Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 52

Terminating A Pregnancy Based On A Test

Beth Daley recently reported on prenatal screening errors:

Two recent industry-funded studies show that test results indicating a fetus is at high risk for a chromosomal condition can be a false alarm half of the time. And the rate of false alarms goes up the more rare the condition, such as Trisomy 13, which almost always causes death.

Companies selling the most popular of these screens do not make it clear enough to patients and doctors that the results of their tests are not reliable enough to make a diagnosis. … Now, evidence is building that some women are terminating pregnancies based on the screening tests alone. A recent study by another California-based testing company, Natera Inc., which offers a screen called Panorama, found that 6.2 percent of women who received test results showing their fetus at high risk for a chromosomal condition terminated pregnancies without getting a diagnostic test such as an amniocentesis.

Libby Copeland summarizes Daley’s findings:

The problem with the new class of prenatal screenings, which look at placental DNA in the mother’s bloodstream, is that these companies’ tests are not regulated by the FDA due to a loophole that dates back to the 1970s, Daley writes. So there’s no one evaluating their claims of accuracy. Many doctors appear not to understand how predictive the tests they’re giving are, since they often get information about a test’s purported accuracy from the salespeople selling them the tests. Genetic counselors should be stepping in to explain the tests’ limitations to patients, Daley writes, but that’s not always happening. She points to an apparently smaller but growing group of women who gave birth to severely ill babies—some of whom died within days—after screens showed their fetuses at minimal risk. (In a separate story, she outlines one of these stories, and another about a healthy baby born after a prenatal screen predicted, supposedly with 97 percent accuracy, that he would be born with a fatal chromosomal disorder.)

The companies that make these tests say they’re studying the false positive rate, but they’re also poised to push back on the FDA’s looming efforts to regulate them. For now, the industry is policing itself, which doesn’t seem to be working out so well for a number of American women.

However, Emily Oster defends the tests as “a huge leap in accuracy over what was previously available”:

The problem may not lie in the claims made by the companies who make the tests, but in the interpretation of these results by doctors and patients. The earlier versions of the screening tests were so inaccurate that no one would think of acting on their results by terminating a pregnancy. The enhanced accuracy here may, perversely, encourage acting on this information when it is still not certain. But that problem can’t be fixed by the test manufacturers; it requires greater statistical literacy among doctors and patients.

Mental Health Break

Even cows get jazzed for Christmas:

And Everybody Hates The Gays

Earlier this month, 26 men were arrested at a Cairo bath house. Scott Long attended the first day of their trial:

The lawyers still hadn’t seen the prosecutors’ or police reports, so we don’t know definitely what the charges are. It seems likely, though, that 21 men were customers at the bathhouse; they will be charged with the “habitual practice of debauchery” (article 9c of Law 10/1061), or homosexual conduct, facing up to three years in prison. The owner and staff probably make up the other five prisoners. They’re likely to be tried for some combination of:

keeping a residence for purposes of debauchery (article 9a, three years),
or facilitating the practice of debauchery (article 9b, three years),
or profiting from the practice of debauchery (article 11, two years),
or “working or residing in premises used for debauchery” (article 13: one year).

That could add up nine years in prison. Contrary to [Egyptian journalist] Mona Iraqi’s lies, there was no mention of “sex trafficking.”

Shortly after the arrests, Brian Whitaker compared this latest incident with “a similar crackdown by the Mubarak regime around 2001″:

The exact reasons for the 2001 crackdown are still debated, and probably several factors were involved. Writing about this at the time, Hossam Bahgat saw it as an attempt by the Mubarak regime to undercut Islamist opposition by portraying the state as the guardian of public virtue: “To counter this ascending [Islamist] power, the state resorts to sensational prosecutions, in which the regime steps in to protect Islam from evil apostates. The regime seems to have realised that suppression and persecution of Islamists will not uproot the Islamist threat unless it is combined with actions that bolster the state’s religious legitimacy.”

