Jeff Roorda, a spokesman for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, says politicians too often side with criminals over the cops who try to collar them — and it caused some officers a "natural reluctance" to do their jobs properly.
"You can take the worst neighborhood in urban Baltimore or urban St. Louis and there still are way more law-abiding citizens living in that neighborhood than there are criminals," Roorda, a former member of the Missouri House of Representatives, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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"And I don't understand for the life of me how politicians who represent those areas continue to stand with the criminals rather than the crime victims that live in their district.
"Particularly black folks who are just as proportionately the victim of crimes and violent crimes — [and] to turn your back on them in favor of standing up for folks that are criminals. Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, I mean there's no other word for them."
He was referring to two suspects whose deaths spurred rioting, looting and arson in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson last summer and earlier this year in Baltimore. The latter resulted in criminal charges against six cops.
Roorda's comments came in the wake of the Memorial Day weekend bloodbath in Baltimore, in which there were 32 shootings that left nine people dead. Some suggest that cops, fearful of prosecution, are policing less.
"It's a phenomenon that isn't new to Baltimore. You saw the same thing in New York a few months ago, we've experienced the same thing here in St. Louis, Cincinnati in the early 2000s, LA in the early 1990s," he said.
"It's called de-policing and it really describes what happens. It's not some organized conscious effort to slow down police work. It's just in the natural reluctance to do your job when you're under constant fire and you really don't know what the right way to do it is in the face of all this unwarranted criticism."