Police were not actually in greater danger than they had been before the Black Lives Matter movement. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate, called police “the force between civilization and total chaos.” Some states began passing laws to categorize physical attacks on law enforcement officers as hate crimes. “That’s maybe why it came to my eyes,” he said.Īs Jacob built the company, a “Blue Lives Matter” movement was growing in the wake of news stories of multiple officers shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Brooklyn, New York and Dallas. Jacob said the flag was not a direct reaction to the first Black Lives Matter protests-an idea suggested by a previous origin story in Harper’s-but he allows he may have first seen the thin blue line image after those protests spurred the circulation of pro-police imagery online. “It’s a flag to show support for law enforcement-no politics involved.” The company officially disavowed its use in Charlottesville. “The flag has no association with racism, hatred, bigotry,” he said. Now, Jacob is the president of Thin Blue Line USA, one of the largest online retailers devoted exclusively to sales of pro-police flags, T-shirts, neckwear and jewelry. While in high school in West Bloomfield, Michigan, he had attended a memorial service for a police officer who had been killed on the job. He had seen the image of the flag on patches and stickers, he told The Marshall Project, but not an actual flag. In 2014, a white college student named Andrew Jacob was watching protests of police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice. Now, as police again become the focal point of a fight for racial equality in the U.S., the flag has returned to both mirror and amplify divisions.īut how did this flag come to be so pervasive? And what does it really stand for? County officials in Oregon recently paid $100,000 to a black employee of a law enforcement agency there, after she said she was harassed by coworkers for complaining about her colleagues displaying the flag at work. But it has also been flown by white supremacists, appearing next to Confederate flags at the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
#Flag with red stripes and one star professional
Those who fly the flag have said it stands for solidarity and professional pride within a dangerous, difficult profession and a solemn tribute to fallen police officers. Officers have worn versions of the flag on face masks while clashing with protesters in Baltimore and in Washington, D.C. When deputies hoisted the flag outside government buildings in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Orange, California, the sheriffs in both communities were sharply criticized. Recently, the flag was flown from the back of a car alongside protests in South Dakota, and burned outside the Utah State Capitol. Sign up for our newsletters to receive all of our stories and analysis.Īs protests over policing continue to convulse cities throughout the U.S., one symbol keeps showing up: a black-and-white American flag with one blue stripe. The Marshall Project is a nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S.
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