A black police officer and the white former mayor of America’s largest city are making headlines this week on the heels of Thursday’s massacre at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas after both openly questioned the premises of the popular protest movement.
A heartfelt Facebook post by Brooklyn native and Florida police officer Jay Stalien, questioning whether the BLM movement cares about the lives of black police officers, went viral this week after it was picked up and posted by several conservative web-sites. In his lengthy post, Stalien, who did a stint on Baltimore police force before joining the force in Riviera Beach, Fla., explains that why he chose a career in law enforcement:
“I watched and lived through the crime that took place in the hood. My own black people killing others over nothing. Crack heads and heroin addicts lined the lobby of my building as I shuffled around them to make my way to our 1 bedroom apartment with 6 of us living inside. I wanted to help my community and stop watching the blood of African Americans spilled on the street at the hands of a fellow black man. I became a cop because black lives in my community, along with ALL lives, mattered to me, and wanted to help stop the bloodshed.”
Salien goes on to say that he has been heartbroken to see the black community turn on those who seek to protect them and blames what he calls the “toxic hateful racially charged political climate.”
“[I]f it had been me, a black man, a black cop, on TV, assassinated, laying on the ground dead,..would my friends and family still think black lives mattered? Would my life have mattered? Would they make t-shirts in remembrance of me? Would they go on tv and protest violence? Would they even make a Facebook post, or share a post in reference to my death?”
Salien concludes that “Black Lives do not matter to most black people. Only the lives that make the national news matter to them. Only the lives that are taken at the hands of cops or white people, matter. The other thousands of lives lost, the other black souls that I along with every cop, have seen taken at the hands of other blacks, do not matter. Their deaths are unnoticed, accepted as the ‘norm’, and swept underneath the rug by the very people who claim and post ‘black lives matter’.”
In an appearance on CBS News’s Face the Nation, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani echoed these sentiments, questioning why activists have so far been silent about black-on-black violence.
“So a black will die 1 percent or less at the hands of the police and 99 percent of the hands of a civilian, most often another black. So if you want to protect black lives, then you’ve got to protect black lives, not just against police, which happens rarely, although with tremendous attention, and which happens every 14 hours in Chicago,” Guiliani told CBS News’s John Dickerson.
“Every 14 hours and we never hear from Black Lives Matter.”
Dickerson later questioned Giuliani’s claim that the Black Lives Matter movement has put police in danger.
“When members of the African-American community see videos, as they have this week, they feel like there is a target on young black men,” Dickerson noted. “Explain your response about how they’ve put a target on — on police officers, how that can match up when people see these videos.”
Giuliani didn’t hold back. Protesters, he claimed, “talk about killing police officers,” a point which Dickerson tried to refute before Giuliani continued,“they sing rap songs about killing police officers, and they talk about killing police officers, and they yell it out at their rallies and the police officers hear it.”
“The police understand it and it puts a target on their back. Every cop in America will tell you that if you ask him.”
Mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, were quick to condemn Giuliani’s remarks:
The viral post made by Stalien, however, has thus far failed to attract similar attention from formats like Face the Nation and other news shows in addition to the New York Times editorial board.
Snopes.com, a website notable for efforts to discern truthfulness on the internet, immediately posted a page dedicated to Stalien’s Facebook entry.
“A number of readers questioned the veracity of Stalien’s commentary, which was a mixture of personal experience, opinion, and selected statistics,” Snopes.com’s Kim LaCapria concluded. “Scant portions of the writing could technically be subjected to fact-checking, as by and large the comments simply reflected Stalien’s own feelings on race and policing.”
(Photo via Facebook) 
