A Philadelphia Fire Department paramedic is under fire for posting this picture with the caption: “Our real enemy.” The caption also said “Need 2 stop pointing guns at each other & at the ones that’s legally killing innocents.” Marcell Salters has also published highly antagonistic language toward police officers. He has since apologized but some have called for his punishment or termination. In the meantime, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is under attack after Ismaaiyl Brinsley effectively executed two police officers over his anger with the recent decisions by grand juries in Missouri and New York. police have been protesting what they view as de Blasio’s unfair portrayals of police after the decision, including turning their backs on the mayor when he came to give a press conference on the murders.
Salters
Marcell Salters has been denounced for his attack on officers who often protect paramedics at accident and crime scenes. In now deleted comments, Salters said that he “never did or will like police” and “[b]ecause of what i do i have to work with them but dont have to like them . . . There are numerous crooked & corrupted cops (mostly white) & mostly they harass, beat, or kill innocents (mostly blks).”
He has since apologized and posted the following: “I would like to deeply apologize to anyone i have offended. That post was out of anger of what is going on around the world (mike brown, eric garner & etc) & past experiences that i have had with the police. . . My intentions was not to slander or hurt anyone or my brothers in blue. Again i am sorry.”
I have previously written about concerns that public employees are increasingly being disciplined for actions in their private lives or views or associations outside of work. We have previously seen teachers (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here), here, here, students (here and here) and other public employees (here and here and here) fired for their private speech or conduct, including school employees fired for posing in magazines (here), appearing on television shows in bikinis (here), or having a career in the adult entertainment industry (here).
One different wrinkle is that Joseph Schulle, head of the firefighters’ union Local 22, said that Salters could be disciplined because he allegedly made a comment about the post while on duty. That creates a different context than many of the prior cases above where comments or postings were made entirely during off-hours or outside of public jobs. It is not clear what the comment was that is being isolated as a possible basis for discipline however.
I tend to view these cases from a first amendment perspective. I find Salters’ comments to be highly offensive and wrong. However, I do believe that he has a right to say them just as others have a right to denounced them. While such comments obviously make for tense working conditions, some of us believe that free speech requires bright-line rules of protection even for hateful speech like that of Marcell Salters.
The uproar of police in Philadelphia has joined an equal if not greater outcry of officers in New York.
Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, the killer of officers Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40, had a history of violence and mental instability. He shot the officers as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn on Saturday before he ran to a subway station and shot himself. Only hours earlier, he shot and wounded his 29-year-old ex-girlfriend, Shaneka Thompson, at her home in Baltimore, Maryland. After shooting Thompson, Brinsley threatened on Instagram to kill police officers while referencing the New York and Missouri grand jury decisions: “They Take 1 of Ours… Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPEricGarner #RIPMike Brown. This May Be My Final Post.”
Before the murders, Brinsley reportedly struck up a conversation with two men. According to the police, he asked the men “for their gang affiliation; he asked them to follow him on Instagram; and then he says: ‘Watch what I’m going to do.'” That is when he walked past the patrol car, circled it and then crossed the street to come up behind the car. That is when he fired four bullets through the front passenger window, killing the officers.
Police directed their anger in part at de Blasio who has been viewed as supporting the protests against police after the decision of the New York grand jury. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association even went as far as having officers to sign a petition calling for Mr de Blasio to be barred from attending their funerals if they were killed in the line of duty. There is also a growing racial rift over de Blasio’s policies. A poll last week found seventy percent of black people approved of the mayor’s performance while only 32 percent of white people supported him. Yet, he had received good polling numbers over his handling of protests following the decisions in New York and Missouri.
Nick,
You are right I will deny that nonsense that you are spewing, ONCE AGAIN. You have repeatedly claimed that I want the 2nd Amendment repealed. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
It is interesting that you also claim that Chicago is the most anti-2nd Amendment area in the country. What is your source for that wild claim? Being for reasonable gun control regulations is not anti-2nd amendment. Liberals also do not hate police unions, but let’s not let reality get in the way. .
And I was for the gun control legislation in Chicago, but once again, not against the 2nd Amendment. I agree with Justice Scalia that reasonable restrictions on the 2nd Amendment would be CONSTITUTIONAL. Tell us Nick, if the First Amendment can be legally restricted, why can’t the 2nd?
