Police Critics Rebuffed

Remember all of the hyperventilating over “militarized” police after the disturbances in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed the Michael Brown shooting?

Well, that was before Wednesday’s shooting at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California. The alleged perpetrators of the attack reportedly fired 76 rounds during a shootout with police, using weapons powerful enough to pierce bullet-resistant vests.

CNN reporter Jake Tapper summed up the critique of heavily armed cops during a report from Ferguson during the disturbances.

“These are armed police, with — not machine guns — (but with) semi-automatic rifles, with batons, with shields, many of them dressed for combat,” he said at the time. “Now why they’re doing this? I don’t know. Because there is no threat going on here. None that merits this. There is none, OK? Absolutely, there have been looters, absolutely, over the last nine days, there’s been violence, but there is nothing going on on this street right now that merits this scene out of Bagram. Nothing.”

Even the nation’s chief law enforcement officer at the time expressed his hostility to a well-armed police force.

“At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community, I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message,” said then-Attorney General Eric Holder.

Appearing on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” retired Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman said on Friday the answer to that question should be obvious now.

“We are at war, and the police in this country are our special ops,” he said. “We’re not going to bring the military into the streets here and run operations at night when you’re asleep. The police are.”

Military style vehicles were in view at the site of the final face-off between police and husband and wife terrorists who murdered 14 people in San Bernardino. The result? A massive shootout in which the couple were killed. Only one police officer was wounded.

Fuhrman said the intense criticism directed at law enforcement over the past year has taken a toll.

“When you strip away what we do have that we know works, you take the motivation away from the people on the streets that are actually doing the investigation. You take their tools, you take their power, and then you try to humiliate them and demonize them — you are going to have more things slip through the cracks,” he said. “You have less people, less motivation, less tools.”

Fuhrman said this can be seen in the drive against profiling.

“They call it an MO, modus operandi,” he said. “By identifying a modus operandi, you are actually profiling … Profiling was a buzz word of defense attorneys. They came up with it so their drug-dealing, scumbag clients don’t get stopped on freeways because they meet this profile typical or atypical of drug dealers.”

Fuhrman said if a private business operated with a similar disregard for facts and common sense, it would go bankrupt.

“It’s not only madness, it’s incompetence,” he said.