Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik tells
Newsmax TV a "total disregard for law enforcement" has broken out across the nation.
"There's a bunch of comments in the news, in the media, across the internet about a war on cops. I have to tell you this is bigger than that. There seems to be a total disregard for law enforcement, for law and order," Kerik said Friday to J.D. Hayworth and Miranda Khan on "Newsmax Prime."
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"It's jeopardizing local state and federal law enforcement agents and police officers all over this country. To somebody that's run the biggest police department in the nation, it's pretty disturbing to me and every chief, every executive [with] men and women under their command. They should be concerned right now."
His comments come following a deadly shooting at a Panera restaurant 30 miles northeast of Baltimore that left two Harford County deputies and the suspect dead — the latest tragedy in the growing list of attacks on police coast to coast.
Kerik said the anti-cop feeling is unlikely to subside anytime soon.
"At the rate we're going, I don't think it's going to stop but our law enforcement in general across the country right now have to realize that they are targets. Domestically there's this movement, an anti-cop rhetoric that's been going on for about a year now and it seems to be growing," he said.
"We have ISIS [The Islamic State] … or al Qaida that have sent messages to all across the internet and social media … for their colleagues and cohorts to attack law enforcement and our military.
"There is a definite threat out there that cops have to be aware of, they're going to be constant targets and that's just a realization of the world we live in today."
Kerik — author of
"From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054," published by Threshold Editions — says the epidemic of cop killings reinforces the dangers law enforcement faces on the job every day, something the public doesn’t always understand.
"That's what a lot of American people just don't get. They don't understand. These men and women put their uniforms on, they go out, they risk their life strictly by the mirror appearance of that uniform on a daily basis," he said.
"They don't care what color, what creed, what nationality the people are that they have to respond for, that they have to rescue, that they have to assist.
"They go out there to do a job and they do it better than any other country in the world but it comes at a risk, a very dangerous risk and we've seen that over the last six or seven days."
Kerik believes the risks police face now are worse than when he was a young beat cop on the street.
"When I was a cop and I told a kid to get off the corner or kids that were acting up to go back home or do something, they did it. Now, in today's world, a kid pulls out a gun. You get attacked by a mob of kids," Kerik said.
"Just the other day we had two cops that were brutally attacked by a bunch of high school kids when they were trying to break up a fight at a high school.
"That kind of stuff just didn't happen. There was more respect for law and order but that has dissipated over the years and that's a problem for our society in general."
He said some of the hated towards the police is backlash from the controversial shooting of a black youth by a white cop in Ferguson, Missouri.
"It is. I'm not the only one that believes that. The FBI director has spoken on it," Kerik said.
"Other law enforcement executives and chiefs and directors of public safety around the country, they would agree there's this constant, anti-police rhetoric that does not seem to tone down and it's having an impact on some of these attacks on cops."