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"Sticks and stones will break my bones," goes the old children's taunt, "but words will never hurt me."
Here at Rogue Central, we beg to disagree. Words can hurt us--especially the words we're hearing lately from Portland's crazed leftists in the wake of the fatal police shooting of James Jahar Perez.
"The pigs are getting away with murder...what are we going to do about it?" reads one poster distributed by the group Arissa. "It's about time we put an end to these pigs, their brutality, their murders."
Craig Rosebraugh, founder of Arissa, claims it is "a little bit of a misstatement" to say his poster calls for killing cops. He claims it merely says that "people in the community need to stand up for themselves, and if we don't, we're going to keep planning more funerals."
Yeah, right.
Then there is the poster put up by Rose City Copwatch, bearing photos of Officer Scott McCollister, who fired the shot that killed Kendra James last year, and Officer Jason Sery, who killed Perez, under the headline "Getting away with murder."
The latter poster follows up on a poster the group put up earlier this year offering a reward for McCollister's photo. The Rose City group's Loretta Rock says the two controversial shootings "demonstrate a culture of racism and brutality that's really sort of at the core of policing."
In reality, what the two posters have in common is that they are shameless attempts to exploit highly charged incidents. They are both about inciting generalized anti-cop hysteria at the expense of informed criticism.
Our society has formed a social compact with its police by granting them license to wield firearms in circumstances not available to the rest of us.
It's a deal that at times makes us feel uneasy, especially when shootings such as these occur. But inflamed rhetoric such as likening a police killing to "murder" does not help the relationship between the Portland police and the community it serves--it only hurts it. Get a grip, people.
WWeek 2015