It was surreal being down on the street on that November 2014 day when a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Even now, Jeff Roorda sometimes wakes up and expects to realize the whole thing was a “really weird, sort of Stanley Kubrick-ish dream.”
But of course, it wasn’t a dream. The shooting of Brown and the subsequent riots, including the riots following Wilson’s acquittal, happened right in Roorda’s backyard. The retired St. Louis-area police officer and current business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers Association saw the worst of his fellow man during those violent protests. His faith in humanity was shaken.
“You watched people behave in a way that you never expected to see in your own community,” Roorda told host Susan Knowles on a recent episode of Stand for Truth Radio. “It was mayhem, it was mob violence, and it was the low point in the history of our country, and I hope it’s remembered that way.”
The whole Darren Wilson/Michael Brown saga brought into sharp focus what Roorda sees as a widespread anti-police agenda. He details this agenda in his brand-new book “The War on Police: How the Ferguson Effect is Making America Unsafe.”
The “Ferguson Effect” to which Roorda refers has to do with the anti-police climate created in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson.
“As we restrict and restrain police officers and second-guess them and hobble them, it makes their job more difficult, they’re less likely to be proactive in enforcing the law, and as a result, criminals are emboldened and we become a lot less safe,” Roorda explained to Knowles.
He said the Ferguson Effect has created an environment where increasing numbers of people feel they don’t have to comply with police. And that attitude infects people from all walks of life, not just blacks.
“They don’t think they have to comply with police,” Roorda said. “They think they can actively resist. They think they can turn deadly force against law enforcement.
“The outcome’s always going to be the same. If you turn deadly force against a police officer, we’re going to employ deadly force, and we’re a lot better at it than you.”
The former officer said it’s easy for ordinary Americans to play Monday morning quarterback and criticize decisions that policemen have to make in a split second regarding whether to use deadly force. But he noted in many police shootings, courts ultimately find the officer did everything right, public outcry notwithstanding.
“The problem is we keep ignoring what actually happened in these situations, and we become slaves to the narrative that emerges,” Roorda said.
Get “The War On Police” now at the WND Superstore, weeks before its November 10, 2016 release date.
The narrative almost always involves an innocent black man, doing nothing wrong, who gets gunned down in cold blood by a racist white cop. Roorda lamented that protesters, politicians and the media all seem to focus their scrutiny on the officer in these situations, even when the officer followed the best police practices for the situation.
He wishes people would instead scrutinize the person on the other side of the gun – too often a criminal who took a wrong turn in life that led to his own demise.
“If we look at the correct side of these deadly police encounters and try to address what’s going on on that side, instead of engaging in all these faux police reforms, we can actually make some progress,” he asserted.
However, that is hard to do when President Obama repeatedly declares America has a problem with race and policing. Roorda noted that theme has been Obama’s consistent drumbeat; even when the president says “we don’t know all of the facts” in a certain case, he still mentions racism is a problem.
Host Susan Knowles suggested Obama should refrain from commenting on police shootings, but Roorda disagreed. He thinks the president should get involved – but he needs to get the facts straight.
“He’s chosen to engage in this rush to judgment, and he more than any other politician in the world could stand in front of a microphone and say, ‘Listen, let’s make sure we’ve got this right. I’m asking for you to not engage in acts of violence in the street, I’m asking you to wait for justice. I’m the president of the United States; I guarantee there will be justice in this case. Just don’t burn down your own city.’
“That could have a profound difference. But instead, he engages in all this dog whistling where he essentially signals to the people waiting with torches and pitchforks that it’s okay to proceed with whatever bad acts they want to engage in.”
So it falls to veteran policemen like Roorda to speak up for officers who find themselves in a situation where they must use deadly force. It’s not a popular position to take, and Roorda understands that.
“I’m doing something very dangerous,” he acknowledged. “I’m disrupting the narrative. This is a narrative that a bunch of folks are clinging to. I’m glad to be on Stand for Truth Radio because that’s really what the book is about and what my calling as a police advocate is about, is standing for the truth.
“We’d be a lot closer to making positive advances in the wake of Ferguson and all these other police shootings if we would just tell the truth.”
When Roorda and others attempt to speak the truth, they are often branded as “racists.” Roorda noted with amusement he gets called a racist simply for disagreeing with black rioters. However, he no longer takes offense at that label.
“It was very liberating when I decided, you know what, I don’t care if idiots call me a racist. I’m going to continue to tell the truth and set the record straight, and if they want to engage in name-calling, they can do it.”
Since telling the truth doesn’t work with everyone, Roorda said he will also endeavor to change hearts and minds by appealing to Americans’ desire to put an end to all these violent police encounters and the riots that follow.
“You don’t have to agree on what happened in Ferguson or Baltimore or Milwaukee or Chicago or anywhere else to agree that you want it to stop,” Roorda reasoned. “Let’s agree that when these conflicts take place, they either end with a dead cop or a dead black kid, and neither one of those is a good outcome, so let’s figure out a way to have this happen less.”
Get “The War On Police” now at the WND Superstore, weeks before its November 10, 2016 release date.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/09/24/ex-officer-bucks-narrative-on-police-shootings/
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