I, like most progressives,are staunch defenders of the First Amendment, no matter if the person is telling the TRUTH or not.
We had a post here about a nurse killing 90 people, and we hear of nurses who kill people all the time. 60 Minutes do a chilling piece on a male nurse who killed over 20 people in the northeast US. Nobody hates nurses like they do cops. It is politics that make people hate cops. Politics do not enter into ones thoughts or feelings about nurses, it does w/ cops.
Nick – nurses don’t give traffic tickets. 😉
I cant speak for anyone else but I never said I was a cop hater. In fact I am astounded that these people, and fire fighters run towards when the rest of us run away but to deny that there are bad cops and they should face incdictments when appropriate is not to be a cop hater. Garner said 11 times, I can’t breathe” The officer was using, from what I have read, an illegal chokehold. Maybe he would have gotten off but to e he should have been indicted. So too with Wilson there was no call for 12 bullets to be shot into Brown. The little boy should have been brought down, not killed. So too with these other 2.
When cops who use questionable tactics get away with them it becomes too easy for people to then brush the whole profession with they are all bums. We saw the saem go after the “pigs” in the 60’s. This is nothing new. Only then it was Kent State, and now it is Garner, Brown, and the young boy(BTW I lived in NYC for 14 years and used the subway almost every single day. I also use the Philadelphia subways. I am not ignorant of the inner city)
It is a HUGE tell here that liberals who LOVE govt. worker unions, HATE police unions!!
Slavery is a distraction from this topic. It should be ignored.
I would LOVE if the police haters here gave us some background on the time they have spent in inner cities. As a former liberal attorney I know would say, “it’s easy to be liberal until you ride mass transit through the inner city every day.”
rafflaw wants the 2nd Amendment repealed. Oh, he’ll deny it. But, he is a Chicago AREA liberal and that is the most anti 2nd Amendment area in this country. You can tell rafflaw’s TRUE thoughts by what he says when he’s ticked off. He supported the repeal of the 2nd Amendment draconian laws in Chicago that were found UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Liberals hate the 2nd amendment and are often haters of the 1st as well, like on college campuses.
I KNOW cops. I HAVE WORKED W/ COPS for 4 decades. How many times do I need to say I KNOW THERE ARE BAD COPS?? The haters here hate them all and know NONE. I do NOT assume all cops are heroes. Some here ASSUME they are all bad. This mayor has such a bad background he cannot get a clearance to see classified info from the Feds. It is not that de Blasio called out the bad cops, he didn’t have GOOD cops backs when they were assaulted. That’s what created the biggest rift.
Slavery has a legacy, an emotional legacy that shows itself hundreds of years later…especially if that emotional legacy is compounded by a structure that keeps the descendants of slaves as second class citizens.
Everything has a legacy. Everything. Some good. Some bad.
If there is a structure that keeps people into second class citizens then you and others need to look at what that structure is. We do not have Jim Crow laws anymore. I was alive during those times. Although very young, I did see the results of Jim Crow/official segregation laws. Let me reiterate….we do NOT have official segregation. There are laws against discrimination.
The structure of society and people’s personal or cultural mores are more difficult to change. Merely waiving a legal wand isn’t going to stop people from self segregating or descending into a culture of crime, gang activity, drug use and illiteracy. If people want to segregate themselves into inner city ghettos, don’t raise their children to be responsible and educated citizens……what do you expect to do to fix this. Seriously. Give us some answers that aren’t platitudes.
Wallowing in the past is not the answer. All that does is mire people down.
As to your linked article. Bull hockey. We have poured billions of dollars into welfare, housing and other programs in an attempt to elevate the urban poor. It hasn’t worked. It has actually made things worse. Yet some people want to pull even more money out of the pockets of the working class as a punishment/reparations for something that happened generations ago. More gifts and more classifying people by race.Punishing “white” people and trying to foist guilt for things that we have no accountability for…………
You want a real race war? Do this and see what will happen.
As long as officers get away with killing citizens in circumstances where there is legitimate question, we will see the protests.
