Steve Sailer writes: There’s a push these days to take away cops’ new quasi-military toys. That was part of the early right-of-center conventional wisdom out of Ferguson in 2014: it was all the cops’ fault for dressing like orcs.
In reality, working people these days are much more safety conscious than they were, say, 40 years ago. Rendering the cops as ill-equipped as they were during the Dallas Massacre doesn’t solve much.
Instead, you have to work with the fact that cops aren’t as brave as they used to be when they’d just walk up with a knightstick and whack a perp into submission. That can get you into real trouble these days. Nonlethal violence looks bad on video, like when the LAPD, having been denied the use of a chokehold, but not wanting to shoot Rodney King, hit him a whole bunch of times to finally subdue him. That didn’t work out so well for the cops
In Tom Wolfe’s 2012 novel Back to Blood, Miami cop Nestor Camacho bravely wrestles down a Rodney King-sized black perp, but an out-of-context video winds up all over social media.
Now, cops say things like, “I’m going home tonight,” meaning: “I’m not getting myself killed over this.”
So we need to work with that reality and develop stand-off means to allow cops to deal with possibly armed suspects without shooting them.
* There is a big problem with how 911 calls are passed on and with how the police treat “man with a gun.” It was reported as “suicidal white guy with a gun” (it was a toy truck – the man was autistic and childlike). One the police arrive at the scene expecting a gun, they are primed to see one and as soon as they see one they feel justified in killing you immediately, especially if you don’t seem to be “compliant.” People are often not compliant because there is something wrong with them (mental illness, don’t speak English, etc.). The police killed Tamir Rice TWO SECONDS after they arrived on the scene, because he was “reaching for his gun.”
* This shooting is the clearest example yet of too many people getting shot by cops. This is a real problem, that has nothing to do with race. But for Obama, everything has to do with race, so instead of helping to solve it, he exacerbated a different problem.
I haven’t seen any pundit make the connection, but some of this stems from how atomized America is today. There’s little in the way of organic community institutions that can deal with stuff without calling 911, which brings cops at Def Con 1. Maybe if there were a neighborhood watch that could have taken a closer look at the autistic guy and saw he had a toy before someone called the police.
Maybe in the Alton Sterling case, there could have been a merchant’s association or whatever to give Sterling a job sweeping up the sidewalks in front of the stores instead of selling CDs.
Maybe in the case of the black lady whose mentally ill son was shot dead by a cop for holding a screw driver, there could have been some neighbors to call to help get him to the mental hospital without killing him.
* Police are not known for elementary marksmanship skill, as this pathetic episode demonstrates. The irony is that IF he had aimed, breathed, focused on front sight, P R E S S E D the trigger, he would have killed the autistic guy. So all in all, his incompetence computed into embarrassment and minor injury, nothing else.
* “White” Hispanic is newspeak for he is the bad guy in the narrative. If they could get away with it we would have “white” Asians, “white” African-Americans, etc.
* He tried to shoot a harmless, unarmed idiot and missed shooting instead an equally harmless and unarmed bystander. This is a tough one if you are queer for cops. The guy with his hands up (the stupid violent black guy) was trying to convey useful information to the trigger happy moron who shot him.
* This seems more like a hiring standards issue to me. If the police weren’t under the cruel yoke of AA I’m sure no one would have been shot.
* Many readers might think that this is churlish in the extreme from me, but here we see a so called ‘Hispanic’ autistic adult being accompanied by a ‘professional’ black ‘caregiver’ – evidently doing the job the autistic man’s parents will not do -.
I don’t know how long the autistic man’s parents have been in the USA, but I would love to see a pure accountant’s cost/benefit analysis of the tax contributions of the parents compared to the tax expenditure on the autistic man. Remember, the likely taxpayer cost of ‘care giving’ of this type must run into tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per annum – that is more than one full time worker, somewhere in the system, must go out to work each and every day to support the autist.
Plus we have the absurd sight of a seemingly fit, active, healthy able-bodied man not contributing to the economy in an active way, but being employed as a ‘caregiver’.
Yes, yes, I know many of you will hate me for saying all this, but just think of what the huge sums of money poured into ‘care giving’ this ‘Hispanic’ could have done for giving inpecunious talented college students financial support.
* The whole episode has a very Dave Barry sort of farcical quality about it. Basically what you’d expect in South Florida.
BLM won’t admit that the incidents they complain of are more Keystone Kops clumsiness than KKK lynchings, because that would take the wind out of their sails, but most of life is farce, not drama.
* Which cases, in this country of nearly a third of a billion residents, would you care to cite? Alton Sterling? Philando Castile? Michael Brown? How many unreasonable cases would you expect to find, in any given year, in a country this populous, considering the nature of our population? It seems to me, if police are willfully or wantonly shooting innocent-and-harmless Black men, in significant and unacceptable numbers, as claimed by Black Lives Matter and the mainstream media, inter alia, then those advocates and activists should be able to rattle off any number of clear-cut cases of willful or wanton killings of innocent-and-harmless Black men. Instead, the “martyrs” cited, mourned and canonized are overwhelmingly people like Alton Sterling. Would you like for me to detail his case, including his lengthy and telling rap sheet, leading up to his death?
* If you rear end someone, as a private citizen, you have no right to exit your car brandishing a weapon– whether you legally possess that weapon or not. If you are a private citizen, you also have no police power– meaning no authority to order the other driver, whose car you just rear ended, not to move. If you shoot him with the gun that you are illegally brandishing, based merely upon the unreasonable supposition in your own hypothetical, then you have committed a further crime– the nature of which depends upon your aim and the resulting effect of your illegal action.
When a policeman, in the course of his duties, stops a car, whether as the result of a BOLO match or a reasonable suspicion of some other violation, such as speeding, he is exercising his police powers– and the consequent duties of the driver stopped is utterly different from when he has been rear ended by a bad driver, such as you. The policeman must act reasonably, under the circumstances; but, his circumstances, as an officer of the law, are utterly different from yours, as a bad driver who approaches another driver, whom you just have rear ended.
The bottom line is, each case must be analyzed on its own facts. Black Lives Matter activists, the mainstream media, and even many of Steve’s readers, seem to think that the police have no more authority to apply potentially lethal force, in furtherance of their duties, than does any private individual, and that police shootings of members of the public should be presumed to be illicit, with the shooter required to prove otherwise. That is not how the law works– thank goodness!
* Tamir Rice.
Two very obvious words that nobody seems to want to say because they are taboo:
Ghetto lottery.
I don’t know if this is true about the Tamir Rice case specifically. But I do tend to think that that any number of ghetto mamas are deliberately having their sons of say, late pre-adolescent and early adolescent years, run around in public and play with toy guns, in the hopes that a cop will shoot and kill him and then she can cash out in a lawsuit. Think about it: Let’s say you’re L’Booshondria, and you gave birth to little N’Deshawntavious when you were 15. Twelve years later, you’re 27 and he’s 12. And it’s easy to see that N’Deshawntavious will never amount to anything; he just joined the FFA, Future Felons of America. He can’t rap, can’t ‘ball (play a sport), and doesn’t have the meddle to be a dope dealer. Ghetto black single mothers love to try to monetize their sons and guilt-trip them into being her surrogate husband and provider. So, what is L’Booshondria to do with N’Deshawntavious who has no natural money making ability in the only ghetto ways available, rap, sports or drug dealing? Easy — Cash out on his black body using the ghetto lottery; bait the police into shooting and killing him.
