Sheriff David Clarke: America’s two options for the future of law enforcement

As a law-enforcement executive, I have been witness to the two paths that are unfolding before our country before most of the public had all the evidence in front of them; 2016 was the year I believe my fellow Americans were able to see it too.

In law enforcement, we enact the principles of our society at the ground level. Whatever the law is – whatever our system, our values are – becomes reality when a police officer acts it out. In 2016, police have been the battlefield over which these two paths for America have been combating.

Those two paths stem from how we all view the American system, including, perhaps most telling, its criminal-justice system.

One path mistakenly says justice cannot be meted out fairly in the American system of individual freedoms and rights. It says that we must dismantle the American system, one that is the envy of the world, and replace it with the mass’s preferences, predilections, and power-seeking. 

That first path, which is the aim of Black Lives Matter and the American left (including some Republicans), says that the world and world opinion should rule over us instead of what they see as our outmoded form of self-governance.

{mosads}In 2016, we saw this first path in action when the US Department of (In)justice continued its issuance of “consent decrees,” imposing misguided federal bureaucratic philosophies and millions of dollars in compliance onto local police departments across America. The result? Fewer hours dedicated to pursuing criminals and reducing crime.

We saw the first path when a totalitarian movement on college campuses glorified the suppression of free speech, making wusses (and worse, little dictators) of students. I experienced this intolerance firsthand when I was disinvited from the University of New Haven as they sought to protect the safe spaces of its students from opposing viewpoints. This is the opposite of what secondary education should be about.

We saw the first path when line-of- duty deaths spiked as President Obama rhetoric did little to discourage a “War on Cops” through his recognition of manufactured lies about street-level police incidents.

We saw the first path when Black Lives Matter knowingly incited violence against law enforcement using falsehoods – lies that were covered up and propagandized into public knowledge through the mainstream media’s deception. That Black Lives Matter, a hateful, violent, anarchist revolutionary movement, continues as a moral entity shows that the first path will be one of lies, division, violence, and state power.

This first path looms but it was rejected on November 8, 2016 when America elected Donald Trump to the presidency, in a full-on counterattack against the global, progressive, George Soros plan to eviscerate American exceptionalism from the face of this earth.

The second path means standing up for our constitutional system that recognizes self-determination, diversity of opinion, and the community that comes with pride in our culture that has made us the free and prosperous.

The second path means condemnation by the elites, and in so-doing the liberal media’s scorn – a sure sign that we are reinvigorating a healthy challenge to the status quo.

For the criminal-justice community, this second path means that we have hope again that we can do our job without being prosecuted by a media that hates us. It means that we can return to serving communities like those of black, inner-city, America, without being fearful that outsider organizer-types are fomenting violence against us. 

And for us, it means our ultimate guide can again be our oath to serve and protect according to the U.S. Constitution, not to the whims of a self-serving mob.

Yes, 2017 can be a year of strengthening the bonds between the community and police based on our common concern: safety, protection of rights, and the rule of law and order – which is the ultimate equalizer. The obstacle to that trust is a wanton media and empowered anarchist movement like Black Lives Matter. 

Other obstacles include the misguided attempts to “reform” the criminal justice system by softening our stance against crime through “restorative justice” and the like. I now have more hope than ever that fellow Americans will do the hard work necessary to reclaim our Republic from its near-death experience.

Against the backdrop of Trump’s America and its repudiation of the lines that divide us, the second path is not only possible but also probable. 

I look forward to carrying out my responsibility along that road in 2017.

Sheriff David Clarke is the Milwaukee County sheriff. Follow him @SheriffClarke

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