Since the beginning of 2015, 21 police officers have been murdered in the United States with three of those coming in just the last week, and some officers feel like they are under siege.
Gregg Pemberton, a member of the DC Police Union Executive Committee, told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News he thinks there is a “growing animosity” against the police in the country.
“While the vast majority of people are probably just looking for a change in policing, there is a small group of people that I think are looking to tear at the fabric of lawfulness and they’re sort of looking for some anarchy,” Pemberton said. “They want that Ferguson, they want that Baltimore to come to their city so they can take advantage.”
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Pemberton said those are exactly the type of people that the police need to be targeting. He also said new policies initiated by the city’s police chief are hampering D.C. police efforts to combat violent crime in the city.
Earlier this year, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier decided to disband vice squads throughout all of the city’s seven police districts in favor of a centralized narcotics unit.
Police officers and their union started fighting that decision immediately and they say the city’s recent violent crime problem and huge increase in murders was caused in large part by the loss of those 20-30 dedicated cops in each district.
Vice units in the city didn’t just lock up drug users or randomly arrest people standing on street corners, Pemberton said. The officers were vital in developing informants and gathering community intelligence on criminal activity in specific neighborhoods.
This past weekend, Black Lives Matter protesters marching on a Minnesota state fair were recorded chanting “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” as they walked behind a group of police officers down a highway.
The incident happened mere hours after a gunman in Texas shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy while the officer was stopped at a gas station filling up his cruiser.
The suspect approached Darren Goforth, a 10-year veteran, from behind at around 8:30 p.m. Friday and shot him in the back of the head. He then shot Goforth about 14 more times as he lay on the ground.
Harris County sheriff Ron Hickman spoke about some of the same animosity towards police officers during a press conference after Goforth’s murder.
“Any point where the rhetoric ramps up to the point that calculated, cold-blooded, assassination of police officers happen, this rhetoric has gotten out of control,” Hickman said. “We’ve heard ‘black lives matter,’ ‘all lives matter’ — well, cops’ lives matter too. So why don’t we just drop the qualifier and say ‘lives matter,’ and take that to the bank.”
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