(Jody Smith and Nicholas Smarr, both shot Wednesday morning after responding to a domestic dispute call, had reportedly been friends for years. Photo credit: Facebook)
Following a 24-hour manhunt, law enforcement finally caught up with the suspected cop-killer who shot and killed 25-year-old Nicholas Smarr, one of two Georgia police officers who were targeted while responding to a domestic disturbance call Wednesday morning at an apartment complex near the Georgia Southwestern State University campus.
Officer Jody Smith survived, but was critically wounded in the attack. Local reports say Smith and Smarr had been best friends since high school, and had even attended the police academy together.
That friendship was abruptly put to an end around 5 a.m. Wednesday, when 32-year-old Minquell Kennedy Lembrick shot Smarr dead and put Smith in the hospital with life-threatening injuries.
The nearby college campus was put on lockdown as more than 200 officers joined in the search for Lembrick, who fled the scene after attacking the responding officers.
According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, Smarr is the 63rd officer to be shot and killed in the line of duty in 2016. The number of police officers who’ve died from non-accidental gunfire has risen by more than 50 percent over last year. Incidents of cops being shot to death have increased so rapidly, in fact, that 2016 stands to become the deadliest year for police officers in a decade.
But while inflammatory rhetoric against police officers rages in America’s streets, those same voices that call for an end to police brutality and the shooting of minorities across the nation are notably silent in moments like these, when a white police officer lies dead at the hands of a black man.
In fact, it’s been 24 hours since Smarr was killed, and the nation has yet to be graced with a statement acknowledging the senseless tragedy from Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, President Obama, or any of the other public figures who tend to come out of the woodwork to slam law enforcement when any person of color is shot by the police, regardless of justification.
Predictably, these accusations of racism against cops -- most notably, white ones -- have always run down a one-way street. The Daily Wire crunched some numbers back in July amid an escalating wave of tension over the killing of unarmed black men by police officers, and found that officers are 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black person than they are to kill the suspect. And while it’s true that black suspects make up a disproportionate percentage of those who are shot by officers, they also account for 40 percent of all cop killers, despite making up less than 14 percent of the total U.S. population.
This data in no way demonizes the black community en masse for the actions of its criminals, any more than the unjustified actions of one police officer reflects on the more than 750,000 officers who serve in communities across the United States.
In fact, none of this should matter, nor would it in a world governed by law, order and common sense. Criminals shouldn’t be quantified based on their skin color, just as cops shouldn’t be demonized at large and justice shouldn’t depend on how much melanin is involved.
But as long as protests rage against any officer who dares to shoot a person of color, as long as stores are looted and cars are burned and highways are clogged by raving lunatics crying “racism” at every corner while they blatantly ignoring the facts behind each case, then likewise, every police officer who dies by the hand of a criminal of color only to be quietly ignored by so-called “justice warriors” should be just as duly acknowledged.