Free Republic

It hasn’t been a good year to be a cop in New York City, but at 12:30 Sunday morning at the gang-plagued Edenwald Houses in the Bronx, bad became infinitely worse. ... Then onlookers loudly did their best to escalate the incident — wishing the cops on the scene dead, among other ugly things. How many cops on the beat fear ending up as a scapegoat — as did Daniel Pantaleo, fired in the Garner case — and hesitate for a fatal split-second in responding to a lethal challenge? It doesn’t help that many cops believe, quite reasonably, they’ve been...

Even before the firing of ­Officer Daniel Pantaleo, cops were backing off. Who can blame them? Under de Blasio and the city’s progressive district attorneys — they feel ­under siege. The disrespect of cop dousings inevitably turned violent when three officers were injured as people hurled heavy objects rather than water. Joseph Imperatrice, founder of Blue Lives Matter, said, "The days of proactive policing are completely done.” Patrick Lynch, Police Benevolent Association boss, urged cops this week to “proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job.” Lynch...

How interesting. Obama’s DOJ would apparently like America to just be overrun with criminals who think they can do whatever the heck they want, because, hey, Obama told the cops not to bother chasing them, because we have to reduce police shootings? Hell no: The Washington Post decided to investigate and come up with a tally of all the police involved shootings for 2015, apparently to not only answer the burning demands of the public, but to pick apart the data and draw some conclusions. I was expecting a deafening volume of hyperbole out of this report – and there...

Activist calls for widespread reform as community reels from verdict that acquitted Michael Brelo for firing 49 shots at two people in car chase.When Al Sharpton got up to speak at the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland on Friday night, he was given a standing ovation. At what was billed as a “justice and reform revival”, attendees, mostly congregants of the church itself, had been primed by several hymns and scriptural invocations. Their pastor, reverend Jawanza Colvin, introduced the civil rights campaigner as “one of God’s trombones”. Sharpton proceeded to deliver a barn-burning speech that had the assembled on...

The Justice Department yesterday announced a simultaneous lawsuit and settlement with the Cleveland police department. The settlement will impose significant federal mandates on the police. This comes after a Cleveland police officer was acquitted of wrongdoing by a court after the officer shot a suspect at the conclusion of a 100 mph car chase. The agreement imposes a ten-member “community police commission” who will watch over the police, only three of whom have any law enforcement perspective. The remaining seven are sure to include individuals either actively involved in the racialist anti-police efforts or one degree of separation from the...

So, let’s get this straight. At a decisive moment in history when our nation required a strong and unbiased voice from its’ senior law enforcement official, you Mr. Holder, made it your personal mission to join with other racial antagonist and politicize a tragic event, accusing a young white police officer of a racially motivated killing in what we now know was a justified self-defense shooting of a predatory felon. Your behavior is unbelievable. You sir, have sacrificed your integrity on the altar of political expediency. You, Mr. Holder, are the “coward” and hypocrite you so loudly denounce when speaking...

For those of us who have managed to survive 2014 with our lives intact and our freedoms hanging by a thread, it has been a year of crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns. We’ve been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those...

In late November, the student government at taxpayer-funded Morgan State University sponsored a conference on slavery reparations for black Americans. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was the keynote speaker. The Nov. 22 conference, called the 2nd Annual Black United Summit International, occurred on Morgan State’s historically black campus in Baltimore, Md. The conference theme was “Re-Claim, Re-Pair, Re-Form, Re-Produce — REPARATIONS Now!” Total attendance was over 2,000, according to EAGnews.org. Final Call, a Nation of Islam publication, provided a detailed report about convention activities. Farrakhan’s keynote rant lasted over two hours. At one point, he held up what resembled...

With reports that the NYPD is looking into as many as 63 threats against police officers, or the mayor this week alone, news also comes of a lack of motivation among the rank and file, undoubtedly contributing to a significant drop in arrest numbers across the city. “[There’s] just not motivation,” one police officer told [Vice]. “I’m not writing people summonses if I have a chance of getting my head blown off.” When asked if this was his own choice or a precinct-wide initiative, the officer added, “Seems like the entire department is on the same page.” As the New...

n the wake of the Ferguson grand jury’s determination that there was no probable cause to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, incensed rioters took to the streets of that Missouri city and neighboring towns where they burned and looted a number of local businesses. Those riots were preceded by an anguished speech delivered by Brown’s mother who tearfully lamented the grand jury’s decision before a crowd of supporters. She was joined by her husband and Michael Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, who expressed his grief in a somewhat less constructive way. “Burn this s*** down!”...

