Attacks on police are up 17 percent compared with last year

It hasn't been as much in the news this year, so you might be under the impression that attacks against police officers are down - and maybe that the cultural hostility we saw over the past couple of years toward police has died down. I wish I could tell you that was true, but it's not. Last week's murder of New York City Ofc. Miosotis Familia did not break a trend toward peace. As Scott Erickson of Americans in Support of Law Enforcement reports, it continued a trend that sees cops even more frequently targeted by rage-driven killers, many of whom simply hate them because they're following a cultural fad that encourages them to do so:

On Wednesday morning, NYPD Officer Miosotis Familia was slain by a lone gunman as she sat in full uniform in a marked patrol vehicle, victimized simply because of her chosen profession.

Familia was a devoted mother of three children and had been described as a “warrior.” Her killer—a man with an extensive violent criminal record—had allegedly ranted on social media about his hatred and anger toward law enforcement. His girlfriend, concerned by his erratic behavior, called police only hours before he would go on to kill Familia. This senseless attack reflects a disturbing trend of increased hostility toward our nation’s officers. So far this year, 68 officers have died or been killed in the line of duty—a 17 percent increase from the same time last year. Equally disturbing, 25 of those officers have been killed by gunfire—a 25 percent jump from this point last year.

It's probably made a marginally positive difference that Barack Obama is gone from the scene, which means we no longer have a president affirming the worst instincts of people already inclined to hate the police. But there are plenty of other cultural forces still hammering home this message. News media still report confrontations between police and citizens with a presumption that the police must be doing something wrong. Just last week we told you about a columnist who falsely claimed his life was in danger during a traffic stop, and only got called out because police released video of the non-incident.

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Celebrities and has-beens like Colin Kaepernick continue to insist that police are oppressing innocent citizens, and receive uncritical coverage of their statements despite the fact that there is no information that backs up their claims. At let's face it, some people are just petulant little creeps who hate all authority figures because they don't want to be held to any standards of behavior. Whether we're talking about career criminals, famous defense attorneys or libertarians, some people are just hardwired with a hatred of the people whose job it is to maintain order in society. There's a massive difference between serving as the armed muscle in an oppressive state and merely keeping everyone safe from harm. Some people have no mental capacity and feel no moral imperative to make this distinction. So police continue to be targets, and some of them are still paying with their lives because American culture has arrived at a point where the good guys are the bad guys, and we celebrate the deviants rather than supporting the brave people who stand between us and utter chaos. As I always have, I hold the media largely responsible for this because they create and play up these narratives. They love nothing more than a race riot, which is why every story about a police action leads by identifying the races of the participants regardless of whether there's any reason to think it's relevant. To a liberal, race is always relevant. It's what every story is ultimately about, so police must be racists and must be called out as such on every occasion. That's getting cops killed, and it hasn't gotten any better this year. To solve that problem, we need to not only stand up for cops, we need to also attack these narratives and the liars who are pushing them - whether that's Colin Kaepernick or the Washington Post. They're all complicit.