Police union head calls for boycotting local pumpkin patch over a #BlackLivesMatter sign

This story is just straight-up depressing.

The head of a Fairfax County police union called for a boycott of a popular pumpkin patch because a “Black Lives Matter” sign was displayed in the window of a home nearby. [...]

In the initial [Facebook] message, Carruthers posted a photo of the sign and wrote that displaying it was a “slap in the face” to the Fairfax County police.

“When Black Lives Matter emerged, it was a small group trying to do the right thing,” Carruthers said in an interview. “The fact of the matter is it seemed like that movement got hijacked toward anti-police sentiments.”

The post has since been deleted, but this premise that the Black Lives Matter movement is "anti-police," as opposed to a civil rights movement that doesn't want unarmed black Americans getting shot, is a position that can only be held if you believe that not shooting unarmed black Americans constitutes being "anti-police." At the very least, that's a position of ignorance, but far more often (e.g. Fox News) it's utterly predictable racism.

The same people that think black Americans are getting "free stuff," or that yes indeedy unarmed black Americans count as super-dangerous and "armed" simply by the virtue of having limbs, or that a black child walking down the street with a toy gun is an obvious reason to panic even while we huff and puff and celebrate the brave patriotic scruffy white unhinged people that wander the streets with their real weapons just to show other Americans that hell yeah, they're allowed to carry weapons—if you already have believed every other racist thing that someone, somewhere has shoveled your way then you of course are willing to believe that Black Lives Matter is not a good and noble civil rights effort along the lines promoted by the inspirational Martin Luther King, Jr., but instead is a violence-minded and subversive anti-authority effort, like the ones promoted by that sketchy troublemaker Martin Luther King, Jr.

What do you see, when you look out on the crowds of black American faces with their signs? For too many Americans, they see only what they are primed to see. Or what they have always seen.

There is a good ending to this story, or at least a better one than you might have expected. The post came down, though only after receiving outrage from many and a sturdy defending from others, people who scuttled out of their holes convinced that Black Lives Matters has been "calling for police deaths" and for whom no amount of saying otherwise would ever do. The family that owns the pumpkin patch and in whose home the sign was displayed in wrote a damn fine response defending and explaining the Black Lives Matter movement. And the local police chief made it perfectly clear where he himself stood.

Fairfax County Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. said Carruthers had the right to free speech, but was not speaking on behalf of the department.

“I'm a neighbor of Cox Farms,” Roessler said. “That sign does not offend me. The sanctity of human life is paramount in our profession.”