Narrative Before Facts (about police shootings)

City Journal ^ | January 26, 2021 | Rav Arora

[karpov]

When officer Rusten Sheskey shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back last year, the media wasted no time establishing the standard narrative: another unarmed African-American shot by racist police.

In a CNN segment on August 25, anchor Jake Tapper said, “Video shows police shoot unarmed black man.” The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, Buzzfeed, Vogue, and several other outlets referred to Blake as “unarmed.” The day after the shooting, David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, asserted, “It’s nearly impossible to imagine any way that his shooting was justified.”

Democratic politicians and celebrities jumped on the story, too. Joe Biden tweeted, “Once again, a Black man—Jacob Blake—was shot by the police. In front of his children. It makes me sick. Is this the country we want to be?” Kamala Harris declared that “the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.” Naomi Osaka, the highest-paid female athlete in the world, tweeted to her more than 800,000 followers condemnation of the “continued genocide of Black people at the hand of the police.”

But as Blake himself admitted in a television interview with ABC News last week, he was not unarmed. “I realized I had dropped my knife, I had a little pocketknife, so I picked it up,” Blake told Michael Strahan on Good Morning America. More critically, Blake admitted his actions at the time were wrong: “I shouldn’t have picked it up . . . considering what was going on. . . . At that time I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

[rktman]

Uh, ever since the debacle on Jan 6th (aka, by hildabeast, as the attack by armed insurgents on the capital) I was pretty sure that any LEO involved shootings regardless of circumstance would be answered with “He/she had no choice!”. End of story. No more ‘hands up don’t shoot’ crap etc.