The Patriot Post® · America's Growing Policing Crisis

Yesterday, the police chiefs from Rochester, New York, and Dallas, Texas, announced their resignations. This adds to the string of police chief retirements as Democrat city leaders have capitulated and kowtowed to the Black Lives Matter anti-police “systemic racism” narrative, which includes calls to defund the police. (Defunding is what drove Seattle’s police chief to resign earlier this month.) The great irony is that all of the aforementioned police chiefs happen to be black, further exposing the fact that the BLM movement is not about protecting black lives or combatting racism. In reality, it serves only as a front for Marxist revolutionaries.

In Rochester, Police Chief La'Ron Singletary announced his retirement after 20 years of service, noting that the media reporting surrounding the death of Daniel Prude, who died in March after being taken into police custody, was false and “an attempt to destroy my character and integrity.” In his resignation letter, Singletary further asserted, “The members of the Rochester Police Department and the Greater Rochester Community know my reputation and know what I stand for. The mischaracterization and the politicization of the actions that I took after being informed of Mr. Prude’s death is not based on facts, and is not what I stand for.”

But Singletary wasn’t the only Rochester cop to tender his resignation. In a clear act of protest against the anti-police sentiments being pushed by leftist agitators and given oxygen by Democrat city leaders, the Rochester police department’s entire command staff will also be stepping down.

One of the first casualties of BLM’s war on cops is proactive policing, which, ironically, is the very type of policing that is most effective in preventing crimes from happening in the first place. Proactive policing is what helped reduce the rising crime rate in New York City.

However, with the increasingly negative view of police, coupled with the fact that many elected officials are quick to throw law enforcement under the bus whenever a police-involved shooting or death of a black individual occurs, officers are less likely to proactively engage. As Mike Brake surmises in National Review, “Cops are going to keep showing up for work. They’re not going to go on strike and parade in front of local police stations with picket signs. But they are going to stop performing the kind of proactive police work that every good cop knows is what really prevents crimes. No doubt many already have.”

When officers are fearful — not because of the possibility of having to confront dangerous individuals but because they risk legal prosecution from spineless politicians looking to placate the Marxist mob — all Americans suffer. It only adds to the irony of BLM’s anti-police movement that it discourages minority Americans from entering or remaining in law enforcement to serve their communities.