Solutions seem miles away in recent headline shootings

Timing is everything, it is said.

And the timing of author Heather MacDonald’s recently released book, “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe,” is tragically so.

The recent epidemic of those taking out their frustrations on law enforcement with the rash of murders of police officers, has made MacDonald’s book an off-the-charts best seller with an Amazon waiting list of up to two months.

It’s also made MacDonald, a widely read author of articles in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and New Republic one of the nation’s most sought-after interviews.

There’s a sense in this nation that the terror, which has fostered itself in sadly sensational shootings, is bringing back thoughts of the Wild West where many wore a pistol on the waist and administered their own form of justice.

The lives of eight law enforcement officers recently in Dallas and Baton Rouge, as well as those of civilians Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minneapolis, are making us stop and think.

And it should be something over which we all take pause because it is not just a reoccurring nightmare that we live in scary times.

Justice Department statistics found in MacDonald’s book point out violent crime has been rising sharply in many American cities after two decades of decline. Homicides jumped nearly 17 percent in 2015 in the largest 50 cities, the biggest one-year increase since 1993.

When asked in one interview if she feared some kind of larger breakdown, MacDonald said it was not out of the question, especially in the inner-city areas of the nation.

Officers working those jobs face pushback to their lawful authority on a daily basis, she said. “Law and order, and respect for the law, are disintegrating. A Chicago police officer told me last month that he has never experienced such hatred in his 20 years on the job.”

In a number of recent headline-grabbing incidents police have been involved in social media driven shootings and arrests. One of the most notable, perhaps, was that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. in the summer of 2014 where the Black Lives Matter movement was brought to our televisions with regularity.

MacDonald’s book has been very critical of the portrayal of the BLM, particularly in light of Ferguson, where investigations later exonerated officer Darren Wilson of wrongdoing.

And again, figures from the Justice Department show that it’s not police that are the biggest threat to young black males as BLM would have us believe. It’s young black males who commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at about 11 to 12 times the rate of whites alone.

What’s also puzzling is with an alarming regularity, places like Chicago experience out of control gun violence, yet BLM — and/or the media — appears to generally ignore these incidents. They include a 3-year-old left paralyzed for life from a Father’s Day shooting and a Fourth of July attack with victims age 5, 7 and 11.

What’s more tragic than harm to small children, innocent bystanders no less?

And when it comes to the media, they also seem to be quick to draw their weapons of conclusions without making sure of the target. There has been much conjecture surrounding the deaths of Sterling and Castile and weapons. Sterling, a man with a mile-long rap sheet — and felon — had a gun in his pants pocket.

Concern of how some policing will be perceived following the death of Brown, has many law enforcement agencies backing off and the so-called “Ferguson effect” tends to embolden the criminals.

So if you think it’s a scary time in this nation you are probably correct.

It’s unfortunate that what is being said about the problems we’ve seen in recent weeks seems to far outpace what is being done to find a solution.

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].