The black bands police wear when an officer dies are a gift from these 2 women

For more than a year, two former Long Beach police officers have made it their mission to honor each and every law enforcement officer killed in the line of duty in the Unites States by outfitting each member of the officers’ departments with personalized black “mourning bands” to be worn over their badges as a sign of respect to their departed colleagues.

In a sight that’s become all too common in recent months, whenever a law enforcement officer falls in the line of duty, fellow officers traditionally don black mourning bands over their badges in tribute. Honorbands co-founder Laura Tartaglione of Monrovia said. The bands are generally nondescript, plain black bands of black elastic worn across the front of a badge.

The Myth of the Racist Cop
Four studies out this year show that if police are biased, it’s in favor of blacks.

By Heather Mac Donald
Oct. 23, 2016 6:17 p.m. ET

FBI Director James Comey has again defied the official White House line on policing and the Black Lives Matter movement. The “narrative that policing is biased and violent and unfair” is resulting in “more dead young black men,” Mr. Comey warned in an Oct. 16 address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in San Diego. That narrative, he added, also “threatens the future of policing.”

Mr. Comey has spoken out before. In October 2015, after he observed that rising violent crime was likely the result of officers backing off proactive policing, President Obama obliquely accused the FBI director of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and “feed[ing] political agendas.”

But as much as Mr. Obama has tried to dismiss the violent crime increase that began after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the data are clear.

Last year’s 12% increase in homicides reported to the FBI is the largest one-year homicide increase in nearly half a century. The primary victims have been black. An additional 900 black males were killed last year compared with the previous year, resulting in a homicide victimization rate that is now nine times greater for black males than for white males, according to a Guardian study. The brutality of these killings can be shocking. Over the weekend of Sept. 16, a 15-year-old boy in Chicago was burned alive in a dumpster.

More police are being killed this year too. Gun murders of police officers are up 47% nationally through Oct. 21, compared with the same period the previous year. In Chicago gun assaults on officers are up 100%. In New York City attacks on officers are up 23%. In the last two weeks, four California officers have been deliberately murdered.

No government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police. If the next administration continues to disregard that truth in favor of a false narrative about systemic law-enforcement racism, the next four years will see more urban violence and race riots, and more dead cops.

Ms. Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of “The War on Cops” (Encounter Books, 2016).

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-the-racist-cop-1477261025

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