The cross blue line

A CURIOUS rage has America’s cops in its grip—or rather, grips those who claim to speak on their behalf. Tragically, the end of summer has seen a spike in fatal shootings of police officers. Bizarrely, President Barack Obama is getting much of the blame.

The settled facts are these. From the beginning of August until the time of writing, seven policemen have been shot and killed. At least one of the dead, Darren Goforth, a sheriff’s deputy killed near Houston while putting fuel in his patrol car on August 28th, may have been targeted because of his uniform. The deaths follow months of heated debate about the use of lethal force by police officers from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore, Maryland. Mr Obama has joined in those debates. Often he has spoken of the need to build trust between non-white communities and the police, and linked today’s mistrust to historic racial discrimination.

Those facts inspire rage in some police chiefs and trade unions, joined by a number of Republican presidential candidates, who in recent days have accused Mr Obama of directly or indirectly causing police deaths. At a minimum, they charge him with remaining silent after officers are gunned down, though—in their telling—he is only too eager to speak out when black men are shot by white officers. Some go further, accusing Mr Obama of fomenting a mood of anti-police hatred.

Police anger overshadowed what should have been a simple exercise in presidential glad-handing—a speech to trade unionists in Boston on Labour Day. Mr Obama was mostly among friends, addressing a pillared hotel ballroom packed with union bosses and backslapping, elbow-squeezing Democratic politicians. Police representatives proved an exception. One of the few who deigned to attend the speech, Hugh Cameron, president of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police, told Lexington that Mr Obama has been “silent” during a wave of anti-police “assassinations”.

Jerry Flynn, executive director of the New England Police Benevolent Association, whose union boycotted the speech, goes still further. He says that Mr Obama had “blood on his hands” after whipping up racial tensions. If abuses by rogue officers led to prosecutions, says Mr Flynn, where are the hate-crimes charges “when white officers are killed by black men?” Ron Hickman, the Houston-area sheriff whose deputy was murdered on August 28th, blamed a “dangerous national rhetoric” for the killing, singling out Black Lives Matter, a protest movement that demands changes to policing in black neighbourhoods. David Clarke, the sheriff of Milwaukee County, which includes Wisconsin’s largest city, has accused Mr Obama of starting a “war on police”.

Republicans with White House ambitions are joining in. Earlier this month Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said that recent attacks on police are a “direct manifestation” of the “vilification of law enforcement” by Mr Obama and his government. A day later Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin declared that targeted police-killing is a “serious problem”, adding: “In the last six years under President Obama, we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric”—a deftly worded explanation that stops short of citing anything irresponsible that Mr Obama has said. Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, calls the president a “divider”.

Police be nice

These allegations—of culpable silence or a “war on police”—would be grave if they were not demonstrably false. The president has not been silent about police killings. In a statement issued after he telephoned Mr Goforth’s widow to offer his condolences, Mr Obama called the targeted killing of police “completely unacceptable” and “an affront to civilised society”. While the Department of Justice did issue a damning report on racial bias within the Ferguson police department, it also probed the police shooting in August 2014 that sparked protests in that Missouri town. To the dismay of some locals, its 86-page report found no grounds to prosecute the officer who fired the fatal shots. Nor are killings of officers soaring, though murder rates have jumped in some cities this summer (arguably because police are being more cautious). To date this year 26 have been shot dead—a grim tally but fewer than over the same period in 2014. Overall, police deaths have declined steadily since the 1970s.

What, then, explains the fury of Mr Obama’s critics? Prejudice is too sweeping an answer, and lazy besides: though a subset of Americans do find an odd satisfaction in calling the president an anti-white racist. Reverend Jeffrey Brown of the Twelfth Baptist Church, one of Boston’s oldest black congregations, has worked with police to reduce gang violence for decades, and gave evidence to a White House task force on policing set up after the Ferguson riots. Asked why he thinks the president upsets some in the police, Mr Brown notes that Mr Obama is asking officers to change how they interact with mistrustful communities. And “change is always difficult for institutions,” he says simply.

That is persuasive. One of Mr Obama’s great strengths when talking about race in America is his focus on national self-improvement. Defying those who want him to take sides, either declaring America damnably racist or ready to embrace colour-blind comity, he calls the country an imperfect work in progress. Yes, it takes special courage to serve in the police, the president said in May, at a ceremony to honour fallen officers. But America can “work harder” to heal rifts between police and the public they risk their lives to protect.

Mr Obama frustrates both those who favour instinctive deference to the police, and radicals in such movements as Black Lives Matter who see policing as repression, and so want less of it. Nobody needs good policing more than poor, high-crime neighbourhoods, Mr Obama said last year. Yes, he is asking a lot of the police, who do a dangerous job under ever-increasing scrutiny. But the president’s demands are also reasonable. His police critics need to calm down.