He also noted the regime’s practice of using sensational trials to divert public attention from the worsening state of the economy and similar issues.

Ursula Lindsey doubts President Sisi and his underlings are trying to “bolster their religious credentials”:

There are other explanations. First of all, the mercenary ones. What happened to the wallets and cell phones of the men arrested in the raid on the bathhouse? I would bet you they never saw them again. What does a cafe or bar in Downtown Cairo have to pay in bribes to operate freely, to take over the sidewalk, to have the noise complaints of neighbors ignored, let alone to keep a liquor license? Businesses that exist on the edge of social approval are easy pickings for extortion.

Furthermore, the way I see it, in the summer of 2013 a terrible mechanism was put into motion. In this mechanism, the media generates hysteria, and the security sector produces repression. This mechanism now continues to run, although its primary target — taking the Muslim Brotherhood out power, putting the military into it, and undermining the aspirations of January 25 2011 — has been accomplished. But journalists still have to report about something, and the country’s economic problems, human rights abuses, and the conduct of its war on terrorism are all out of bounds.

Excuse Me, Mr Coates

Some apologies for getting around to this so late. The torture report came out shortly after Ta-Nehisi’s excoriation of TNR as some kind of “neo-Dixiecrat” rag which had the equivalent of a “Whites Only” sign on it, and, well, first things first. Then I wasn’t blogging last week. So please don’t consider my recent silence some kind of tacit concession to TNC’s incendiary and hurtful critique. Au contraire.

A few brief points about his general argument. From the intensity of his rhetoric, you might infer that Ta-Nehisi was writing about National Review, an opponent of civil rights laws, or even about a neo-Confederate rag, as opposed to The New Republic, a longtime champion of the civil rights movement. But it appears he sees no difference. You’d think he were writing about a magazine filled with bigoted white Southerners, as opposed to an overwhelmingly Jewish set of writers and editors engaged in a long and internecine debate about what it means to be liberal. And the racial politics of TNR from the 1970s through the 1990s cannot be understood without grappling with the bitter and intense struggle between Jewish and African-American civil rights activists in the late 1960s and beyond. Surely Ta-Nehisi knows this. He grew up in this atmosphere. Maybe he believes TNR’s deviations from the Black Power party line were even worse because of its proclaimed liberalism. But he should at least diagnose it with a modicum of the sophistication he usually applies to American racial history.

As for the case that there was a “Whites Only” sign on the door: Has Ta-Nehisi really never read the extraordinary coverage of black history, literature, intellectual life, and poetry that TNR routinely published? Leon’s back-of-the-book was filled with such essays and reviews. Has it even occurred to him either that the campaign for welfare reform in the front of the book, for example, was conceived by liberals who believed the existing system was hurting black America? That it was a good faith effort precisely to care about an underclass “beyond the barrier”? You can debate its effectiveness and rationale. (President Obama, for the record, has said it was one subject on which he had changed his mind. Is he a neo-Dixiecrat as well?) But to assume that it was not done in good faith – or fueled by cheap racism – is not an argument. It’s just a smear.

Did we fail to find and nurture and promote African-American staffers? We did – along with almost every other magazine and newspaper at the time. I regret this. I tried – but obviously not hard enough. I’m no believer in affirmative action, but I’m a deep believer in the importance of differing life experiences to inform a magazine’s coverage of the world. And I tried mightily hard to find young black writers to contribute to the magazine. Did we fail because we were racists? I’ll leave that up to others to judge. But did we try to include black writers and intellectuals in the magazine’s discourse? Of course we did.

Which brings me to the issue we published on Race & IQ, of which I remain deeply proud and which has been distorted over time to appear as something I don’t recognize at all. Some of this may simply be bad memory or insufficient research (the issue is not online). Ta-Nehisi, for example, hasn’t actually read the issue he excoriates in the two decades since it was published. He is writing about his “feelings” about his memories, which he is perfectly entitled to do. But allow me to explain, with the full issue in my hands, why I think his account is flawed.

