The bitter fruits of the progressive war against police continue to mount; an ill wind blowing no one any good. Over the weekend we witnessed two policemen in LA ambushed and shot repeatedly while in their squad car, and, protestors reportedly tried to block the entrance to the emergency room, with at least one allegedly crying out “we hope they die.”

Omar Williams, who lives near the Metro station on Willowbrook Avenue, said he was saddened if not surprised to learn someone had shot a police officer, an act he called “the work of an evil person.” Williams, 40, had taken part in protests against racism and police brutality earlier in the summer, but he’d recently sensed in the crowds a heightened anger. “You could hear the chatter in the crowd,” he said. “You could feel the tension. You could tell something was going to happen.”

Police have a uniquely difficult job. They are tasked to serve and protect, yet the very people they must protect are also potentially the ones they must protect others against. Distinguishing between friend and foe is a difficult task that requires good training and good people. With over 700,000 police officers of various stripes in the US, you have many, many, many opportunities for training or people to fail. If you have an expectation that there will be zero mistakes, well…that is simply unrealistic. Couple those many interactions of police and the people they are supposed to protect with the reality that police are killed every year in the line of duty (48 in 2019), and you can understand why some police don’t show the restraint that in hindsight is so apparently needed.

Now one person’s foolish “we hope they die” is certainly not representative of a movement, and yet as Williams notes, “you could tell something was going to happen.” There are perfectly predictable consequences to the vitriol that is constantly put out by the media and many on the progressive left. With the idea that the entire police system is systemically racist and that racism is the greatest evil in the world, it becomes a much shorter step for a deranged person to come to believe that killing a police officer to fight back against injustice is a necessary step. Nobody but the shooter (in the LA case) is directly responsible for this act, but are there not accomplices? It was right and just that public figures immediately condemned the violent shooting. But I’ve not seen any serious introspection yet that maybe we’ve taken this a bit too far?

The problem of course is not racism, but sin within all of us, and nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than this irony: those that think it is so wrong for people to ascribe to all black people attributes of a few are yet willing to look at the actions of a few police officers and ascribe that to all. We don’t know the motives of the young man that shot these officers in LA, but it certainly appears to be random–that he shot them simply because they were police officers. For those that are fanning the flames, consider Proverbs 10:12: Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses. Are you acting in hate in your agitation?

This is also self-defeating, as the current overreach against police is poisoning the well against constructive reform. As the WSJ notes earlier this week, “Policing reform is impossible amid a war on police.” And we know the perfectly predictable results of this war on police: police will be less likely to go into hostile environments, and the bad guys will prey on the vulnerable that cannot escape. Baltimore provides the unfortunate case study on what happens when police pull back after the death of a black man in police custody: many, many more people are murdered.

We need a reasoned discussion on police tactics and race, and I would gladly support reforms. I–and I’m confident many others—are troubled when we hear that police pull over African-Americans for trivial auto violations again and again, as just one example. But that conversation is not likely to happen while some are fomenting violence against police that are trying to keep all of us safe. And the sad reality is that the majority that is needed to implement real reform will not be the ones harmed by this fomenting of violence–it will be the most vulnerable that are left behind in the crime-infested neighborhoods that will be abandoned. We must do more than condemn the shooter in this case–we must condemn the entirely irresponsible “defund the police” and the police force is “systemically racist” movement.