They want peace. No really. And the New York Times is just a dispassionate observer looking for reform and change. Not mass murder.But Nicholas Kristof had one of his “Take the Mask Off Moments” when the radical left shows how ugly and unhinged it really is despite its facade of dinner parties and book clubs and that its media outlets promote violence.And so he invited readers to send in poems about the usual stuff. Bunnies. Flowers. Killing all white people and burning America to the ground. And the emphasis was not on the bunnies and flowers.Here’s a deranged screech of...

Opposition to de Blasio reaches new heights By Yaron Steinbuch December 26, 2014 | 10:20am The opposition to Mayor de Blasio reached new heights Friday – with a plane flying a banner reading “De Blasio, Our Backs Have Turned To You” over the Hudson River. Ashley Chalmers, owner of Jersey Shore Aerial Advertising, the company that flew the banner, declined to reveal from the airborne plane who hired him for the flight. John Cardillo, a blogger and former NYPD cop, tweeted that he was contacted by a “coalition of NYPD cops, Detectives, and supervisors” and asked to release their statement:...

There is some good debate and conversation happening in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. But there is also plenty of nonsense. Consider this gem from the New York Times editorial of this morning about police arrests: "there can never be a justification for any lethal assault on an unarmed man." How absurd. In Ferguson, there is evidence that Michael Brown was attempting to wrest the officer's gun away. Should Darren Wilson have waited until Brown was successful before defending himself? Whatever the facts from Staten Island, if a single officer finds himself in a struggle...

<p>Decades ago, I taught at a community college. The bunch of us treated our shared office as if it were the neighborhood bar. We’d hang out for hours. That beat going home to our cheap apartments or our parents’ basements and watching TV, which was all we could afford on the pittance adjunct professors are paid. James was a jazz musician. Mo’s nose was always to the grindstone. Patrick was enthralling. I wish I had had a video camera recording our every conversation. His words glittered.</p>

Time Magazine warned of a growing threat to cops nationwide in September 2010. The nationally renowned publication argued that sinister individuals would launch targeted attacks against police officers and even ambush them in their patrol cars. Time alerted readers that these groups and individuals have a disturbing hatred of cops and that there was a real threat of “lone-wolf” attacks. Who are these groups that present such a threat to police? Right-wing militias, according to Time. [Snip] “Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement...

Barack and Michelle Obama, speaking to People Magazine, of all disappointments, shared the disheartening news that they have experienced what they called racism. Barack, for example, apparently has had trouble, before he was president, hailing a cab in Chicago, to which an immediate thought might occur to anyone who has been to Chicago: Who hasn't? Also, Barack, at a black-tie event, when he, too, was in festive livery, apparently was asked by another guest if he would get them a cup of coffee. For her recollection, Michelle came up with a visit to a Target store as first lady. She...

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Four years ago, few seemed to care when Rodney Brown uttered, "I can't breathe" after being tased 11 times by Cleveland police officers during a New Year's Eve traffic stop – at least that's how his family felt. Now the phrase has become a powerful symbol of civil unrest, a rallying cry represented on T-shirts and chanted during marches protesting police use of force cases across the country, like the one involving Eric Garner, who repeated it 11 times while lying face down on a Staten Island sidewalk.

CNN is complicit.

Full Title: Why do you MANSPREAD? Woman with her tape measure confronts splay-legged men on the subway about the space they consume It is a gripe that frustrates subway riders daily: men with their legs splayed. So one woman decided to confront male commuters about the amount of space they consume. The investigation comes a month before New York City's MTA launches a campaign targeting 'manspreaders'.

It is the bane of many female subway riders. It is a scourge tracked on blogs and on Twitter. And it has a name almost as distasteful as the practice itself. It is manspreading, the lay-it-all-out sitting style that more than a few men see as their inalienable underground right. Now passengers who consider such inelegant male posture as infringing on their sensibilities — not to mention their share of subway space — have a new ally: the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Taking on manspreading for the first time, the authority is set to unveil public service ads that encourage men...