As the oft-repeated mantra of “Black Lives Matter” continues to echo in the streets of America, what is being lost in the noise is that the actions of those shouting it also matter. In a sane world, actions speak louder than words. Wednesday’s brutal beating of NYPD officers and Chief of Department Terence Monohan shows that negotiating with violent terrorists never ends well.
Monohan — who knelt with BLM protesters last month to demonstrate what he called the first step in “getting this together” — was marching with other NYPD officers in Wednesday’s Power to Prayer March when BLM “protesters” (read: violent criminals) attacked them with canes and baseball bats. The march was organized by religious leaders and police supporters and began on the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge and continued to the Manhattan side.
The BLM crowd, which claims that police are instruments of violence against black people, converged on the march. Many of them were armed with clubs, canes, and bats, ready to inflict violence. The march quickly turned into a clash between police and their supporters on one side and BLM criminals on the other side. But the “battle” was overwhelmingly one-sided. As police officers, including Monohan, were bludgeoned by people whose battle cry is “No Justice, No Peace,” they did not draw their weapons or fight back; they covered their heads and retreated.
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At least four officers, including Monahan, were injured, and 37 people were arrested, police said in a statement. NYPD tweeted a surveillance video of part of the attack. The video shows one man running to a sidewalk along the path and reaching over a fence to deliver repeated blows to the heads of officers who were struggling with a BLM “protester” they were arresting. As police retreated, the man ran away. His escape was caught on other surveillance video, and police are seeking information about him.
The NYPD tweet of the attack states, “Three officers violently attacked by protesters crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The officers sustained serious injuries,” before ending with, “This is not peaceful protest, this will not be tolerated.”
The problem, though, is that it has been tolerated. New York City has been out of control for weeks now. Monohan’s olive-branch gesture of kneeling with the enemies of law and order proves one thing: BLM criminals will not be satisfied as long as there are police protecting law and order. The popular hashtags, ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), FTP (F**k The Police), and the like, as well as the growing demand to defund and even abolish police departments, should have told Monohan that kneeling with those who hate him and his fellow officers would not end well.
Perhaps that realization had to be pounded in to his head — literally.
This attack comes in the midst of weeks of violence by BLM and Antifa criminals and pandering by NYC politicians. As the city has been engulfed in rising violent crime, vandalism, and riots, BLM and Antifa “activists” have called for defunding the police. Mayor Bill de Blasio — no friend of law and order — announced earlier this month that he was slashing the NYPD budget by $1 billion. He also stated that he will sign a package of “police reform bills” aimed at further crippling law enforcement.
Last month, around the same time Monohan was taking a knee in obeisance to BLM, de Blasio called the police reform package “the right thing to do,” stating, “We have to give people confidence that policing will be fair, and I’m convinced this legislation will do it, and I will be signing it.”
Former NYPD Police Commissioner Howard Safir told Fox News that the blame for Wednesday’s attack belongs to Mayor de Blasio. He said the attack “shows you what these Antifa and Black Lives Matter movement people are all about. It’s not about peaceful protest.” But Safir reserved his strongest condemnation for de Basio, saying things like this are “happening — particularly in New York [City] because Mayor de Blasio has ceded the city to these violent vandals, rioters, murderers, and protesters.” He added, “This mayor … says they can do whatever they want and all he is interested in is prosecuting police officers.” He said the proof that BLM and Antifa are not interested in peaceful protest can be seen in the fact that they attacked a peaceful pro-police protest.
Safir, who served as police commissioner from April 1996 to August 2000 under Mayor Rudy Giuliani after serving that administration as commissioner of the fire department from January 1994 to April 1996, said that de Blasio’s “reforms” will reduce the NYPD to “blue flower pots.” He paints a picture of rising crime — which can already be seen as NYC has abandoned policing practices that had seen consistently lower crime — and a return to an era that many have called “the bad old days.”
Monohan, who sustained “non-life-threatening” injuries to his head in the attack, has bent over backward for BLM and Antifa. But even as he bowed his knee to them, he had some words for them. Though he firmly condemned the killing of George Floyd, saying, “What happened in Minnesota was an outrage, completely and totally,” he quickly added, “But 800,000 law enforcement officers around this country are paying the price for what that guy did in Minnesota.” And to those who are angry about what happened in Minnesota, he said, “Protest, yell, scream, let your rage out, but don’t take your rage out on the community, destroy the businesses that actually employ members of this community.”
But for weeks now, they have ignored his words and continued to riot, loot, vandalize, destroy, and kill. And now, he finds himself an actual victim of their unquenchable blood-thirstiness. Again, this is an example of actions being louder than words: Monohan’s action of bowing before those who want him dead spoke so loudly that his mere words were drowned out in the noise.
Image: Screenshot of a video by ABC7 New York
C. Mitchell Shaw is a freelance writer and public speaker who addresses a range of topics related to liberty and the U.S. Constitution. A strong privacy advocate, he was a privacy nerd before it was cool.