The current story-line would lead you to believe that TNR published “The Bell Curve.” But of course we didn’t. It was published by the Free Press, with a huge publicity and marketing budget. TNR wasn’t even the first magazine to weigh in on the controversy. The New York Times Magazine had Charles Murray on its front cover before our issue came out – “The Most Dangerous Intellectual In America” – making the book even more of a hot topic. Every editor of every paper and magazine had to make a call about how to deal with the book. And as the editor of one of the country’s primary journals of opinion, which had already published Murray many times, I decided we should tackle it head on. We should air its most controversial argument and expose it to scrutiny and criticism. These were not, after all, marginal authors. One was a celebrated Harvard professor; the other was, at the time, the most influential social scientist in America. In my view, ducking this issue was not an option and even seemed cowardly. And I had read the entire book in great detail in manuscript to determine if there was a smidgen of eugenics in it, something that I, as a Catholic, find repellent in every way. This was my job as an editor. It passed my own test. Maybe I was wrong. But it was an honest call and one with which (unlike some others) I remain comfortable with today.

And look: I completely respect those who believed that the right approach was to ignore the book entirely and treat it as a pariah text; or to publish only definitive, devastating take-downs. But I hope that an issue-long, 28-page debate on the subject can also be seen as a legitimate alternative option, especially if you’re on the liberal part of the left. Several quick books were published on exactly that model – and no one is accusing those editors of favoring white supremacy. TNR, moreover, had a long history of this kind of diversity. It published, for example, Robert Bork’s early and famous critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while simultaneously supporting its passage.

And Dish readers know how comfortable I found myself in that liberal tradition. Airing taboo stuff and examining and critiquing it has been a running feature of this blog from its beginnings. It is an axiom of mine that anything can be examined and debated – and that the role of journalism is not to police the culture but to engage in it forthrightly and honestly. Again: I respect those who believe the role of a magazine is to bless certain opinions and to stigmatize others, to indicate what is a socially acceptable opinion and what is not. It’s just not the way I have ever rolled on anything. So I responded to the race and IQ controversy exactly as I would any other: put it all on the table and let the facts and arguments take us where they may. In fact, I couldn’t understand why those who loathed the book didn’t leap at the chance to debunk it. If it were so transparently dreck, why not go in for the kill?

As it was, several leading black writers and intellectuals, with ties to the magazine, were eager to. Among them: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Glenn Loury, and Randy Kennedy. They were among the finest African-American minds of the era; and they did not hold back. Henry Louis Gates Jr analogized Murray to a slavery-defender:

By making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery, they excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a free man.

Hugh Pearson wrote:

Murray and Herrnstein sound like two people who have found a way for racists to rationalize their racism without losing sleep over it. One could call what they are facilitating Racist Chic.

Glenn Loury wrote:

Murray and Herrnstein’s declarations of intent notwithstanding, the fact is one cannot engage in such a discourse without simultaneously signaling other political and moral messages. These other messages bear on the worth of the disadvantaged “clans” and the legitimacy of collective ameliorative efforts undertaken on their behalf. … I would have thought, and have always supposed, that the inherent equality of human beings was an ethical axiom and not a psychologically contingent fact.

The white contributors were just as caustic. Andrew Hacker, whose racial politics echoes TNC’s and who wrote another cover-story on racial justice under my editorship, deconstructed the IQ argument by applying it to ethnic sub-populations among whites:

Yet no one really wants to discuss the question of inherited intelligence as it might apply, say, to individuals of Irish and Italian stock. And when Americans of Russian origins (who are predominantly Jewish) place a premium on higher education, it is attributed to cultural roots rather than an inborn aptitude for this kind of endeavor. Better, for white sensibilities. to focus on presumed black deficiencies. But this is neither surprising nor new.

Legendary psychologist Robert Nisbet wrote:

This is not dispassionate scholarship. It is advocacy of views that are not well supported by the evidence, that do not represent the consensus of scholars and that are likely to do substantial harm to individuals and the social fabric.

