Barack Obama, as chief law-enforcement officer of the United States, is going to have to stop acting like a conscientious objector in this war on cops.

On Tuesday, another police officer, in Fox Lake, Ill., Lt. Charles “GI Joe” Gliniewicz, was gunned down. On Aug. 29, Darren Goforth, a Houston deputy sheriff, was shot 15 times by an alleged black racist.

President Obama has yet to show the same indignation and outrage he exhibited at what happened to Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Ferguson.

This year, 24 cops have been gunned down. The day after Deputy Goforth's execution, the Black Lives Matter group showed up at the Minnesota state fair chanting, “Pigs in a blanket! Fry 'em like bacon!”

It's time for Obama to ascend the bully pulpit and call out the racial demagogues in the fever swamps of his own radical left constituency. For some of the evils of the last century that we thought we left behind seem to be returning, as is the old indulgence of lawlessness when done by those claiming some “grievance” against society.

The lead story in the New York Times on Monday reported a surge in murders in New York after the death of Eric Garner in an encounter with police on Staten Island and even greater surges in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

To discover the causes of the new crime wave in America, we should reconsider what rolled back the tsunami of crime that swept America from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

One of the causes was simple demography. From 1962 to 1990, the baby boom generation, largest in U.S. history, passed into, through and out of that age cohort, 18 to 36, where crime among males is at its highest.

Second, beginning with the Reagan era around 1980, America nearly quadrupled the number of incarcerated, from 600,000 to over 2 million. Muggers, robbers, rapists and killers were taken off the streets and put away for decades.

Cops became heroes. America's cities became livable again.

Post-Ferguson, America seems to be dividing angrily over this issue of cops and crime.

The right sees America's cops as civilization's last line of defense against crime and anarchy. Among liberal elites and the Black Lives Matter crowd, an old notion is regaining ascendancy — cops are the problem and police are all too often the oppressors.

In the 1960s, Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared that if he had to endure the conditions of the ghetto, he “could lead a pretty good riot” himself, while Nixon ridiculed the Kerner Commission report that blamed the riots on “white racism.”

A strong stand for law and order helped to give the GOP a near quarter-century lock on the presidency.

The law-and-order issue is lying there again, waiting to be picked up.

Meanwhile we ought to hear from our president about who and what he thinks are responsible for all those wounded and dead police officers.

Pat Buchanan is the author of “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.”

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