Comments: The Paul O’Neal shooting will be getting a lot of press. Here is the raw footage without any narrative.
They let the family trial lawyer get first crack at the story, who called it a police murder.
My guess is that the public will find the victim not particular sympathetic and see the chaos of a crime in progress.
The cops, obviously, didn’t think about their body cams and were not censoring any thoughts. It’s pretty clear they thought they were shot at and assumed the victim was armed.
It’s a bad outcome — but anyone stealing a car and initiating a car chase with police which included hitting two cop cars — is engaged in some high risk behavior.
* High risk indeed. He nearly ran over one cop and then smashed head on into a cruiser. I don’t think there are enough police shootings.
Compare with this video of a South African motorcycle policeman going full RoboCop on some thugs.
* It is good to see these things without the narrative overlay telling you what to think about what you are seeing. When one sees raw video like this, it is surprising how anodyne these events are.
In this case, the sports car almost crushes an officer. He and his partner fire at it, ineffectively and perhaps recklessly. The sports car hits a police SUV and stops. The driver flees. There is a desultory chase. Off camera gunfire. Suspect apprehended. A lot of talking.
Maybe the police shouldn’t have shot at the car, but no one appears to have been hit, so whatever. Maybe something untoward happened off camera with the gunfire and apprehension, but it was off camera, so it’s unknown for now.
But then you look at the Narrative Imposers, who saw the exact same video:
Head of Chicago police oversight agency Sharon Fairley: “shocking and disturbing”
Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson: “violated procedure”
Former prosecutor Michael Oppenheimer: “beyond horrific” “There is no question in my mind that criminal acts were committed” (Oppenheimer may be a former prosecutor, but he is also representing the O’Neal family in a civil suit. Some media are coy about that but not his being a former prosecutor.)
Oppenheimer benefits from an anti-police narrative, but Fairley and Johnson are supposed to be neutral.
And this leaves aside all the “activists” (typically unemployed ex-cons with a microphone) to whom the media give ample airplay who are uniformly anti-police.
Even in the highly inflammatory Philando Castile video from Minnesota, if you knew nothing about it and saw it without his girlfriend’s narrative overlay (and possible retconning), all you see is a shot man with a gun in his lap. The obvious conclusion would be that he had just lost a gunfight, which may be exactly what happened. His girlfriend’s narrative, which was enthusiastically amplified and elaborated by the media, makes the scene sound like the aftermath of cold blooded murder (in spite of the lap gun) to the point that many public speakers talked as if they had actually seen the shooting happen in the video, which of course no one did because the video starts afterwards.
A level-headed assessment of the videos released so far in the Paul O’Neal shooting.