Here is a passage from Randy Kennedy’s piece in the same issue:

Those who strongly disagree, as I do, with [Murray’s] analysis and prescriptions should not attempt to prevent Murray from stating his and his late collaborator’s, views. Attempting to muzzle him will only give the book additional, bankable publicity. Nor should critics feel that they must disagree with everything the authors say. Sometimes the authors make good points, as when they discuss anxieties surrounding the question of environmental versus genetic determinants of alleged racial differences in intelligence. Readers interested in evaluating the Murray-Herrnstein enterprise should show patience by engaging in and waiting for careful siftings of its intellectual merits and demerits. They should resist having their agendas set and their minds made up on terms prescribed by cultural entrepreneurs who exploit controversiality for the purpose of financial and political profit.

Is that erudite neo-Dixiecratism? I simply refuse to feel ashamed for publishing this debate, for showing that liberals need not be afraid of any set of ideas or empirical claims, and for believing that the best response is to air all of it, confident that the truth will ultimately win. That, in my view, is the essence of liberalism and I make absolutely no apologies for it. And the space granted to the critiques of the book was almost twice the space given to Murray and Herrnstein, and laid out at the beginning of the magazine, with the extract at the very end. It doesn’t get any fairer than that, which was why it was no surprise that this electric, passion-filled issue sold more copies than any in the magazine’s history.

For Ta-Nehisi, none of this mattered or matters:

I knew that TNR’s much celebrated “heterodoxy” was built on a strain of erudite neo-Dixiecratism. When The Bell Curve excerpt was published, one of my professors handed out the issue to every interested student. This was not a compliment. This was knowing your enemy.

Kennedy and Loury and Gates were the enemy? Open, spirited debate was the enemy? That, it seems to me, tells you a lot more about Ta-Nehisi than them or me.

Why Police Feel They’re Under Siege

Reflecting on the senseless murder of two officers, a reader passes along the disgusting video above:

I follow my local precinct on twitter, to get neighborhood news. And a week or so before the murders, they posted a link to a video with protestors chanting for cops to be killed. I think it was going around in police circles.

I think we have to understand the police response in this context. They felt very much under attack by the mayor, who didn’t have their back against the protestors. And they saw this video, and many of them said someone was going to kill a cop. And then someone killed two cops.

My sympathies are very much with the protestors, in general (although not these protestors). When I saw the video, I thought the cops were being hysterical. I thought, of course no one is going to do anything to the cops, no one ever does anything to the cops. And I was totally wrong.

So I don’t think they’re going to be argued out of believing that we’re in an anti-police climate that’s been fomented by de Blasio and Sharpton. It’s like there were two totally different world views – mine (and other people’s) and theirs. And my world view got a very big prediction wrong, with deadly consequences, and theirs got it right. In this context, saying “We’re not anti-police, we’re for better policing,” isn’t going to convince them, even if it’s true.

Friedersdorf also comments on that video:

There’s almost no chance that the chants in this unrepresentative protest motivated a killer from a different city to kill cops in New York. The protestors were nevertheless behaving in a disgusting manner and undermining a norm the importance of which has just been underscored by two murdered men and grieving families. An even more disturbing example of this phenomenon, given subsequent events, is the fact that when Brinsley, the cop killer, posted an image of a gun to Instagram with a note about killing police officers, several people“liked” the post. Perhaps they took him to be making a figurative rather than a literal statement, and it’s possible some of his followers liked the image of the gun without reading his words. Still, it’s disturbing that some seemed to approve of this callous, prejudicial threat of violence. And one can’t help but wonder if Brinsley would’ve thought better of his subsequent actions had his social-media followers objected to his threat or expressed disapproval rather than vague encouragement.

I see nothing wrong with criticizing people who urged or expressed affinity for actual violence against police, even as the bulk of responsibility must belong to the murderer alone. But NYPD defenders are engaged in an attempt to discredit even criticism of police that is totally nonviolent. Theirs is an attempt to squelch legitimate political debate by irrationally associating it with the deeds of a suicidal murderer.

