ABOUT FAITH & FREEDOM

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Police Major: "America, We Are Leaving"

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After weeks of protests, violence, and calls to abolish law enforcement in America, life for the men and women of the police force has taken a very dark turn.

One police major from Tulsa pours out his heart in an opinion column, concluding simply,
"America we are leaving."

Tulsa Police Major Travis Yates says: "This is the hardest thing I've ever written."

It should also be very tough for all of us to read. Our institutions are being dismantled.

Be informed.

The officer's confession.



"This is the hardest thing I have ever written," the police major from Tulsa, Ok., wrote as he poured out his heart in an opinion column for the "Law Officer", a website operated by members of law enforcement, concluding simply, "America we are leaving."

He details growing up with his police captain father and looking forward to interacting with the police force who he revered as "heroes," but now Yates writes, "things are completely different."

He says "parents used to get mad at their kids for getting arrested, now they get mad at us."

Yates continues, "Now in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, all police have been branded as racists." But says that hasn't been his experience at all.

"With all this talk about racism and racist cops," he says, "I've never seen people treated differently because of their race. And while I know that cowards that have never done this job will call me racist for saying it, all I've ever seen was criminal behavior and cops trying to stop it and they don't give a rip what their skin color was."
"I've been called every name you can think of," (and he names a few of them) saying: "I've watched African American cops take the brunt of this and even talked one rookie out of quitting after he was berated by a lot of cowards that had the same skin color as him."

But even with the name-calling and the adversity that comes to every officer of the law, no matter the ethnicity, Yates had still hoped one of his children would have followed in his footsteps and became a police officer.

Yates says, "But today, all of that is over. I wouldn't wish this job on my worst enemy. I would never send anyone I cared about into the hell that this profession has become---It's the only job where the same citizens you risk your life for hate you for it."

He says rioters throw rocks, bottles and even gunfire as the attacks on police have evolved from verbal attacks to physical attacks.

And he says,
"This job is a walking time bomb....now the little we have, we are told they are going to de-fund us or even abolish us. Citizens with a political agenda will reign over us and all you have to do is wake up and put on a uniform to be a racist."

Yates says he used to talk cops out of leaving their job, now he's encouraging them.

He concludes: "You aren't going to have to abolish the police, we won't be around for it."

Black columnist and professor: "True plight of black people has little to nothing to do with the police or 'systemic racism'."



Walter E. Williams is a columnist and a professor of economics at George Mason University. He says in his column this week that the "True plight of black people has little to nothing to do with the police or what has been called 'systemic racism'. Instead, we need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities."

While he knows it isn't popular to say, including for him as a black man, the most dangerous cities in America---St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Newark, Buffalo, and Philadelphia are all run by far-left, mostly black Democrat mayors---and have been for the past 50 years.

Williams says often in these cities "blacks dominate city councils and they are chiefs of police and superintendents of schools."

He notes that in 1965, there were no blacks in the US Senate, nor were there any black governors. And only 6 members of the House of Representatives were black.

But, he says, "As of 2019...52 House members are black. Nine black Americans have served in the Senate...and in recent times there have been three black state governors."

'The bottom line," Williams says, "is that today's black Americans have significant political power at all levels of government. Yet, what has that meant for a large segment of the black population?"

He says "Democrat-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets."

Williams lays out the numbers based on facts, with the sources, for these cities that are run by the left...often blacks. It isn't pretty.

He notes that the population is declining in every city because of violent crime and poor education; and because of the decline of population, the economic base of the city erodes as well.

"Academic liberals, civil rights advocates, and others blamed the exodus on racism," he says---'white flight' to the suburbs to avoid blacks. But blacks have been fleeing some cities at higher rates than whites, The five cities whose suburbs have the fastest growing black populations are Miami, Dallas, Washington, Houston and Atlanta."

He says,
"It turns out that blacks, like whites, want better and safer schools for their kids and don't want to be mugged or have their property vandalized. And like white people, if they have the means, black people cannot wait to leave troubled cities."

And he says, let's put police shootings of blacks in perspective:

This year, 172 whites and 88 blacks have died at the hands of police. In Chicago alone in 2020 there have been 1,260 shootings and 256 homicides with blacks being the primary victims, That comes to 1 shooting victim every 3 hours and 1 homicide victim every 15 hours. Three people in Chicago have been killed by police.

Williams says, "If one is truly concerned about black deaths, shootings by police should figure way down one's list..."

But, unfortunately, it doesn't figure way down the list of some who have the loudest voice.

Can Oprah lead us out of this wilderness?



Oprah led a two-day televised racial summit this week on behalf of Black Lives Matter to lay out the organization's list of demands moving forward.

The event, called "Where Do We Go From Here?", aired Tuesday and last night on some cable channels and featured over a dozen black social justice activists, including failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms. Abrams is being considered by Joe Biden's campaign as a possible VP running mate. Some say Mayor Bottoms is also being considered.

I found it interesting that among those who want to chart the course forward is New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who spearheaded the newspaper's controversial "1619 Project" which "reveals" that America was not founded with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, rather it was founded in 1619 when the first slave ship sailed into Jamestown with slaves for the colony.

Hanna Jones also told CBS last week: "Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral."



Ibram Kendi, a racism scholar who teaches at American University, is one of the leaders who are plotting the course forward for our nation---at least in their minds.

Kendi is a strong advocate for amending the US Constitution "to fix the original sin of racism" by adding an "anti-racist amendment." He is also a strong supporter of the creation of a federal "Department of Anti-Racism."

Oprah says: "I thought it would be both of interest and service to bring their ideas, concerns, and comments into a national spotlight."

Abraham Lincoln told our country:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."

Be Prayerful. Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant.