From the New York Times:

In a recent paper on gun violence and mental illness (also discussed at Op-Talk last week), Dr. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish write that in the 1960s and ’70s, “when the potential assailants of a crime were Black, U.S. psychiatric and popular culture frequently blamed ‘Black culture’ or Black activist politics — not individual, disordered brains — for the threats such men were imagined to pose.”

When crimes are committed by white shooters, Dr. Metzl told Op-Talk, “there is a prevailing cultural narrative that tries to localize the question of what caused this or what is to blame to the pathologies of an individual white brain.” After the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, “there was a push to talk about Adam Lanza’s brain and his DNA, and talk about it in terms of individual mental illness.” But in the case of a black shooter, some in America have shown a tendency toward “defining black crime more broadly in terms of black culture,” a tendency he sees in recent rhetoric “that links this individual and by all accounts senseless crime, and a crime that wasn’t supported by any of the main political protest movements, to those very protest movements.”

Remember the Isla Vista shootings? Remember how quickly the entire Right absolved male entitlement and pickup culture and chose to say Elliot Rodger was just mentally ill?

But when a violent black man with a long criminal record randomly murders two police officers, it’s the fault of protests. Or black culture. Or anything but the mental state of that one man.

The problem here is that it’s not an either-or. Someone driven to extreme actions probably is in some extreme mental state. But which state? The only “excuse” in my book is out-and-out psychosis. I realized last spring that the people claiming Elliot Rodger was just “mentally ill” had no grasp of what psychosis is. Psychotics don’t just believe things that are odd or not mainstream; they believe things that are utterly nonsensical — Algebra is a green octopus. Your aura is eating my head. That kind of thing.  Here’s a good description of what psychosis is like.

However, it’s also the case that people who are angry or agitated or spoiling to do something awful might seize on issues in the news and weave them into their personal myths. The NY Times article continues,

Mr. Brinsley did apparently make Instagram posts referring to Michael Brown and Eric Garner. However, said Dr. Metzl, “there is often some sort of political connection to senseless crimes, at least in the narratives of the people who try to justify their senseless acts.”

“People who might be at risk or imbalanced in some way certainly coopt these messages and take them on as their own personal rhetoric to commit violence,” he explained. “But to me it’s a mistake to take that connection literally and to say that that is a reflection of the protest movement itself, when clearly what’s happening is a very pathological use of that language for a very different set of means and ends.”

People who are not psychotic but who are prone to anger or fear and harbor a desire to harm others can be pushed into violent acts by inflammatory rhetoric or by soaking in a hateful culture. Such a person might be driven to kill women (and men who love them) or Jews or Sikhs mistaken for Muslims.  That’s why inflammatory and hateful rhetoric is irresponsible, especially coming from public officials or people in media. If someone like Bill O’Reilly goes on and on for years demonizing and reviling someone like Dr. George Tiller, it’s almost inevitable that someone will, sooner or later, act on that rhetoric and murder George Tiller. It’s a wonder it didn’t happen sooner, in fact.

So, Mayor de Blasio has responsibly called for everyone to chill and to pause protests for a few days.

In his first extensive remarks since the killing, Mayor Bill de Blasio called Monday for a pause in protests over police conduct as he faced a widening rift with those in a grieving force who accuse him of creating a climate of mistrust that contributed to the execution of two officers. He called for “everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in all due time.”

“We are working toward a day where we can achieve greater harmony toward policing and community,” he said later. De Blasio had earlier met with the officers’ families and later noted, “There’s a lot of pain.”

Meanwhile, Patrick Lynch, head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of the NYPD — the police union, in other words — has ramped up the hate speech. He has fanned resentment among the NYPD that they are being protested at all, blames City Hall for being against police, and has asked that the Mayor be banned from attending the funerals of slain officers. I don’t even want to know what’s going on on Fox News.

People are still posting obviously doctored videos that allegedly show recent protesters calling for the death of cops, because they so much want to believe that’s true. They want to make it an either-or. They want the cops to be blameless and all the fault placed elsewhere. It’s not that simple.

But, seriously, from what I can see there is not a proportional amount of hate speech coming from both sides, especially from officials and media figures. Individuals, no doubt. You’ll find people saying intemperate things across the spectrum, I’m sure. But among people in prominent positions or in media, it’s not equal at all. Is it?

The degree to which the Right is hysterically attacking Mayor Bill de Blasio over the murder of two New York policemen is either the measure of knee-jerk right-wing racism or knee-jerk right-wing animus toward anything they label “Left,” or both.

For example, Bill O’Reilly is calling Mayor de Blasio a “villain” who must resign. Let us not forget that this is the same Bill O’Reilly who helped incite the murder of Dr. George Tiller. O’Reilly has never taken responsibility or expressed remorse about Dr. Tiller’s murder, I don’t believe.

Meanwhile, convicted felon Bernie Kerik says “war is being raged on our homeland.” He also says Eric Garner’s death was Garner’s own fault.

On the other hand, the New York Times has been supportive of the Mayor and the protesters.

I believe I’ve already written that the reactions to police violence have been somewhat different from what they might have been in years past. The wall of white obliviousness doesn’t seem quite so solid, anyway.

It’s still there, though. By now you’ve probably heard about the Fox News Affiliate that was so eager to blame protesters for the murder of the two officers that they doctored a video to claim the crowd was chanting to “kill a cop.” But it was not. And the claim that Mayor de Blasio somehow made inflammatory anti-police statements is just conjured out of thin air. As Michael Tomasky wrote,

I covered New York politics for 15 years, and I saw some awfully tense moments between the police and Democratic politicians. But there has never been anything remotely like the war the cops are waging right now against Mayor Bill de Blasio for the thought crime of saying something that was completely unremarkable and so obviously true that in other contexts we don’t even bat an eye when someone says it. And for that, the mayor has blood on his hands, as Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association head Pat Lynch said Saturday evening after the hideous assassinations of two NYPD officers?