Another reader, an officer, is disappointed with our coverage of police issues:

I’ve been a cop since 2006 and will be the first to admit that some cops are evil and have no right wearing the badge, but good cops despise those cops. In the aftermath of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner deaths, a narrative was pushed painting all cops as racists bent on murdering black males. While you haven’t been as anti-cop as others, you have contributed to the narrative. With every other topic you examine, you report or post emails from as many different points of view as possible. Most times you post emails from readers or professionals directly involved in the topic; however, I’ve yet to see a single point of view from a cop.

Additionally, after a Grand Jury failed to indict Darren Wilson, you published articles stating how rare it is for Grand Juries to not indict people. It gave the perception Police get away with murder because of their position. You completely ignored the fact that at the very same time in South Carolina, three white cops were indicted for shooting unarmed black men.

I have no issue with questioning police tactics or use of force policies, in fact I believe it’s an important component of a free society. What I take issue with, is not giving an equal voice to the overwhelming majority of cops who are good people. This leads me to my last point.

On Saturday two NYPD cops were executed simply because of the uniform they wore. They were sitting in their Patrol car when they were ambushed. The murderer, whose name doesn’t deserve mentioning, killed those cops to “avenge” Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

It had taken almost two days for you to post about the shooting. I read the post and realized it’s not a condemnation of the shooting, the deaths of two cops is almost secondary to its point. The article is a condemnation of Giuliani and Union President Lynch for suggesting an anti-cop attitude may have contributed to the murders. The rebuttals to Giuliani and Lynch argue that they have no right to feel that way because the protestors are just expressing themselves. You referred to police turning their backs on de Blasio as “antics.” Lynch as been accused of smearing, ranting, and being divisive to the point of savagery. In one fell swoop you and your fellow journalists defend de Blasio’s and the protestor’s right to free speech while condemning Giuliani’s and Lynch’s use of it. You haven’t taken a second to allow a cop or their representatives to explain why they feel the way they do. I can tell you for a fact that every cop I know feels there is an anti-cop movement taking place.

ISIS Suffers A Defeat

The Kurds have beat them back:

Kurdish forces in northern Iraq celebrated their biggest victory yet over ISIS on Friday after breaking, with U.S. air support, the lengthy jihadi siege of Mount Sinjar and freeing hundreds of trapped members of the Yazidi religious sect. The Kurds claimed at least 100 Islamic militants were killed in the two-day battle to lift the siege. The victory by about 8,000 Peshmerga fighters will boost the Kurds’ confidence in their efforts to roll back the territorial gains made in northern Iraq by the fighters for the so-called Islamic State.

But the fighting isn’t over:

While Kurdish fighters in Iraq have pushed deeper into the town of Sinjar, held by ISIS group, they are facing stiff resistance from the Sunni militants who captured it in August, the Associated Press reported. One of the fighters, Bakhil Elias, described the overnight clashes which continued till Monday as “fierce” and that ISIS militants are using snipers.

Dexter Filkins puts the news in context:

For the Kurds, regaining control of Sinjar would restore most of the territories they lost to the ISIS summer offensive. And while that would place them in control of the highway that runs into western Mosul, it’s unclear whether the Kurds would send troops there. Western Mosul, like the rest of the areas under ISIS control, are overwhelmingly Arab; the Kurds, who ultimately have independence on their minds, may be reluctant to try to take control of non-Kurdish lands.

Eli Lake observes that “the question of a Kurdish state is getting harder to avoid”:

The peshmerga own some tanks, some rifles and have in the past worked very closely with American special-operations forces in Iraq. But they are still organized like a militia, with various commanders more loyal to local Kurdish political leaders than to the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG. Between 1994 and 1997, forces loyal to the two major Kurdish parties fought one another in a civil war.

