The assassination of NYPD officer Miosotis Familia, who was sitting in her vehicle doing paperwork when she was shot in the head, is the latest instance of the national “War on Cops.” Her murderer, Alexander Bonds—subsequently gunned down by cops—was a career criminal who boasted of having attended “Attica High School,” and had previously beaten up a police officer with a pair of brass knuckles.
Bonds, whose Facebook page displays a picture of him wearing a T-shirt reading “Coming Out Hard,” hated the police and blamed them for his problems. He posted a video of a young man assaulting a female officer, agreeing with a comment that she was a “lil bitch” who had “to prove something.” Bonds also called for the release of leftist hero and convicted cop-killer Judith Clark, a participant in the notorious 1981 Westchester Brinks robbery on behalf of the Black Liberation Army. Depicting himself as a vicious pit bull straining at the leash, wearing a spiked collar, Bonds described “vengeance” as his most “deadly” characteristic: “If someone hurts you, they have to feel the full force of your wrath and your vengeance is swift and merciless.”
Officer Familia, the tragic target of Bonds’ twisted sense of justice for the miserable consequences of his bad choices, was by all accounts a model citizen and heroic public servant. A former Red Cross worker and registered nurse, the mother of three had served on the NYPD for 12 years. At the time of her murder, Officer Familia was guarding a corner that had been the site of a recent shooting, in a demonstration of the NYPD’s commitment to “flooding the zone” to restore order to neighborhoods afflicted by criminality.
The murder of Officer Familia is only the most recent of a deadly series of attacks on law enforcement officers around the country. The murders of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in December 2014 by a gunman apparently seeking revenge for the death of Eric Garner; the killings of seven police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas by a radical black separatist in July 2016; and the murder of two Des Moines cops last November by a disgruntled “loner” are three of the most prominent ambush killings of cops in recent years. But these incidents only scratch the surface of what San Antonio police chief William McManus described earlier this week as general “hatred” toward police officers.
That hostility arises largely from a media-fed narrative—promoted cynically by liberal politicians—that black men are unjustly targeted and killed by police. In fact, incarceration rates by race, age, and sex largely track criminality, and research demonstrates that black men are actually less likely than whites to be killed during police confrontations, when adjusting for crime rates.
Anti-police sentiment has led to “de-policing” across America, though not yet—thankfully—in New York. But in Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit, murder rates have shot up as law enforcement has retreated from proactive policing of high-crime neighborhoods. The Black Lives Matter movement and its rhetoric of victimhood have thus helped lead to more black deaths. And now the killing of Officer Familia by Alexander Bonds can be added to that sad and growing list.
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images