If police officers were truly trigger-happy villains with badges, then years of public scorn, nonstop surveillance, and career-ending viral videos should’ve slowed them down. Instead, the New York Times tells us police killings are up — and not just up, but climbing steadily since George Floyd’s death. That’s the narrative. But it doesn’t pass the smell test. Officers today operate under immense scrutiny. They’re more cautious, not less. Every traffic stop could mean a headline, every call could end their career. And yet we’re expected to believe they’re killing more people than ever?
Even the Times…. concedes that the killings of unarmed individuals have dropped sharply, by nearly two-thirds since 2015. That’s not nothing.
I thought something was off. I was right.
Five years after Floyd’s death, the Times has returned with what it calls an investigation but reads more like a carefully engineered parable. The headline screams injustice. The graphs are clean, the moral is preloaded, and the nuance is dead on arrival. It’s not journalism — it’s storytelling with a purpose. And that purpose is not to understand, but to indict.
Let’s start with the headline claim: police killings are rising. That part is true. But so is serious violent crime, drug abuse, gun ownership, and untreated mental illness. And when you combine all of these — violent crime, drugs, guns, and broken minds — you don’t get a country suffering from “police brutality.” You get a country coming apart at the seams. But the Times will never say that. Because if it did — if it dared to center the chaos on the ground instead of pointing a sanctimonious finger upward — the entire moral scaffolding would crumble. The problem wouldn’t be cops. It would be a society addicted, armed, and on the edge. And that truth doesn’t trend. That doesn’t sell. It just hurts.
Instead, we get the usual bait-and-switch. Armed suspects charging at officers with knives or guns are lumped in with rare, horrific abuses, framed in a way that makes every police killing look like a cold-blooded execution. Context is stripped. Detail blurred. Because nuance, much like truth, doesn’t trend.
Even the Times, in its own data, acknowledges that most of those killed were armed. It also concedes that the killings of unarmed individuals have dropped sharply, by nearly two-thirds since 2015. That’s not nothing. That’s progress. But you wouldn’t know it. Those facts are smothered under charts and buried in footnotes. They don’t serve the outrage machine. They don’t fuel hashtags. So they get the quiet treatment.
Then comes the ideological spin: blue states good, red states bad. Reform-minded cities saw fewer killings, we’re told. Conservative states, meanwhile, are painted as blood-soaked backwaters. But the data doesn’t support that kind of moral geometry.
Crime has surged in major liberal cities, and the cities drive state crime rates. Police are pulling back from proactive enforcement in places like San Francisco and Chicago — not because reform worked, but because officers are afraid of becoming the next viral villain. Meanwhile, in many red states, violence has spilled into suburban and rural areas where police departments are understaffed and undertrained. But the Times doesn’t want to explore that. It just wants red state scapegoats.
It gets worse. The article actually floats the idea that rising distrust in police, stoked, let’s not forget, by this very paper, might be contributing to more fatal encounters. That’s rich. The Times, along with half the liberal press, spent the better part of a decade demonizing police officers as racist executioners, foot soldiers of white supremacy, enforcers of a system that must be dismantled. They didn’t just criticize — they castigated. Turned beat cops into villains. Turned restraint into oppression. Night after night, headline after headline, they poured acid on the public’s faith in law enforcement.
And now, with a straight face, they wonder why people are resisting arrest more often. They wonder why traffic stops turn sour and routine encounters turn violent. It’s like soaking a crowd in gasoline, striking a match with a smile, tossing it in, then playing dumb when the whole place goes up in smoke.
There’s also a lazy attempt to blame Trump, as if a few unsigned memos in Washington somehow triggered a nationwide meltdown. It’s as if federal oversight was the dam holding back the tide. It wasn’t, and everyone knows it. We don’t need more bureaucrats breathing down officers’ necks from behind desks in Washington. If policing is breaking down, it has nothing to do with a shortage of paperwork and everything to do with a society in freefall.
Most of these officers, underpaid, overstretched, and thrown into impossible situations without real support, aren’t out there failing because the DOJ missed a compliance audit. They’re failing because they’re human. Because they’re the last ones standing in neighborhoods decimated by fatherlessness, drowning in fentanyl, and stalked by untreated psychosis. They’re asked to do everything: calm schizophrenics, comfort overdose victims, talk down suicidal teens, chase armed suspects, all while knowing one wrong move means career ruin — or a funeral.
They’re not jackbooted thugs. They’re overworked triage nurses for a culture hemorrhaging at every vein. But the Times won’t print that. Too sympathetic. Too real. So instead, they toss the blame upstream, because it’s easier to accuse than to understand. Easier to sneer from Manhattan than to patrol in Memphis.
What’s also missing — conspicuously — is any real concern for the victims of crime, the people police are sworn to protect. In this narrative, the only deaths worth mourning are those that come at the hands of law enforcement. The thousands of black Americans gunned down in their own neighborhoods every year? Ghosts. The parents who beg for more patrols while politicians talk about “reimagining public safety”? Inconvenient. This selective empathy isn’t compassion — it’s politics.
The article ends, predictably, with a nod to “broader societal factors” that go “beyond the police.” A throwaway line, like a legal disclaimer. But if you take that idea seriously, the entire argument collapses. Because if police troubles are downstream from larger cultural, economic, and spiritual decay, then the problem isn’t just training or oversight. It’s the nation itself. And that is a story the Times refuses to tell.
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