts. The Michael Brown incident in Ferguson was nothing like what activists first claimed it was. Darren Wilson did nothing wrong, and even the Obama Justice Department said so. Yet the narrative was established in activists' minds, and once that was the case they disbelieved anything that cast doubt on the narrative.
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This has police officers questioning whether they can follow their training without losing their jobs, or being arrested for murder.
And this did not start in recent years. The idea that white racist cops were wantonly attacking black people gained momentum after the Rodney King riots in 1992, and the resulting hysteria soon claimed two tragic victims named Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers. Budzyn and Nevers were Detroit police officers who followed their training and used force in the arrest of a suspect named Malice Green. With the King trial and riots still fresh in the minds of the public, a politically ambitious prosecutor named Kym Worthy went after the two officers and charged them with murder after Green died.
Then-Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, to the surprise of no one who knew how he operated, declared publicly that Green had been "literally murdered by the police."
The rest of the story is tragic, and was recounted by MLive.com following Nevers's death in 2013:
The course of Nevers' life changed dramatically Nov. 5, 1992. Emotions had yet to settle from the riot-inducing acquittal of the officers involved in the March 3, 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles.
Although what happened with Malice Green never sparked rioting and looting, it was possibility that hung heavy over the city long after the minority's death at the hands of two white police officers.
Nevers and his partner beat Green while attempting to detain him and pry open his hands to reveal the crack cocaine the officers expected to discover inside. Crack cocaine was located at the scene of the arrest.
A Wayne County autopsy identified blunt force trauma to the head as cause of death.
Green died after the altercation generating a racially-charged political firestorm with the white officers at the epicenter. Nevers and Budzyn were charged and convicted with second-degree murder of Green in 1993.
Nevers' conviction was later reduced to manslaughter after he received a second trial on appeal. He was released from prison in 2001 and maintained until his death that the charges brought against him and his partner were the result of a political witch hunt and racial hysteria.
In his 2007-published book, "Good Cops, Bad Verdict," Nevers provides a nearly 500-page account of the night Malice Green died, the media frenzy that followed and the judicial wranglings that landed him in prison.
Nevers presents himself as a by-the-book officers who used appropriate force on the night of Green's death as he and Budzyn struggled to get Green to submit to their authority.
"Events in the arrest of Malice Green were unlike anything else I ever encountered," Nevers wrote. "It's that simple. I regret with all my heart that he and I were brought together as police officer and arrest subject, and that 24 years of working the streets with no tools but my wits and my revolver ended with him dead and me a devastated man."
No one, least of all Budzyn and Nevers, was happy about Malice Green's death. But no one intended it either, and because of the political atmosphere of the time, Kym Worthy set out to destroy the lives of these two men - and succeeded. That should never have been allowed to happen.
And that's the very atmosphere Colin Kaepernick and the other anthem protesters are giving us today. They would have you believe that white police officers are prowling around looking for black people to hurt. They are not. Police officers only deal with people when they believe it may be necessary to protect the public, and often these are very bad people. They're not always, of course, but police training and experience tells them they have to be very careful about how they approach people, and that includes giving people very specific instructions about where to face, where to stand, where to put their hands . . . this is all for the purpose of making the interaction as safe as possible for everyone and keeping the cops alive.
They also have to trust their instincts. Sometimes their experience tells them that certain cues could signal trouble, and they may be that much more assertive in the instructions they give someone because of it. Activists want to say this is all about the person being black, but it's not. If a white person gives off the same signals the cops will react the same way, but you won't hear about that on the evening news.
Yet because of the atmosphere created by people like Kaepernick and the anthem protesters, cops now have to question whether they really can trust their instincts or follow their training. What will happen if they do? What if everything they've ever learned tells them the suspect who was just told to keep his hands visible, but is reaching into his pocket, is reaching for a gun? Do they shoot and risk excoriation from the media and possible prosecution from another Kym Worthy? Or do they not shoot because they fear all this, and risk their lives if that guy does indeed pull out a gun?
Being a cop was dangerous enough before all this nonsense started. It's even more deadly now, because the public no longer respects the dangers cops face, and no longer is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. The media drop insinuations of racism before they have any idea why something really happened, and the marchers and rioters are ready to take the media's lead and spring into action. Even a fair trial is hard to pull off now because a judge has to consider the threat of riots if the activists don't get the verdict they want.
This is what cops are now facing in this country.
Now look. I'm sure there are bad cops who do bad things. They need to be dealt with. And if a black man is the victim of unjust police force, then yes, America does care about that and wants it stopped.
What America should not do is what it's doing now, which is to jump to conclusions about every situation when the facts will often show that there was more to the story than people were first led to believe, and that racism was not in fact the driving factor despite the insistence of activists that it must have been.
When NFL players and owners take a knee during the national anthem, and say this is why they're doing it, they're exacerbating an atmosphere of racial hysteria that's pre-judging innocent cops as guilty and making it harder and much more dangerous for cops to do their jobs. That is not OK to do, no matter what Donald Trump said about them.
Supporting our police officers is more important than "standing up to Donald Trump," whatever that even means. If you want to say something, then fine, say it. But don't indict an entire country, and don't inspire widespread rage against people who aren't doing anything wrong. Make sure what you say is accurate and that you're not jumping to conclusions about situations, and people, when you might not really know everything there is to know.
Donald Trump is not the one who's "dividing us." The people who are attacking good police officers are the ones doing that. And the extent to which they did it on NFL fields this past Sunday is one of the most disgraceful things I've ever seen.
I'm just glad no Vikings did it. They're the only part of the NFL I like anyway.
