One of the things I've been worried about since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement is that cops would close ranks against whatever perceived "assault" they thought the BLM movement represented. And that has happened, with multiple organizations and politicians saying that 2015 was the year of "The War on Cops" despite 2015 being one of the safest years for cops in history. But, my bigger concern would basically be the reaction to the reaction, that there would be individuals who saw the cops as literal enemies and who saw a lack of accountability for the deaths of innocent people as license to start being violent since every other course had failed.
Luckily, that hasn't really come to the fore, yet. Aside from the two cops who were murdered in New York City in 2014 there hadn't been any major stories of cops being killed in retaliation for cops killing black people. Until Thursday, anyway. At a protest over the recent deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, 25-year-old Micah Johnson opened fire into the crowd, injuring twelve people in total, and killing five police officers. Johnson was later killed in a standoff with police, and Dallas Police Chief David Brown later quoted Johnson's motives as wanting to kill white people, and white officers specifically. So far, there have been calls for unity, but it won't be long before think pieces start laying the deaths of these officers at the feet of BLM and anyone else who seeks to hold cops accountable for the people they kill on duty.
And honestly, that attitude of "Questioning the police's authority is an inherent threat to their safety" can only really lead to more dead cops. If you remove a society's natural way to check official power, eventually, people are going to realize the only options left are bullets. For a police force that is becoming increasingly militaristic nationwide in its tactics, equipment, and philosophy, pushing the ideology that cops are urban soldiers and questioning them is treason only reinforces the "Us vs. Them" mentality that you find in real armies. The whole purpose of that mentality is to dehumanize your enemy to the point where you won't question any action you've been ordered to take against them, it's pure psychological conditioning that armies have been using it ever since we decided to create them.
The problem with this, of course, is that it trains cops to view every ordinary citizen and encounter as a life-or-death situation against a hostile enemy. Obviously, that isn't to say that cops shouldn't asses a situation for threats, but if they deem the threat level as 'low', they should act accordingly. Because there's no way any police force can effectively police a community if every interaction with the people of that community carries an implicit threat that they'll be killed with no hesitation at the slightest of provocations. That barrel-of-the-gun style of peace hasn't worked for any professional army on foreign soil, so we should really doubt and cast aside anyone who advocates for civilian entities to try it right here at home.
This is all just one very long-winded way to say that we need to stop treating our cops like they're soldiers and the people who question their actions as enemy combatants. Hell, we need to stop talking about criminals that way, too. Because the longer we allow the narrative that crime is a war between the authorities vs. everyone subject or questions that authority to reign the more we just add to the inevitability of the day where communities who feel like they are under siege from an invading army will began to respond as occupied communities tend to do and there'll be no justice or peace for anyone.
P.S.
One final note, this whole situation of a former armed service member using his weapons and training to kill representatives of what they perceive to be an oppressive and illegitimate government is kinda the wet dream scenario of those who advocate for "2nd Amendment Solutions". That those same, overwhelmingly conservative, people will strongly condemn this action as an assault on American values but will no seriously say how we should embrace these solutions if wins the Presidency is an irony I can't really get enough of.
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