Special Privileges for a Special Job

As the five Dallas police officers who died in an ambush recently are memorialized and laid to rest, that's where we have arrived. Some anti-police violence activists on the radical fringe want police departments disbanded altogether, while others would be content if police were simply disarmed and placed at the mercy of violent criminals who would still have access to deadly weapons.

This perverted notion of equality even carries over to how we're supposed to talk about the victims of street violence. Here, the police reform activists and their liberal advocates in the media have painted themselves into a corner.

On the one hand, maintaining that all lives are equally precious, they insist that Americans should mourn not just the dead officers in Dallas but also the various victims of police violence.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni recently wrote that President Obama had gone to Dallas in an attempt to calm "a nation reeling from [the officers'] deaths and the ones just beforehand of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota."

Does anyone believe that most Americans would equate the murderous ambush in Dallas -- which resulted in five police officers targeted and killed, seven other officers wounded, and a major city paralyzed for several hours -- with the unfortunate deaths of two individuals during encounters with police?

But on the other hand, the reform advocates push back against the suggestion that they should be more concerned about black-on-black crime because, they claim, there's a difference between someone meeting his demise at the hands of a fellow citizen and that person being killed by an agency of the state -- i.e. the police.

They can't have it both ways. Are the police just like everyone else, or aren't they?

Here's the answer: They aren't. When someone kills a police officer, it's a blow against civilization. After all, if someone were to kill enough of them, the result would be chaos and the end of society.

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.