On a visit to Washington last month, Fuad Hussein, Barzani’s chief of staff, told reporters that his government was now beginning the process of creating a centralized Kurdish army. And this is where U.S. training of three Kurdish brigades could make a major difference. If the peshmerga transforms from a localized guerilla militia into a modern army, then one of the remaining pieces necessary for Kurdish independence will fall into place.

And Walter Russell Mead recommends that, “for now at least, keep our gloating in check”:

ISIS has so far demonstrated a knack for repeatedly solving problems that others assumed were insoluble. It has conquered much more territory much more quickly than anyone expected, it has established a global presence and a successful brand, it has attracted and organized huge numbers of foreign fighters and has made inroads among rival Sunni tribes in both Syria and Iraq. We can hope that the stresses under which it now labors will cause it to fragment and fail, but we should certainly not count on it. This is an extremely dangerous organization, and the problems it now faces are, we should not forget, the results of its startling successes.

(Photo: Fighters of Kurdish Peshmerga forces get ready for an operation in the town of Sinjar on December 20, 2014 at Mount Sinjar, west of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. By Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images)

For Richer, For Poorer

Philip Cohen explains the impact of the recession on US marriages:

In the case of divorce, the pattern is counter-intuitive. Although economic hardship and insecurity adds stress to relationships and increases the risk of divorce, the overall divorce rate usually drops when unemployment rates rise. Researchers believe that, like births, people postpone divorces during economic crises because of the costs of divorcing—not just legal fees, but also housing transitions (which were especially difficult in the Great Recession) and employment disruptions. My own research found that there was a sharp drop in the divorce rate in 2009 that can reasonably be attributed to the recession. But, as is suspected will be the case with births, there appears to have been a divorce-rate rebound in the years that followed.

Meanwhile, Andrew Gelman flags a “recent research report from M.V. Lee Badgett and Christy Mallory,” indicating that divorce is less of a threat to same-sex couples:

The first wave of same-sex marriage is not necessarily typical of what will happen in future years, and in other states. So it will be interesting to see this go forward. It would also be interesting to see the age distribution of the newlyweds. I’d expect that in the first years of same-sex marriage we’d see a lot of older couples and then the average age of marriage would settle down to a lower level, comparable to that of traditional wives and husbands.

Finally, Aran reports that “female couples make up 51% of all same-sex relationships, but 64% of legally formalized relationships” but the data in the linked report does not separate out the dissolution rate by sex (a data partition that can be done with same-sex marriage but not, of course, with traditional marriage data). Many more interesting things to look at.

The View From Your Window

Sacramento, California, 7.04 am

What Does Cuba Mean For 2016? Ctd

Last week, Rand Paul voiced his support for normalizing relations with Cuba. Harry Enten expects Paul to pay a price for doing so:

In [Florida International University]’s 2008 survey — which had similar overall results to their 2014 poll — John McCain supporters favored the embargo 73 percent to 27 percent. Obama voters were almost exactly the opposite: 70 percent against and 30 percent for. The embargo’s biggest supporters are older Cuban-Americans, who are quite Republican-leaning, compared to younger Cuban-Americans, who are quite Democratic-leaning.

These Cuban-American Republicans could easily swing a relatively close Florida Republican primary. Cuban-Americans make up a sizable 8 percent of the primary vote in Florida, which is greater than the 6 percent Cuban-Americans make up in the general election. More importantly, though, Cuban-Americans have voted in a bloc in the past two presidential primaries.

Allahpundit agrees that Rand is in dangerous territory:

It’s not even Cuba per se that’s risky for Paul; it’s the perception that he’s so much different from other Republican candidates on foreign policy that he’s more inclined to agree with — gasp — Barack Obama than he is with Marco Rubio and the rest of his own party’s candidates. Opposing the Cuba embargo might please libertarians but it probably won’t him many extra conservative votes, especially in the primaries. Being seen as simpatico with Obama’s approach to international relations could hurt him, though, with exactly the sort of righties he’s targeting for votes.

