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| Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (AP) |
Now that I got that out of the way...
The fatal shooting of a 26 year old black woman by the name of Breona Taylor by Louisville police was tragic. She was an innocent person caught in the middle of a police action. They were executing a search warrant.
Ms. Taylor did not deserve to die this way – or any way. No one does. The city of Louisville recognized that and recently awarded her family a $12 million dollar settlement. Of course no amount of money can replace a human life. But at least there was an acknowledgement that an innocent person died at the hand of the police regardless of the circumstances. And they paid a price.
Whether the police that shot and killed her are guilty of murder in any legal sense was still an open question. Until yesterday. Kentucky’s Attorney General Daniel Cameron who is himself black was tasked with studying all the evidence surrounding that tragic event and submitting it all to a Grand Jury for a possible indictment. The Grand Jury refused to indict.
They determined that when the police approached Ms. Taylor’s door demanding she open it up, a shot was fired from inside her apartment through the door - injuring one of the cops. They returned fire. Some of those bullets hit Ms. Taylor and she was killed. The Grand jury saw it as self defense. Ms. Taylors death as unintended, accidental... and no crime was committed. The police simply shot back after being shot at first.
The fellow that shot the cop was also not indicted because he said he thought the cops were dangerous criminal intruders. The cops claimed they announced they were cops before they attempted to enter. (There was one witness who said he heard them say it. Others there did not hear them say it. There was a lot of commotion and confusion. So it is quite possible that he didn't hear them say it either.)
End of story? Hardly. The entire mainstream media saw yet another innocent person killed at the hands of racist police. And proclaimed this to be yet another gross miscarriage of justice. Black lives matter protests erupted all over the country but were mostly peaceful.
But not in Louisville. The outrage was palpable. Rioting broke out. Fires were set. 2 cops were shot...
How dare these cops get off free – killing yet another innocent black person for no other reason than she was black?! The fact that a black Attorney General said it wasn’t didn’t matter to them. He too was somehow racist against ‘his own people’. I guess they believed that he was just another ‘Uncle Tom’ who just liked sucking up to ‘whitey’ for the few crumbs they throw him.
Never mind the fact that he is a highly intelligent and accomplished public servant elected by the citizens of Kentucky – most of whom are white. It didn’t matter because leaders of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement see every instance of a black person being killed at the hands of police as purely racist.
And the mainstream media is lapping it up.
I watched several news reports after the Attorney General’s announcement and they all said the same thing. How is it possible that these cops were not indicted for murder? A lot of different people were interviewed after that and all of them questioned what the Attorney General did. Not a single person defended him. These cops were guilty and got off scott free. Racism wins. Justice loses.
Was there no one that defended that decision? Was there no one that dared to contradict the media narrative that when a black person gets shot by the police it was because of racism?
I think there was. But the media didn’t want to hear that side of the story. They only interviewed people that agreed with them. Thus presenting a picture to the public of unified anger at yet another instance of systemic racism in police departments all over the country. What about the 2 cops that were shot? OK the media admitted that this too was bad. But it was almost besides the point and they id not spend more than a few seconds reporting it.
I’m sorry. Not every instance of a black person being killed by a white cop is racially motivated. The Grand Jury didn’t think so. Which is why they decided not to indict. The media and all the entertainment personalities that joined their chorus did not have access to all the evidence the Grand jury did. But they ‘knew’ these cops were guilty. Had to be. Because of systemic racism..
The people on the grand jury had to know that the poliically correct thing to do was to decide to indict. They had to know that not indicting those cops might cause protests and even rioting. They had to know that they could have avoided that. And yet they still chose to do the right thing based on the evidence presented to them.
There are those who accuse the attorney general - even though he is black - of biasing the jury in the way he presented that evidence in order to avoid an indictment. I guess they didn’t even notice that he was black or how choked up he got when he made the announcement. Thy saw bias by black man against his own race! The could not entertain for a moment that what the Grand Jury decided was based on the facts and the law. That this was not a case of racism but rather of police defending themselves against someone firing bullets at them from behind a closed door.
This is what we have descended to in our day. Cops are guilty until proven innocent. What was once (and still in many cases) an assumption by cops about black suspects has been turned back on them. This is attitude is not justice. It is a perversion of justice.
This is of course not to say that black people are not justified in the claim that they are unduly harassed by police because of their color. In far too many cases when a black person driving a car is stopped by police the assumption is more often that they are guilty of… something.
Whereas when a white person is stopped under the same circumstances they are more often given the benefit of the doubt. Anyone that doesn’t see this is simply being blind to that reality. It is an outrage when it happens. Protesting this unfortunate reality is well justified. I join all good people – both black and white in protesting this until it gets fixed.
How that should be done is a good question that is beyond my paygrade - and in any case beyond the scope of this post.
But to see every instance of cops being hard on a black person as racist is the exact opposite of the justice we should all be pursuing.