Another example where an officer apparently has not faced a grand jury: EXCLUSIVE: Rookie NYPD officer who shot Akai Gurley in Brooklyn stairwell was texting union rep as victim lay dying In the six and a half minutes after Peter Liang discharged a single bullet that struck Gurley, 28, he and his partner couldn’t be reached, sources told the Daily News. And instead of calling for help for the dying man, Liang was texting his union representative. What’s more, the sources said, the pair of officers weren’t supposed to be patrolling the stairways of the Pink Houses that night.http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/exclusive-texted-union-rep-akai-gurley-lay-dying-article-1.2034219
This man who murdered the 2 officers was crazy with a long history of criminal behavior yet only served 2 years, according to news report this morning. As long as the judicial system does not deal appropriately with people like him we will see, as we have ling seen, this type of behavior (criminal, not necessarily cop killing).
It is inappropriate, to me, that the cops turned their back on the mayor and inappropriate that the police union, gov Pataki, Fox news and others immediately come out and made it political, blaming the killing on the mayor and others who have protested the lack of indictments in the 3 cases, Garner, Brown, and I am sorry I forget the young boy’s name.
No one blamed a mayor r the democrats when 23-year-old police officer, Melvin Santiago, was brutally gunned down in an ambush on July 13 or in Las Vegas (LAS VEGAS (AP) — Two police officers were having lunch at a strip mall pizza buffet when a man and a woman fatally shot them in a point-blank ambush, then fled to a nearby Wal-Mart where they killed a third person and then themselves in an apparent suicide pact, authorities said.
The attack at a CiCi’s Pizza restaurant on Sunday killed Officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, who are both husbands and fathers. One of the shooters yelled, “This is a revolution!” but a motive remains under investigation, Las Vegas police spokesman Larry Hadfield told The Associated Press.http://www.aol.com/article/2014/06/09/2-officers-bystander-killed-in-las-vegas-ambush/20909063/
“Ambush-style attacks like the one that killed Santiago are a growing concern. The average number of fatal ambush assaults against police has nearly doubled since 2010, compared with the prior two decades.
In 2010, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department launched a training program for police, called VALOR, “to address the increase in ambush-style assaults that have taken the lives of many law enforcement officers.” It’s intended to prevent and prepare officers for violent assaults by criminals. More than 15,000 law enforcement officers have taken VALOR training.
Today, VALOR training appears more important than ever. In a report just released by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, the number of law enforcement professionals killed nationwide jumped
31 percent during the first half of 2014, compared to the same time in 2013. Twenty-five officers were killed by gunfire — a 56 percent increase over last year’s figures — including five in ambush attacks.
Las Vegas has been particularly hard hit by targeted violence toward police.
“We’ve seen an unprecedented amount of suspects shoot at our officers this year, or shoot our officers,” Sgt. John Sheahan recently declared. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has reported 11 officer-involved shootings so far this year, compared with seven during the same time last year.”
nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/08/police_ambushes_a_growing_fear_opinion.html
Obviously since this was an issue in 2010 to put it on Mayor DiBlasio or the democrats or the protests is to play politics rather then deal with the underlying issues
Lee,
WordPress only allows two links per comment. Due to the work you made on this I corrected the issue by dereferencing one of them. If you would like to provide the readership with additional links this can be accomplished through the use of additional comments.
Darren, Thanks. I had forgotten when doing that posting.
Obviously none of the ultra liberals who are blathering about this have ever been trapped in a locked subway car while a Michael Brown is doing his thing.
It must be great to yap from an ivory tower in some failing college. Yessh.
DBQ, meant to say 400 years of oppression.
You, however, went on a rant about slavery and dismissing its consequences on Black americans by using the routine tropes of white priviledge by saying:
1- I wasn’t here
2- It is just history, we moved on already, why don’t you?
3- Reverse racism…Al Sharpton… (kudos for not using black on black crime… fatherless black children…etc)
In MAuritania where slavery still exists, a weird phenomena is happening. Some families that have owned slaves for generations have freed them. And they find that the slaves do not want to leave. They identify as slaves and do not want to face the world as freed men for they do not know who there are unless it is as slaves attached to the family of their masters.
