Posted on 01/02/2022 12:44:19 PM PST by grundle
It’s just incomprehensible to me that we have a system that is so biased, so random, so unbelievably racially biased... '
The radical social justice movement to transform police officers into compassionate caregivers, and police departments into social service agencies, appears to have suffered a setback in what was already a tragic story.
William Dorsey Jones Jr., a black police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, on the day before Christmas Eve shot and killed an unarmed, 14-year-old Latino girl, Valentina Orellana Peralta.
Jones was one of several officers who responded to a 911 call from a retail store in North Hollywood, where a man was reportedly attacking customers with a heavy bike lock, according to the Associated Press. When police arrived on scene, one officer holding a rifle pushed to the front of the pack, while “other officers repeatedly said “slow down” and “slow it down.”
“Hold up! Hold up!” another officer screamed just before three shots rang out, reported the AP. The officer holding the rifle fired, police said, leaving the attacker and 14-year-old Orellana Peralta dead. Jones was the officer who fired the rifle, with a stray bullet from the hail of gunfire striking the girl, who was hiding with her mother in a store dressing room.
It’s a storyline that has played out in a disturbingly familiar pattern, when in the heat of a tense criminal encounter, police are required to make life-or-death decisions in the blink of an eye. Far too often, the officer involved, especially if it was a white male, has been viscously maligned for shooting the law breaker, especially if it was a black male.
No matter how well-intentioned or legal an officer’s actions were, social justice warriors have taken to the streets in protest and riot, activist politicians, pundits and leftist media have bellowed for change, for reform and for police accountability.
Which is where the case of LAPD officer Jones takes an unexpected twist. That’s because Jones was a self-proclaimed Black Lives Matter adherent and social advocate for change, according to the Daily Beast, who “was determined to position himself as a bridge between police and communities of color.”
“I’m a black man, I’m the father of a black son, I’ve been the vict[im] of racism,” Jones wrote in one now-removed tweet. “I’m the LAPD. I have the power & determination to affect CHANGE in the community. Im a proud member of the #thinblueline & #blacklivesmatter.”
The tweet has been scrubbed, along with a Twitter page showing Jones promoting a nonprofit, Officers for Change, and related charitable activities, reported the Daily Beast, while another now-inaccessible account indicates he coached a local high-school football team.
Like a majority of law enforcement officers, Jones seems by most reports to be earnest about his job, sincere in his goal to fight crime and make his community’s streets safe. But in the backlash of activist movements to defund the police and handcuff their ability to carry out critical decisions in a chaotic moment, that job is becoming increasingly perilous and subject to public persecution.
That holds especially true in California, where extreme leftist Gov. Gavin Newsom approved one of the nation’s toughest standards for the use of deadly force by police officers, requiring that officers use it only “when necessary in defense of human life.”
“It’s just incomprehensible to me that we have a system that is so biased, so random, so unbelievably racially biased,” the governor, a Democrat, told The Marshall Project before signing the legislation.
California double-downed this year, when it approved a raft of police reform measures that included eliminating legal immunities that shield law enforcement from civil rights lawsuits, and implemented a review process that includes officers possibly losing their badges for serious misconduct incidents such as racial bias or excessive force.
“Too many lives have been lost due to racial profiling and excessive use of force,” Newsom proclaimed in a press statement. “We cannot change what is past, but we can build accountability, root out racial injustice and fight systemic racism.”
How that standard will apply in the Jones case is yet to be seen. But if immediate reactions are prescient of future conduct, the social justice and woke police reform cloak that Jones wrapped himself in is likely to prove a benefit.
A case to that point was already made by the New York Times, with a headline that declared “Officer Whose Bullet Killed a 14-Year-Old Girl Wanted to ‘Change’ the Police.” The subtle yet decidedly subjective shift from a black officer who killed to “officer whose bullet killed” is telling.
If the police change that Jones wanted and reportedly worked for comes to pass, it might prove a rude awakening for the woke.
