The assassination over the weekend of two New York City police officers has inflamed the already heated rhetoric and has given conservatives a convenient excuse to ignore the issues that have created a fraught relationship between police and African-Americans around the country.
I’ve written about this a few times over the last month, since the decisions not to indict police officers in separate and unrelated killings of unarmed black men. And I am the first to admit that I write this post from a position of privilege — I am a white middle-age guy living in the suburbs. I don’t fit the profile our culture has misguidedly created that transforms all young black males into potential criminals, nor am I a police officer who has been tasked with protecting society.
So, yes, I’m lucky. Yes, I sit in my “safe house,” holding my “enlightened thoughts” and comment “on police policies.” Yes, I support the protesters in their efforts to ensure that the war mentality that has taken hold among some departments and to fix the broken relationship between police and communities of color.
I don’t do any of this smugly — contrary to what bloggers like House and Home seem to believe. I do this because I believe that police officers are public servants and that their job is to serve the public. They have a difficult job, an often thankless job and a dangerous job. Most police officers are conscientious, public-minded, concerned with the public and advancing the public good.
But the police operate in a society in which race remains a flashpoint, in an economic environment in which many neighborhoods (mostly black and Latino) have been robbed of hope, in which schools have been allowed to deteriorate (if not collapse outright), and in which poverty is more prevalent than in the white suburbs. We then treat these areas — both in policy and rhetoric — as war zones, sending the police in not to keep the peace, not to serve the residents, but to clean up, keep order and, ultimately, to protect the status quo.
That is the history of policing — it has always been an arm of the state, which always has been an arm of the economic elites. Police are a part of the larger social and economic structure, are influenced by it, and they are subject to the dictates of the economic, political and police hierarchies, hierarchies that have pushed failed policing policies in many places, that have endorsed profiling and the militarization of police in recent years, that endorse order over all other prerogatives.
I don’t mean to indict all departments — there are many that have embraced community policing concepts that attempt to reconnect police to the communities in which they serve. But the larger cultural imperative — starting with the law-and-order political rhetoric that has been ascendent since Nixon and including news coverage and television shows and movies — remains one of us against them, of good guys and bad guys.
This is an environment that leaves many in the minority community feeling disconnected from the police, feeling targeted, and which is sowing distrust. This is what we see in polling and what I hear from my students. They are angry at being profiled. They feel that too many police officers are too quick to escalate situations involving minorities — especially young male blacks and Latinos. They want to be accorded the same deference and respect that they feel is being given to whites.
On the other side, police officers are right to feel that many are being painted unfairly by the broadest brush possible — some of the rhetoric certainly does that — and that they are not given credit for the efforts that they do make.
And while I disagree with Mayor Bill DeBlasio that it’s time for the protests to go on hiatus — protests are necessary to induce changes — I think it is pretty clear that the heated rhetoric is making discussion impossible. The mayor and the protesters are not responsible for the death of the two officers; the blame for the senseless deaths of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos lies with the shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley. The blame for the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, while all occurring at the hands of police officers, were not killed by a single, monolithic entity known as “the police” — though systemic failures did make their deaths more likely.
We are unlikely to move forward until we stop generalizing and start being honest with ourselves.
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Hank Kalet 
Blaming DeBlasio or the protesters for the assassinations of the 2 police officers is despicable, untrue and politically motivated. Ray Kelly was on the blame-the-mayor bandwagon, he's beneath contempt. What is he trying to say, that the police are above criticism? All that being said, policing is an incredibly dangerous and difficult job and in a moment a police officer can be dead or crippled for life.