Slavery has a legacy, an emotional legacy that shows itself hundreds of years later…especially if that emotional legacy is compounded by a structure that keeps the descendants of slaves as second class citizens.
Please read the following and tell me if you still stand your ground. You too, Paul and Nick.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/the-road-to-reparations/373578/
po – I do not defend slavery. I come from people who were enslaved and sold to Muslims. I know a lot about the history of slavery in the United States and most of it starts with black Muslims selling their neighbors into slavery. Still, the history of slavery goes back at least to 1500 BCE in Egypt. Maybe earlier in other areas.
Groty,
Numbers exist for between 400-500 people killed by police each year, but scholarly research finds the number about 1000 per year. I can’t cite the numbers exactly right now but that’s my recollection of the best available numbers.
The problem isn’t the number of shootings. Most of them are very likely completely justified. The problem is the culture of secrecy boarding on contempt of the public and their right to know what their public servants are doing. Again, going from memory California and other states have laws that restrict releasing officer’s names when they shoot someone. That needs to change. The basic argument is the safety of the officer and his family. It’s reasonable to find the double standard in that statement, in that police routinely release names of people arrested or involved in shootings regardless of guilt. If I as a private citizen shot a person who was a gang member, wouldn’t releasing my name call my safety into question? Why are only police officers afforded that courtesy of protection?
I wouldn’t care if there were 2,000 police shootings a year. If they were all justified that would be the end of it. But since we don’t know, I revert to my standard position: Secrets are for people with things to hide.
White privilege in action, ignore the 500 years oppression of blacks
2014-500= 1514
The Pilgrims didn’t even land in the Americas until the 1600s. People who enslaved the blacks in Africa were either black Africans themselves and mostly Muslims who excelled in the slave trade.
My ancestors were planting potatoes and were serfs in Ireland or scrabbling for Coal in Wales and fighting the British. Most of them immigrated AFTER the Civil War and those that were here earlier were Quakers or fought on the side of freeing the slaves…..so playing that white privilege card isn’t going to work. I don’t care what happened in the past other than to feel sorry that it happened. We can’t change the past. We can change the future if we stop focusing ON and wallowing IN the past..
Is slavery wrong. Yes and it was abolished in the United States at a great great cost to those who fought their own families and almost tore the country apart. Is there slavery now. Yes. It exists all over the world and particularly in Muslim cultures. But not here.
NO one is ignoring the shameful history of the slave trade. However….it is just that HISTORY. Wallowing in the past and obsessively picking the scabs of the past is not helpful. This focus on the past is what has brought us to these violent times….yet again.
Instead of integrating into the larger society, people like Sharpton and other race hustlers exacerbate the differences and create strife, where they could, if they wanted, work to bring people together.
There are many sociological dynamics that continue to keep people apart and deepen the resentment between races. Many of those are the brainchildren of the left and are held to despite decades of proof that those policies just don’t work.
this is not a black and white issue. The black issue is merely one symptom of the disease, and the disease is the police state that militarizes itself. there is a mentality of us vs them, and they view us civilians as the enemy.
This is a true statement.
It is going to get really ugly and probably really soon.
A couple of months ago I went searching for statistics and data to determine how many people are shot /and or killed by law enforcement officers (LEOs), and what the trend is. I started with the FBI Uniform Crime Report, which is a treasure trove of crime related data. Anybody who has accessed that report online knows what I am talking about. This report was crucial for the pro Second Amendment crowd after Senator Feinstein went on one of her periodic anti-gun crusades following the Sandy Hook massacre. The hard data from that report demonstrated that gun related crime is down sharply, about 50%, in 20 years, and that only a tiny fraction of gun related crime is committed using the Democrat invented class of weapons known as “assault rifles” that Feinstein wants to ban. So the bigger picture trend is terrific good news, notwithstanding the occasional heart-breaking tragedy like Sandy Hook. And this positive trend in lower gun violence has occurred despite gun sales soaring and states increasingly liberalizing gun laws over the past 20 years.
