Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal details newly appointed NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s take on the recent spate of arrests gone wrong. Here, Riley also gives his take on the reasons behind what’s going on.
While opportunistic civil rights leaders and liberal commentators are pretending that policemen not only routinely kill black people but do so for no reason, the New York Police Commissioner decided to inject some common sense into the discussion.
“What we’ve seen in the past few months is a number of individuals failing to understand that you must submit to arrest. You cannot resist,” said Mr. Bratton in a radio interview Tuesday. “The place to argue your case is in the court, not in the street.”
Mr. Bratton’s comments come in the wake of two high-profile police killings—one in New York City in July and another in suburban St. Louis last weekend—of black suspects who allegedly were resisting arrest. In the case of the New York victim, police allege that he was engaged in an illegal activity—for which he had been arrested numerous times before—when they approached him. Criminal behavior tends to attract law enforcement, and you only compound the wrongdoing by refusing police orders.
Mr. Bratton also said that police find themselves in black neighborhoods more often because that is where most of the 911 calls originate. So while liberals complain that these neighborhoods are “over-policed,” the reality is that the law-abiding residents of those communities want the police there.
