August 2019 Warning Bells article

Why?

Seems like a pattern doesn’t it? Seventy- two officers from the Philadelphia Police Department are being removed from the field pending investigation of improper remarks made on a private website. One-fifth of their department sidelined at a single stroke. Also, numerous border agents of the Customs and Border Protection service are under
investigation for remarks they made on a private website.
The Washington Post cites the fact that research is being done to find these private websites, and persons familiar with online posts are tracking down the comments to identify the persons making them by the Plain View Project. Over 5,000 embarrassing posts from law enforcement officers are posted online. See the database at www. plainviewproject.org.
You don’t even have to make a controversial post. Belonging to a website where others make controversial statements may be enough. A second Border Patrol website is now being investigated.
The left, of course, is calling for termination of these officers. These efforts are coordinated and well-funded and are going mainstream compliments of a cooperative media.
The ACLU, once a bulwark of bristling protection for First Amendment rights,
has been politicized into silence. In 1976, they publicly supported the Public Safety Officers Bill of Rights, believing that even cops had rights. Now, they have been consumed by an anti-establishment agenda that blinds them to their former mission. What would their reaction be if ACLU attorneys were subject to the same scrutiny and public exposure on their personal Facebook posts? The ACLU is now just another well-funded political hack organization.
The reason that a pattern can be perceived may be because there is a playbook recommending this kind of attack that was written by an activist in 1971 named Saul Alinsky. He took his decades of experience as an agitator and came up with 13 rules he lists and explains in his book Rules for Radicals.
Hillary Clinton wrote her college master thesis on this book, Barack Obama taught a course on community organization using its principles, and even the Tea Party is supposed to have used it. It did not become popular based on its political leaning; it became popular because it works.
There is no room in this article to address all 13 of the rules, but discussing a few may be instructive and help answer the question “why?”
Rule 13 says, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Alinsky points out that attacking an organization doesn’t work. It is too abstract. You must personalize the target. Give the target a face and attack it on a personal level. That means, in this case, to select individual officers and expose them as the face of evil. Thereby, the organization can be brought down. Authority must be given a face. It is your face that can be used to personalize the attack, and the attack is meant to polarize the community.
Rule 4 says, “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity … they can be constantly pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations. No organization,  including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book. You can club them to death with their “book” of rules and regulations.”
In other words, use our rules against us. The manual is thick, and the rules are many. Whenever an officer fails to live up to the rules, it becomes instant public knowledge and negative publicity. In this view, AB 392, the change in use of force laws working its way through the legislature, is not about preventing unauthorized uses of force. AB 392 is about establishing laws that are impossible to comply with and can be used to personalize failure. Similarly, AB 1421, the release of use of force records to the public, is not about transparency. AB 1421 is about providing evidence to show that officers violate the rules. Hundreds of people will be examining every officer-involved shooting and comparing video to reports to find inconsistencies. That will then be spun up to further damage the face of law enforcement and “unite” the community against the police.
Will it ever end? Alinsky says this: “There is a way to keep the action going and to prevent it from being a drag, but this means constantly cutting new issues as the action continues, so that by the time the enthusiasm and emotions for one issue have started to de-escalate, a new issue has come into the scene with a consequent revival.” A constant barrage of fault will be presented one after another ad infinitum, as you can see happening today.
The mainstream media, by design or by ignorance, empowers the Alinsky method and is largely responsible for the fact that it works. For instance, the LAPD in 2018 engaged in 1,754,415 contacts with citizens and had to use deadly force 33 times. That is two-thousandths of one percent where officers had to use deadly force. That is a tremendous success, one that any business in the country would be bragging about. And yet, that point is ignored by the media and the lie that there is an out-of-control use of force
problem is portrayed to be an unarguable truth.
The League has done a good job in conjunction with other unions in trying to get the proper message out and calling a lie a lie. There was little help from the media. Law enforcement must fight back with the truth in all ways possible, including one-on-one contacts with legislatures and our own efforts to educate the public.
The Alinsky rules are dishonest and disgusting, as a reading of his book will attest. It substitutes the American ideal of a free and honest public debate of the issues with lies and methods to manipulate public opinion in deceitful ways. Unfortunately, it is a method that works. Vigilance is required.
Be legally careful out there.