And what did Mayor de Blasio say?

This is profoundly personal for me. I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he said that Dante reminded him of what he looked like as a teenager. And he said, I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens. I said to him I did. Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years, about the dangers he may face. A good young man, a law-abiding young man, who would never think to do anything wrong, and yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face—we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.

And this was bad, because … ? It reminds me of the outrage when the President remarked that if he’d had a son he would have looked like Trayvon Martin. Yes, possibly so. But the way the Right reacted to this innocuous remark was so out of proportion to anything, you’d have thought the President had called for a melanin deficiency tax.

Whatever goes on in rightie heads is utterly alien to me.

But here is where the real lines are drawn. It’s not really between whites and blacks. It’s between the sane and the crazy. And it’s between people who actually want peace and justice and those that just want to politicize and hate and refuse to take responsibility.

This past June, when two Las Vegas police officers were shot and killed by a couple of anti-government white supremacists, right-wing bloggers and media went into overdrive blaming just about everything but anti-government white supremacy. For example, The Dumbest Man on the Internet® blamed “meth-using neo-Nazi socialists.” (Note to the oblivious: fascism began as a reaction against liberalism and socialism; 20th century European fascism was emphatically and expressively anti-socialist. “Neo-Nazi socialists” is an oxymoron.) Many readers of this and other right-wing blogs blamed Attorney General Eric Holder for these murders, accusing Holder of staging a “false flag” operation to distract us from something, possibly the Bundy Ranch circus going on at the time.

Fast-forward to yesterday’s execution of two police officers in Brooklyn. The Right is blaming Mayor de Blasio, Al Sharpton, and … Islam? Seriously.

Before going any further, I want to second what Zandar wrote:

Supposedly the suspect also shot and killed his girlfriend and posted a picture of his blood-covered leg to Facebook, but at this point details are still coming in.  It’s completely rational to say that nobody here deserved to die, the cops, the suspect, his girlfriend, and neither did Tamir Rice or Eric Garner or Michael Brown.

But see also Steve M. It isn’t just right-wing bloggers casting blame on everyone on the Left, especially Mayor de Blasio; it’s the NYPD Sergeants Benevolent Association and former New York Governor George Pataki. Fox’s Eric Bolling also blamed Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Samuel L. Jackson. Possibly the first black people who popped into his head?

Bernie Kerik — you do remember Bernie Kerik — stepped up and said Mayor de Blasio and Al Sharpton have “blood on their hands.” And (same source) former Mayor Rudy “Giuliani Time” Giuliani blamed “anti-police propaganda.” And several NYPD officers turned their backs when Mayor de Blasio entered a room to give a press conference.

I must’ve missed the memo where de Blasio advocated shooting police officers. Otherwise, Some People are behaving like spoiled children.

Just last week NYPD officers were filmed beating up a 12-year-old boy. And we’ve all seen the video of the death of Eric Garner. No, I don’t think all cops are bad. I certainly don’t think Police Officer Rafael Ramos and Police Officer Wenjian Liu, the two men murdered yesterday, deserved to die. But the NYPD needs to realize that it does have a massive problem, and that people have legitimate reasons to protest them.  It isn’t just “propaganda.” It isn’t just a few “socialists” or whatever black men whose names first popped into Eric Bolling’s head badmouthing them in public, assuming they even did.

One thing we know about yesterday’s murders is that the act appeared to be committed by one man, who then killed himself. One man who was not a New Yorker but whose last known residence was in Georgia and who had just arrived in NYC after shooting his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore. This was not a conspiracy. This was not an act carried out by political activists or protesters, but by a violent man with a long criminal record who appears to have been associated with a criminal gang of some sort (see Steve M for details). He appears to have had a beef with police, but most criminals do. A New York Post headline screamed Gunman executes 2 NYPD cops as ‘revenge’ for Garner, but his motivation is speculation.

Seems to me this likely was more about one man’s personal issues than about politics. Of course, we might be dealing with some borderline personality, and anti-police rhetoric sluicing around in media and the Internet may very well have pushed him in the direction of murdering police officers. Just as anti-government rhetoric no doubt incited Jarad and Amanda Miller to murder two police officers in Las Vegas. As I wrote in my original post on the Las Vegas shootings, I don’t blame the Bundy Ranch crowd specifically for what the Millers did, particularly since the Bundy Militia guys were all about hating the federal government but were willing to work with state and local government. But people with loose screws do sometimes scramble the messages they get. What the Millers did was no doubt founded on their personal issues, and they seized on anti-government rhetoric as a kind of permission slip to do what they wanted to do. The man identified as the Brooklyn shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, may have done likewise.

However, I am seriously tired of the way conservatives — or the Right, or whatever they want to call themselves — steadfastly refuse to take responsibility for anything, just as I fear the NYPD is not going to reform until it can honestly appreciate that there are legitimate reasons people are angry with them. And just once I’d like to see Bernie Kerik and Rudy Guiliani own up to their own role in creating a dysfunctional and violent NYPD. Yes, maybe we’re all at fault here, to some extent. Apparently many are blaming Mayor de Blasio because he met with protesters. They wanted him to ignore protesters? And the heads of the NYPD should have been meeting with them too, for that matter, instead of acting like spoiled children whining that people are either for them or against them.

And how much any of this really has to do with the murders of Ramos and Liu possibly will never be known, since the perp is dead. But I’m sure we can all look forward to the Right’s shameless politicizing of the deaths of these officers. Because that’s what they do.