Larison differs:

Paul’s position may not help him with that many voters in the Florida Republican primary electorate, but it’s the obvious position that he would have been expected to take. It’s also the obvious move for anyone who identifies as a conservative realist as Paul does. Had he not come out in favor of normalization, it would have given would-be supporters a new reason to doubt him, and he would have missed an easy opportunity to distinguish himself from the rest of the party’s likely 2016 field on an important new foreign policy issue. And Paul is far from being the only Republican inclined to support normalization. Not only are there other members of Congress that take the same view, including Jeff Flake and Justin Amash, but according to at least one survey taken this year more Republicans nationally support this position than oppose it. Republicans are far from monolithic on this question, and most don’t share Rubio’s hard-line views.

The Slain Officers In Brooklyn

Two NYC police officers were shot and killed on Saturday while sitting in their patrol car:

[Ismaaiyl Abdulah Brinsley] approached a marked police vehicle parked in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood around 2:45 p.m. He “took a shooting stance” and fired a handgun several times through the window, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said at a news conference.

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were struck in the head, and taken to a hospital, where they were pronounced dead. Police said Brinsley, 28, ran into a subway station, where he shot himself in the head.

Caroline Bankoff runs through what we know about the shooter. Rudy Giuliani was quick to blame the recent protests against police abuse:

Giuliani went out of his way to be clear that he’s not blaming a handful of bad apples. He thinks the culprits are everyone protesting police misconduct everywhere. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence — a lot of them lead to violence — all of them lead to a conclusion: The police are bad. The police are racist,” said Giuliani. “That is completely wrong. Actually, the people who do the most for the black community in America are the police.”

Along the same lines, NYPD union president Pat Lynch ranted about the mayor having “blood on the hands” and officers turned their backs on de Blasio at a presser. Bouie pushes back on such antics:

Despite what these police organizations and their allies allege, there isn’t an anti-police movement in this country, or at least, none of any significance.

The people demonstrating for Eric Garner and Michael Brown aren’t against police, they are for better policing. They want departments to treat their communities with respect, and they want accountability for officers who kill their neighbors without justification. When criminals kill law-abiding citizens, they’re punished. When criminals kill cops, they’re punished. But when cops kill citizens, the system breaks down and no one is held accountable. That is what people are protesting. …

The idea that citizens can’t criticize police—that free speech excludes scrutiny of state violence—is disturbing. Since, if free speech doesn’t include the right to challenge the official use of force, then it isn’t really free speech.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar argues along the same lines:

In a Dec. 21, 2014 article about the shooting, the Los Angeles Times referred to the New York City protests as “anti-police marches,” which is grossly inaccurate and illustrates the problem of perception the protestors are battling. The marches are meant to raise awareness of double standards, lack of adequate police candidate screening, and insufficient training that have resulted in unnecessary killings. Police are not under attack, institutionalized racism is. Trying to remove sexually abusive priests is not an attack on Catholicism, nor is removing ineffective teachers an attack on education. Bad apples, bad training, and bad officials who blindly protect them, are the enemy. And any institution worth saving should want to eliminate them, too.

And Tomasky defends de Blasio against the NYPD’s smears:

Pat Lynch, by speaking of officers’ blood on the steps of City Hall and urging his cops to sign an online petition that de Blasio not attend their funerals should they be killed in the line of duty, is doing… what? His behavior is divisive to the point of savagery. He is actively trying to make the people who follow him not only despise de Blasio but despise and oppose any acknowledgement that police can be faulted in any way, that black fear of police has any basis in reality. If Al Sharpton did the same with regard to police departments tout suite, which he does not anymore—he denounced the murder of the two cops immediately—he’d be drummed out of society.

Still, de Blasio should find ways to rise above all this. That’s part of the responsibility that comes with being mayor. But he should not back down from what he said.

(Photo: Officer Wenjian Liu (left) and Officer Rafael Ramos (Right). From the NYPD.)