The Morning Briefing: Atlanta PD Seems to Suffer Outbreak of ‘Blue Flu’ After Charges Brought in Rayshard Brooks Case

Need a Cop Atlanta? Shoulda Thought About That Earlier.

Police in the United States have been under siege for almost a month now because of one very bad cop in Minneapolis. Men and women who risk their lives every time they go to work are being painted with a broad brush, being portrayed as plagued by systemic racism and routinely abusing power. That, after all, is the justification for all the rioting and looting the last three weeks.

Yes, the are bad cops out there. There are bad people in every profession. Human beings are a messy bunch and some of us are just plain evil. Most of us aren’t though. This collective guilt nonsense that we’re being told we must believe in to be better people is absurd.

Some of the cops out there have been trying to appease the mob, kneeling with them and hoping that they would act a little less lunatic. Others have gone about doing their jobs under very trying circumstances, sometimes running afoul of their civilian overlords.

After charges were filed against the officers involved in the Rayshard Brooks shooting in Atlanta, several members of the police department didn’t seem to be up to coming into work. The exact number of cops who didn’t show has been difficult to determine as the police union won’t admit that it’s actually happening and the media is just hoping this will go away.

There were numerous people on Twitter monitoring police scanners and confirming that the walkout seemed to be extensive.

ATLANTA Ga. (WRBL) – A blue flu appears to be sweeping across the Atlanta Police Department as many officers walked out or did not come to work allegedly protesting murder charges filed against one of their own on Wednesday.

The non-profit group Georgia Law Enforcement shared the following information late Wednesday night on their FB page.

“The head of Atlanta’s police union confirmed Wednesday that officers from the Atlanta Police Department in Zones 3 and 6 walked off the job Wednesday afternoon.

The officers’ anger is understandable to anyone not buying into the current “all cops are evil” narrative. Rayshard Brooks was resisting arrest, then grabbed one of the officer’s taser away from him. The press is basically canonizing him and making it look like the officer who shot him just wanted to take target practice. Even more infuriating, Fulton County DA Paul Howard decided that Brooks and the taser didn’t pose a threat to the officer. This happened just two weeks after Howard charged several cops for using tasers during an arrest, saying that a taser is “considered a deadly weapon under Georgia law.”

That’s right, in the hand of a drunk and disorderly man who’s resisting arrest, the taser isn’t a threat, but it’s a deadly weapon if a cop is holding it.

Could what’s happening in Atlanta be just the beginning of a mass protest by cops around the country, or maybe even a mass exodus? Why would any good cop in one of these liberal-run cities want to stay where he or she is not only underappreciated, but demonized? Any cop near a full pension has no real incentive to stick around this point. Chicago PD’s second in command announced his retirement on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Buffalo PD’s riot response team resigned after disciplinary action was taken against some of their colleagues. They’re still on the force, but they left the Emergency Response Team without any personnel.

As I explained in the post about the Buffalo PD, I have had dealings with the cops from both sides of the law. I’m not some wild-eyed innocent that thinks there aren’t some problems to be fixed with policing in America. Still, if all of the good cops are going to get lumped in with the occasional bad cop, the willingness to head out every day to a job from which they might not return is bound to wane.

It’s tragic that Rayshard Brooks died, no one wants to see run-ins with the police end that way. On the other hand, every cop who does his job can’t be made an example of to appease an angry mob.

By Stephen Kruiser, June 18, 2020, pjmedia.com