Anti-police hate is about to get more intense in Seattle

I fear that anti-police rhetoric is going to get ratcheted up a few notches. But, first, the good news.

There’s an interesting poll out this week that highlights how Seattleites view the Seattle Police Department.

I contend there are a lot of folks in the media – activist bloggers, activists pretending to be reporters – who are trying to paint cops as the bad guys. The reporters over at the Seattle Times do it and thinks it’ll win them awards, for example.

And of course, you’d expect that this kind of narrative would influence how the public views the cops.

So when I saw a survey done for the federal courts, as part of the federal decree looking into the Seattle Police Department, I was pleasantly surprised.

Related: Anti-cop Times feature lacks important context

Almost entirely across the board, you have people having a positive view of the SPD. Overall, 64 percent approve, up 4 points since 2013; but even more promising, only 25 percent disapprove, which is from 11 points since 2013. Asians, Latinos, LGBT Seattleites all overwhelmingly approve of the police.

Seventy-percent of people who are stopped by the SPD approve of how it’s handled and this is true of African Americans and Latinos (particularly meaningful in that the narrative from activist groups are that the cops unfairly target people of color).

In fact, while the activists are out there pretending police are just attacking people at random, less than 1 percent of those polled for the court say they’ve been victims of excessive force. That includes African Americans and Latinos.

But what’s sad – and it’s due, in part, to the narrative from the local Black Lives Matter protests as well some in the media have pushed by jumping on the Black Lives Matter movement without fact checking them – the poll suggests, even though virtually no one polled actually has experienced police brutality, 46 percent say SPD use excessive force very or somewhat often.

Now, when they directly hear from the cops or interact with the cops, people like the department.

For the most part, the data is finally starting to catch up with reality. It is undoubtedly true that sometimes, cops do bad things and those cops should be fired and/or thrown in jail. But, the vast majority of cops are the “good guys” undeserving of the hate they experience for the heroic task of putting on a uniform every day with the intent of enforcing the law and protecting you and I from the bad guys who wish to do us harm.

Related: Here’s a way to stop hateful, anti-cop bias

But here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to have people who don’t like this poll. They’re going to use it to go after cops even more because they don’t want to lose this ideological battle. Too many activists are perverted by their own biases against cops; perverted by their own anti-authority ideology (remember, they think the SPD was wrong in how they handled May Day; they want protesters who break the law, to go unpunished). They’re in love with the power they have over the police force at a time when the SPD is under the watchful eye of the Department of Justice. They don’t want to lose that.

Consequently, you’ll see more anti-cop stories. Some will masquerade as hard-hitting journalism. Others will be from bloggers with an ax to grind. Now, it will be coming from the usual places, but I suspect they’ll be more vicious because they don’t want to lose the battle they’re waging against cops.

This all means it’s on you to call it out when you see it (and you’ll see it because you’re working on becoming a better consumer of news, right?). You’ll need to speak louder with the truth about cops (while not ignoring cases where police legitimately do bad things and should be called out), drowning out the folks who will always push hate.