Police Advocates To Politicians: It’s Time To Stop the ‘Demagoguery’ and Back America’s Men, Women in Blue

“The demonization, the anti-police rhetoric, the new laws and policies that undermine public safety – it all sends a clear message that cops on the street are effectively on our own,” Patrick Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, told Fox News in a statement. “As a result, criminals feel emboldened to not only prey on the public, but to attack police officers as well.”

He added: “Too many of our brothers and sisters across the country have lost their lives to targeted attacks. We need our elected officials at every level of government to stand up and say ‘enough is enough.’ When cops have to struggle just to protect ourselves, we can’t adequately protect the communities we serve.”

Dennis Slocumb, the Legislative Director for the International Union of Police Associations, told Fox News that officers “are going to do what has to be done but I don’t think they are going to initiate contact with people on a corner as long as this environment exists… if they initiate and it becomes a poor situation they have a problem.”

“These young men and women are responding to calls daily to deal with situations that have been festering for years, whether its been family disputes or neighborhood disputes or whatever,” he also said. “They don’t know the background or anything… almost every single time it’s handled properly without any hubbub and in those cases where it goes haywire they are on the front page.”

Privately, cops are continuing to grapple with another struggle: the rate at which they are committing suicide.

“When you are talking about police suicides, it’s at epidemic proportions in America now,” Sutton says.

Data from B.L.U.E. Help, a nonprofit formed to “acknowledge the service and sacrifice of law enforcement officers we lost to suicide, assist officers in their search for healing, and to bring awareness to suicide and mental health issues,” shows that 146 cops have taken their own lives so far this year. That number follows 167 in 2018, 169 in 2017 and 142 in 2016.

In this year alone, nine active-duty and two retired officers from the New York City Police Department were reported to have committed suicide – the most recent less than a week ago.