Yet, shockingly, the Uniform Crime Report does not collect (or at least publish) data about how many LEOs shoot civilians each year. That makes absolutely no sense to me, especially after I’ve spent hours scanning and analyzing the report and I know how much statistical detail they DO collect and publish on violent crime. The only rational explanation is that they deliberately DO NOT WANT TO KNOW. Or at least they don’t want the public to know. This must change. We have to insist that the FBI start collecting and reporting annually how many people are shot and/or killed by LEOs every year.
Because now all we have are anecdotal individual cases like Brown and Garner that are exploited by activists and the media to manipulate the emotions of the low information crowd. If you only have high profile anecdotes, rather than hard data, it is impossible to have an informed debate. We need data. The CDC collects some data but its reliability has been questioned. As Politifact points out, the CDC gets its data by analyzing death certificates and apparently there is no requirement that a coroner always specify on the certificate that a LEO was responsible for a shooting death. So those stats understate the “true” rate.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/dec/04/bill-oreilly/bill-oreilly-cites-faulty-data-claim-about-shootin/
JT: The content of the comment, public statement, is crucial. One does not have First Amendment protection to yell FIRE! in a croweded theatre particularly if there is no fire. One probably does not have First Amendment protection to yell: Burn The itchBay Down! before a crowd of rabble rousers. Particularly when the crowd goes out and burns down twenty stores in Dellwood and Ferguson.
A close call would be for an off duty fireman to ask on a web blog for his fellow fire fighters to ignore the call to put out the fire at Al Sharpton’s house. If he says: You risk getting shot and killed by Ishmayel’s brother then it might be more protected speech.
Paul C. Schulte
rafflaw – yes, the inner city was crafted and kept in place by Democratic politics. If blacks move out of the inner city and assimilate, then the Democrats lose their voting base.
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Paul, that may be the worse comment you have ever made here…Wow! Not only is it fallacious, but also lazy, ahistoric and downright nonintellectual.
White privilege in action, ignore the 500 years oppression of blacks and the institutional process of keeping them into ghettos then blame it on either themselves or the democrats, or both! Wow!
po – you need to catch up on your history and forget the mythology. Which party was in charge of the South? Which party started the War on Poverty and has yet to win it? Which party wants to ‘enslave’ people by keeping them tied to government handouts?
Frankly, Democrats are dead without the poor. They are losing whites by the boatload. Just speaking truth to power here.
This is insane… the cops kill innocent, unarmed people, the people stand up to demand and end to the random killing of people and the fact that we neither know how many killing by cops happen yearly, but most of those killers are never held accountable…the mayor speaks out against the bad cops and he is demonized and being asked to steps down?!
Who are the police working for? What are they hired to do? They are badged, armed, responsibilized, with a full institutional support and the abilityand authority to use force, and they are the victims here?
Nick, this is not a black and white issue. The black issue is merely one symptom of the disease, and the disease is the police state that militarizes itself. there is a mentality of us vs them, and they view us civilians as the enemy. it will only get worth from, and sooner of latter, the expression of the disease will show itself beyond the inner city and affect you wherever you are.
Whatever happens on the macro, happens on the micro…to quote MLK, the US is the biggest purveyor of violence on earth, and what goes around comes around, and that violence within our midst is the winds of war turning inward.
Whoever thinks that one deserves to be killed while unarmed and while posing no threat to an officer, I wish it never happens to you or yours.
rafflaw said …
I guess when a mentally disturbed white guy kills children in a school with a gun, it is just a mentally ill guy, but, hey, don’t touch my guns!
No, there is no difference. Both lunatics are culpable. And you are absolutely right, don’t even try to take my guns. I’ve carried for well over 40 years, and have yet to find a need to fire at anyone, outside of the military experience. I very nearly did so once, but common sense prevailed. My guns are not the problem…and my guns are used 99% of the time for target shooting, and only 1% of the time as insurance personally. I no longer hunt ever since I returned from Asia….in part because I felt I’d seen enough if it on two legged “game” to just forget it for 4 legged versions…but I don’t decry hunters, except for the “trophy” killers who don’t eat what they shoot. My guns are NOT the problem. The popular mentality today that asserts everyone can just do any dang thing they please is the problem. I’d guess that the assassin in NYC recently felt he was both righteous and justified (as well as seeking attention)…but not based on anything he had any, not an iota of, direct knowledge regarding.