Chris Christie is showing solidarity with his Republican colleagues by attacking the Black Lives Matter movement, characterizing them as promoting the murder of police officers.
Christie, who went on CBS’ “Face The Nation” program today, said this:
“I don’t believe that movement should be calling for the murder of police officers…. They’ve been chanting in the streets for the murder of police officers…. That’s what the movement is creating, and the president of the United States is justifying that, but not only that, he hasn’t backed up police officers from the minute he’s gotten into office. And we can cite instance after instance.”
Christie and other Republicans may sincerely believe that Black Lives Matter and President Obama are creating a war on police, but the numbers don’t back them up. According to information on the Office Down Memorial Page and the America Enterprise Institute, 2013 and 2015 are the safest years to have been a cop in America since 1887.
Shaping the public perception of Black Lives Matter is nothing new to the right. On Dec. 21, 2014, a Baltimore Fox affiliate station aired footage that changed a Black Lives Matter slogan from:
“We won’t stop. We can’t stop. Till killer cops are in cell blocks.”
Into:
“We wont stop. We can’t stop. So kill a cop.”
If Black Lives Matter is such a violent instigator of police murders, why would anyone have to fake footage? Why would it be one of the safest times to be an officer?
Chris Christie’s comments represent a dangerous trend in the Republican Party to demonize any minority group that wants to be equal. Christie and the Republicans aren’t really concerned with the lives of officers; if they were, they wouldn’t have held up Cliven Bundy, a rancher who led an armed stand-off with police, as such a hero.
The demonization of the Black Lives Matter movement by the right is having an effect on the way people view the movement. A recent Rasmussen Report poll found that 58 percent of Americans believe that there is a “war on cops” today in America, with only 27 percent disagreeing.
That kind of distortion might prevent solutions to a very serious problem: the high number of blacks being killed by police.
An investigation conducted by The Guardian found that by July 1, 2015, 547 people had been killed by police. Black Americans were twice as likely to be killed by police, and a third of them were unarmed.
If so many Americans believe that cops are under such a threat today, even though the facts disagree, it’s unlikely that Christie or any other Republican candidate will ever take a position that would help solve the issue of police violence.
Featured image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
