The open letter by Sheriff Daniel J. Coverley has touched off the expected media outrage and fake news heavy breathing because of its final paragraph, in which he states, “Due to your support of Black Lives Matter and the obvious lack of support or trust with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, please do not feel the need to call 911 for help. I wish you good luck with disturbances and lewd behavior, since those are just some of the recent calls my office has assisted you with in the past.”

But the letter’s previous six paragraphs elaborate at length why the BLM myth about racist policing is a series of lies.

In these three paragraphs, Sheriff Coverley notes that…

Last year in the United States, a country with a population of 330 million people, 1,004 civilians were fatally shot by police officers. The vast majority of these officer-involved shootings were justifiable, and most involved an armed or dangerous subject. There were nine fatal shootings of unarmed black persons (down from thirty-eight in 2015) and nineteen fatal shooting of unarmed white persons (down from thirty-two in 2015) those deaths represent 0.1% of all black homicide victims and 0.3% of all white homicide victims.

The data indicate that exceedingly few encounters with police involve force. For example, only 2% of people who had any contact with police anytime in the prior twelve months said that officers used or even threatened to use force against them, according to the 2015 Police-Public Contact Survey conducted by United States Bureau of Justice Statistics. Over 58,000 officers were assaulted while  performing their duties in 2018, according to FBI data collected from only two-thirds of law enforcement agencies. That is an assault rate of 10.8 per 100 officers. Moreover, assaults with deadly weapons against the police occurred thirty-three times per day.

Recent history confirms that when myths about the police are not strongly repudiated by our local, state and national leaders, law-enforcement officers lose their lives. In 2016, following a national rebellion against law enforcement —like what we are experiencing today —the number of officers shot and killed in the line of duty increased by 56% in that year alone. Twenty-one of those deaths were ambush-style shootings of law-enforcement officers. Who can forget the fine officers murdered in attacks in Dallas, Texas, and the three officers murdered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in only a ten-day period? In recent weeks of national unrest, 750 officers have already been injured defending their communities from the violence that has swept our country. Two members of law enforcement have already lost their lives.

This is a solid and thoroughly ‘evidence based’ argument which is why the media is going after Sheriff Coverley.