Posted on 04/27/2021 8:15:10 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Two weeks ago, Daunte Wright’s death sparked another round of protests and calls to defund/abolish the police. A week later, Derek Chauvin’s trial resulting in a guilty verdict has given the U.S. a reprieve from another round of violent riots. Both of these outcomes could have been anticipated: every time a black civilian dies in an encounter with the police, the conversation immediately becomes about police brutality and police reform. I agree there are many things we could do to reform policing in this country — I have discussed a few possibilities here and here. But while excessive policing is a problem, there are two other aspects to the BLM conversation that are ignored by the mainstream: we will always need some policing and law enforcement to protect civilians from criminal behavior, and many of the recent victims who have been held up as martyrs of the BLM movement had been engaged in criminal behavior.
Daunte Wright had a warrant out for his arrest for carrying an illegal firearm and attempted armed robbery. George Floyd had served several stints in prison. Both men had been accused of armed robbery, attempted in one case and executed in the other. Their final encounters with the police were for non-violent infractions, but their histories of criminal behavior tell a different story. Those histories also indicate that future run-ins with the police were not unlikely.
Ma’khia Bryant, a 16 year old girl shot dead by police in Columbus, Ohio, had been trying to stab another woman. 13 year old Adam Toledo had been firing a handgun in the middle of the night when police were called to the scene. Jacob Blake, left paralyzed from the waist down after an encounter with the police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was attempting to kidnap his children from their mother, who had been awarded custody. In these scenarios, police intervention was warranted.
There is a difference between overcriminalization and excessive policing on the one hand, and situations where there is a threat of violence and the police are called to protect innocent civilians on the other. As a society, we need to be able to distinguish between the two. Instead we are creating a dichotomy in which the police are always wrong. Over time, this will result in more leeway for criminal behavior and less protection for law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, with the public poised to distrust the police, odds increase that people will be more likely to resist arrest, and that fraught encounters with the police are more likely to turn violent.
One could argue that Eric Garner should not have been arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes, or that George Floyd should not have been detained for attempting to use a counterfeit bill. But even if we rolled back all of these petty regulations and made a big push to decriminalize non-violent behavior, odds are that we could not have prevented a future altercation between the police and, for example, a young man on the same trajectory as Daunte Wright.
The Daunte Wright case is a useful example of how quickly situations between civilians and police, which might look cut-and-dried on the surface, become complex. The PR effort to portray Daunte Wright as innocent began immediately: a 20 year old father, pulled over for a petty nonviolent traffic violation, whose only crime is being black. The linked article, from NBC, notes that he was pulled over for driving a car with expired plates and that the situation escalated because he had an air freshener dangling from his rear view mirror. They blithely skip over any mention that there was a pre-existing warrant out for his arrest and don’t say what it was for. In their narrative, what occurred is yet another case of a black man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, now dead for no reason.
If it had been that simple, the outrage would be warranted and welcome, as with the outrage over the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd. Police should not be able to pull you over for having an air freshener on your rear view mirror. Those types of regulations will result in excessive policing, and don’t have foreseeable benefits that protect a community against violence. In an article for Reason Magazine, Billy Binion writes: “Serious criminal justice reform should include an effort to criminalize fewer things. We need to slash away the laws that make virtually everyone a criminal—and that lead to so many unpleasant, and sometimes deadly, confrontations with law enforcement.” Overcriminalization sets the police against the public, creating tension and distrust, when the public genuinely does need law enforcement to protect it from violence.
So perhaps we can all agree that Daunte Wright should not have been pulled over in the first place, in which case he would likely still be alive today. He would also be alive today if the police officer had used her taser to stop his attempt to flee, which is what she meant to do. Instead, she shot him by mistake. Her body cam footage has her saying, “Holy shit. I shot him.” The very next day, she resigned from the force. Her actions were horrible and regrettable. But it’s very hard, nearly impossible, to argue that this officer acted out of malicious racism, or even that the incident was evidence of her unconscious bias.
And there is the reason Daunte Wright attempted to flee the scene: the outstanding warrant for his arrest for possession of an illegal firearm, and allegations that he choked and robbed a woman at gunpoint. Those actions are legitimate cause for arrest.
At the same time that BLM wants to abolish the role of policing and holds up men like Daunte Wright as the reason why, NPR is reporting -- just this month -- that President Biden has declared gun violence an “epidemic” and an “international embarrassment” that has to stop. He has proposed new regulations that include “‘red flag’ laws which would enable law enforcement and family members to seek court orders to remove firearms from people determined to be a threat to themselves or others.” Biden has also allocated $5 billion in his “infrastructure” bill for “community-based violence prevention program,” noting that research shows “deaths from gun violence rose significantly in 2020.”
