Sen. Weinberg: Tell Obama "Cops Lives Matter" too
/That picture on her Facebook page is curious. Is that Senator Loretta Weinberg (D-Corzine) tickling the former confidant of the "Love Gov"? It certainly looks like she is doing something to make Steve Goldstein smile.
The "Lov Gov" is, of course, Eliot Spitzer of New York. Goldstein was Spitzer's campaign mouthpiece when they were blazing their own version of the sexual revolution. "Whatever floats your boat" is the mantra of the Kinsey-besotted "Swingers' Lobby." Spitzer, whom Goldstein insisted was "an incredibly nice man in real life" -- even after the Lov Gov was caught hiring young women for sex, was recently in the news again. This time he was accused in the New York media of losing it and then trying to strangle a young woman. He was accused of this kind of "role playing" before, in a book authored by one of his young victims. Now the latest subject of his attentions has fled the country.
The lifestyles of rich insiders never ceases to amaze: Sex, power, money, and let's change the world to do whatever we want. Average people and their talk of "democracy" doesn't matter. "Only the rich, the powerful, the well-connected, count and we decide who and what matters. We set the fashion."
Which brings us to the misdirected "Black Lives Matter" movement that works to pit some Americans, based on their skin color or ethnic origin, against other Americans, based on their employment as law enforcement officers. Never mind that black police officers are as ubiquitous as Irish cops once were -- especially in the higher ranks. Black employment in policing of all types is a growth industry.
While United States Justice Department figures indicate that the number of Hispanic and Asian police officers lag behind their proportional representation of America's population as a whole, that is not the case with black police officers, who more than match it. In some urban police departments, black officers make up more than half the department. 63 percent of Detroit's police officers are "African-American."
In spewing hatred towards working class police officers, many of whom are black, the "Black Lives Matter" movement is allowing itself to be used by the political establishment, which is now thoroughly anti-police. Some dislike the police because it is fashionable to do so, just as it was fashionable to hug a first responder in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Fashion changes. Blue is out this year. Others want the best police protection, but they don't want to pay for it. For them, undermining the police weakens their position at the bargaining table. If they can get a police officer to risk his or her life at a cut rate, that leaves more money for the vendors who fund their campaigns or for their criminal friends on Wall Street.
The real target of the "Black Lives Matter" movement should be the very politicians who have duped them into attacking the police. In a 2014 column titled, "Eric Garner: Criminalized to death," conservative columnist George Will wrote:
Overcriminalization has become a national plague. And when more and more behaviors are criminalized, there are more and more occasions for police, who embody the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, and who fully participate in humanity’s flaws, to make mistakes.
Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties attorney, titled his 2009 book “Three Felonies a Day” to indicate how easily we can fall afoul of the United States’ metastasizing body of criminal laws. Professor Douglas Husak of Rutgers University says that approximately 70 percent of American adults have, usually unwittingly, committed a crime for which they could be imprisoned. In his 2008 book, “Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law,” Husak says that more than half of the 3,000 federal crimes — itself a dismaying number — are found not in the Federal Criminal Code but in numerous other statutes. And, by one estimate, at least 300,000 federal regulations can be enforced by agencies wielding criminal punishments. Citing Husak, professor Stephen L. Carter of the Yale Law School, like a hammer driving a nail head flush to a board, forcefully underscores the moral of this story:
Society needs laws; therefore it needs law enforcement. But “overcriminalization matters” because “making an offense criminal also means that the police will go armed to enforce it.” The job of the police “is to carry out the legislative will.” But today’s political system takes “bizarre delight in creating new crimes” for enforcement. And “every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence.”
Carter continues: “It’s unlikely that the New York Legislature, in creating the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, imagined that anyone would die for violating it. But a wise legislator would give the matter some thought before creating a crime. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they’re so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.”
Last year the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice issued its report on the Ferguson Police Department. The report was the result of a lengthy investigation, commissioned as a response to the shooting death of a young black man by police. The report's most notable finding -- placed front and center, although ignored by many in the mainstream media -- was that "(Ferguson's law enforcement) practices are shaped by revenue rather than by public safety needs."
That's right, the Legislature criminalizes behavior as a means of obtaining revenue for state and local governments. The Legislature turns the police into privateers, pushing them to "earn" more for government. Then, when something goes wrong, the very same politicians who pressured police into becoming revenue agents turn on them, setting their "movement" political allies on them to devalue police lives in order to make it easier to reduce their salaries, cut benefits, and hollow out pensions.
All you have to do is look at the way President Barack Obama has criminalized investigative journalism and whistleblowers to get a taste of how many new "offenses" have been added to the statute books. New Jersey leads others states in adding regulations that will ultimately be enforced by men with guns. If Weinberg and Goldstein have their way, the police will soon be used to issue citations and collect fines from people whose speech critters like the Love Gov (he of the Swingers' Lobby) finds insulting or bullying or "hateful."
And as they add more and more for the police to enforce, they seek to make fashion statements and dupe black voters by engaging in irresponsible attacks on working class police officers. Well, the seeds of their rhetoric has borne fruit and we are beginning to see the harvest their words have conjured.
Last week, the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), a police officer's union, reported that violence against police had escalated to the point where seven police officers had been killed in just six days. This is the kind of headline we more often saw coming from a warzone like Iraq or Afghanistan -- not from within the borders of the United States.
7 officers have been killed serving their communities in the last six days. Please pray for their families
President Obama has been mute about the violence this rhetoric has unleashed against working police officers and their families.
Big government legislators, like Senator Weinberg, and their lobbyist allies, like Steve Goldstein, have been mute as well. Now is the time for them to step up and start to undo what they have done.
First, take responsibility. We challenge Senator Weinberg to propose a resolution that reminds legislators, Congress, and the President that police officers only enforce the laws that the political establishment makes them enforce; that there is an inherent danger in this transaction; and that police officers are often injured, wounded, or lose their lives in carrying out the directives of the political class.
Second, tell the President to speak up. We challenge Senator Weinberg to sign a letter to President Obama that urges him to acknowledge the costs involved in police work. This cost is measured in lost or damaged lives and in the stress and trauma dealt with by families and loved ones. Making the police into villains for enforcing the laws written and decided upon by the political class is outrageous hypocrisy.
Third, make the police "peace officers" not "privateers." Make policing about public safety and not a source of revenue. Create a Sunset Committee to review the thousands of laws and regulations that impact police conduct and place police officers on a collision course with the growing number of out-of-work or under-employed citizens who are having difficulty paying the economic sanctions imposed on them by legislative bodies at all levels of government. Recognize that every time you send a man with a gun to collect money for government, you run the risk that someone will die.
Because of the vote Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-Norcross) made to end capital punishment, the lives of serial killers, those who rape and murder small children, those who torture to death young women, mass terrorists, and cop killers are all spared the death penalty in New Jersey. Let's stop legislative action from inadvertently imposing the death penalty on people who can't pay a few traffic tickets or who are selling a couple cigarettes to someone who can't afford a full pack.
It is insane for a legislative body to spare the life of a Jesse Timmendequas while causing the death of an Eric Garner. It is monstrous for the political class to blame the police for following its orders.
