Dennis Frazier perpetuates harmful police stigma, gets FOP endorsement anyway

A reckless accusation to make

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Last week, Carroll County’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 20, endorsed the State Delegate candidacy of outgoing county Commissioner Dennis Frazier, as he pursues the representative post in Carroll’s crowded legislative District 5, which stretches from Taneytown through parts of Westminster and into Eldersburg.

Also receiving the FOP’s endorsement for Delegate were fellow outgoing Commissioner Stephen Wantz and incumbent lawmaker April Rose.

But it is the FOP’s endorsement of Frazier that is uniquely peculiar, considering the Delegate hopeful just publicly perpetuated a harmful stigma about police in The Baltimore Sun.

Yes in a published candidate profile for all across the region to see, Frazier basically insinuates that police are, well…. racist.

The question posed to Frazier by The Sun that prompted that insinuation was this:

“How equitably do police officers treat people of color?”

Now before even considering Frazier’s response, let us first acknowledge the inherent leftward slant built into the phrasing of the question. A more neutral version of the same inquiry would be framed so it invites a simple yes or no response, like — do police treat people of color equitably — and then if the responder chooses they can elaborate on the extent to which the police do or do not.

Regardless, as for Frazier’s reponse, it reads like this:

“I feel it depends more on the person than the position. I do believe however that people of color are viewed with more suspicion and not given the assumption of innocence.”

To state that police on the whole do not grant people of color an assumption of innocence, is quite literally to suggest that law enforcement as a collective discriminates on the basis of race.

What a reckless accusation to make.

He does qualify it a bit, saying it depends more on the individual than the position, but he certainly does not say it depends exclusively on the individual, which is of course the truth.

But this widely held yet provably false notion that police systemically discriminate against people of color has had vicious consequences for both minorities and officers alike over the course of the last few years — just look at how both cohorts are the victims of murder at much higher rates than before.

Now I have no insight into the internal politics of Carroll’s FOP or what criteria they might have used to decide who they endorse, but I can’t imagine many beat-walking workaday cops would have a favorable view of a politician, a Republican one nonetheless, holding such an opinion as this.

Yet Frazier has their endorsement regardless, and maybe even a ticket to Annapolis as a result.

Maryland Muckraker is a completely independent and fearlessly conservative blog covering local issues by me, Ethan Reese. After spending nearly a decade in corporate Baltimore in marketing technology, figured I’d have a go at writing. Since then I’ve contributed articles to FOX’s OutKick, PJ Media, and Rare Politics, as well as being named a Writing Fellow with the America’s Future Foundation.