By these metrics, aren’t young men in possession of an illegal firearm part of the problem, potential perpetrators of “community violence”? How could a community remove guns from its streets except via active police intervention and measures like stop-and-frisk (formerly ended in New York in 2014 after accusations of racial profiling)? How could there be any result other than increasing the number of violent altercations between young men (and women) and the police called upon to enforce gun restrictions — with more of those interactions resulting in more deaths?
The protestors are right about one thing: if our goal is to ensure that citizens with backgrounds and histories like Daunte Wright's never have violent encounters with the police, we might have to, quite literally, abolish the police. However, if our goal is to protect civil society from criminality, the conversation about how the police should deal with people like Daunte Wright -- and Ma’khia Bryant, and Adam Toledo -- suddenly becomes a lot more complicated. The fact is: we will always have laws that punish violent offenders, and those laws will always require enforcement — we can’t have peace if we don’t.
The BLM movement and the mainstream media have used their momentum to focus exclusively on police reform and reducing the role for policing. There’s much we could do there, but black lives would be equally -- or better -- served by an effort to understand what happens in the lead up to violent encounters with the police in the first place. As long as we focus exclusively on police brutality, we’re treating a symptom and not the problem — and we can expect more deaths like those of George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Ma’khia Bryant, and Adam Toledo as confidently as the BLM protestors did.
Dawg, go lie down. You are so confused, you remind me of Biden.
When did Floyd become a shooting victim? When did Garner become a shooting victim?
A law which stands in clear violation of the second amendment. There is no illegal firearm; there is only illegal USE of a firearm.
Anyone who can not be trusted to be armed should not be running around loose.
The Book disagrees.
Heb 9:27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.
Oh, wait...was a < /sarc > tag implied?
THE REAL PROBLEM IS THE BLACK COMMUNITY HAS TOO MANY CRIMINALS.
TOO MANY 'BAD APPLE' BLACK THUGS
TOO MANY PEOPLE INTIMIDATED BY THE 'NO SNITCH RULE'...
The problem isn't cops - it's criminal-controlled black communities, absent fathers, and white liberal elites ginning up hatred among blacks.
I think we have to take a new social tact on what is innocence.
Is a life of crime and repeated encounters with the police with repeated commission and attempted commission of crimes a definition of “innocence”, when that life finally brings the person into a fatal encounter with the police. Maybe it is wrong to be fatalistic in thinking the fatal end was a conclusion preceded by a lot of guilt.
Almost but not quite “Blazing Saddles”.
Well, the most likely scenario if “de-policing” happens is that the police will just take down the criminals’ information, let them go, and then forward that info to the local vigilance committee to deal with.
“But how much danger did Floyd or Garner or Wright present to the officers in question or anyone in the surrounding area?”
That really is two different questions, isn’t it? One question is “how much danger did they pose before police tried to arrest them?” and the other is “how much danger did they pose after police tried to arrest them?”, since in all 3 cases, they resisted arrest with physical force, which objectively escalates the danger to everyone nearby.
Perhaps they posed little threat before police tried to arrest them, but what does that matter? Should we just not try to arrest anyone because the act of trying to enforce laws is going to lead some people to resist, and thereby put themselves and others in danger? That’s the path to anarchy.
The police used a non-lethal procedure on Floyd, he died because of his bad lifestyle.
This culture is what liberalism has wrought.
If that were the case then Chauvin would be walking free as we speak.
“If that were the case then Chauvin would be walking free as we speak.”
You can’t be that naive DD, so I am going to assume you forgot the sarcasm tag.
Whether or not I'm naïve is open for debate, but at least I know what qualified immunity is.
“Blacks say it’s all Whitie’s fault,”
It’s all Whitey’s fault that white men with blue eyes created, with God’s inspiration, a country where these people able to live wonderful, safe, successful, productive lives that they couldn’t if born elsewhere. Sadly, although they’re “able”, they choose NOT to live wonderful, safe, successful, productive lives, but that’s not Whitey’s fault.
If they’re not falling to their knees every blessed day and thanking GOD they were born here, they’re certifiably retarded.
I AM Whitey, and I thank God always that I was born here. That started when I was very young and foreign missionaries would stay at our house when they were on furlough. We saw movies of life in other countries, and that made a big impression. Do these people even get that?
Do you have statistics to prove that the procedure is deadly?
As far as Floyd was concerned it was 100% of the time.
Some people have died while traveling in cars: should car travel therefore be banned?
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