I read two reports from the police earlier in the week that the round that took out the girl ricocheted off the floor.
I agree. In this current environment nightsticks would save lives. The cops would have a less lethal outlet for their adrenaline than just their trigger finger.
Anyone know if police use FMJ for their rifle rounds, or do they use a hollow point or soft point?
Thank you for detailed and reasoned explanation. I watched the full 35 minute video put out in post #7 and I agree with your assessment. The officer with the AR-15 or M-16 should have been on point given the nature situation. The suspect was told to stop but then looked to be reaching around the corner, possibly for a weapon. It will need to be thoroughly investigated, but it looks like it may be a justifiable shooting.
If blame is to be assigned, let's blame the store.
No, let's blame the criminal who created the entire situation by attacking several shoppers and nearly beating an innocent women to death.
In general I disagree with your “no excuse” comment. But that is not saying the rifle was applied correctly in this case.
Same experience with others who are culturally from South and Central America.
It’s the brain-washed immigrants who lean left that buy into the use of “Latino” or “Latina” I believe. YMMV..
Perhaps? But I look at it more as an Ethno-centric term.
If you can trace your ancestry roots to a Latinzed nation (Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Romania etc..) then you are “Latin” or “Latino”.
If not, why use the term?
Yeah calling somebody Indio in Mexico is like using the “N” word.
But, some folks fit in that category. My whole point is why would an Indian (Native Mexican) call themselves “Latin” when their heritage says the opposite?
Why is English a target language to be abandoned?
Why is not Spanish abandoned?
Spanish is the language of historical oppression in the Americas - where Spain conquered.
If THE RESET position is to be originality, are we not to speak whatever was our local tribal utterance of 500, no, make that 1,000, no, make that 5,000 years ago?
And, what, and where, is THE RESET POSITION?
Is it not, to reject standards that help us to communicate and have the benefits of simplifying production (our chores and tasks of the day) thru mutual agreement and understanding?
In all the fuss over culture, wherein we are expected to comply with cultural purity, who has abandoned the mechanisms and ways of using, for example, the steel knife?
Let alone, the wheel.
Cancel English (but not Spanish?!). Cancel gasoline-powered transportation and engine operations. Cancel Harbor Freight stores. Cancel pipelines. Cancel individual rights to choose regarding our health (where are the pro-abortion “Free Choice” advocates re COVID-19 vaccination?).
Cancel self-discipline, and instead, just make any noise you want at midnight, or let your dog chew up the neighbor’s leg, or just mess with people because you feel like it and do not like how somebody looked at you.
When, suddenly, something goes wrong, and you happen to be in need of standards, decent behavior, clean linen, sterile medical tools, and so much that we have to learn, and apply well . . . BUT you failed to GIVE kindness and respect.
Yeah - you failed to provide what your neighbors needed, peace, quiet, some mutual security, so that they are in good enough shape to SAVE YOUR SORRY BUTT.
Recently, I watched pastor Corey Brooks, southside of Chicago, as he had at his table, two former [cultural] gang bangers whose gangs “really tore up the place,” but had gotten older and wiser and resolved to make peace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpKTL2eip8E
The thing that people want: good homes, good neighbors, good schools, good neighborhoods, a good mother and father watching over their family and taking care of them and others.
Could people just leave their false pride and vanity somewhere behind themselves, and instead, attend to building and maintaining what actually does work?
It is already hard enough, to do that, WITHOUT having to rebuild some structure that the Culture Wars destroyed overnight in “mostly peaceful ‘protest’.”
Apologies, if I went too far on a tangent, but today has not been easy, and tomorrow, I admit, I fear.
Hispanic folks don’t like to be lumped into one big giant generalization. There’s not much that Cubans and Mexicans have in common other than the language, and that’s probably debatable.
Hispanics are nationalists for the most part. A black Colombian has little in common with a white Mexican. Same can be said of a mulatto Peruvian with a mulatto Nicaraguan, except the language probably.
I think for Americans, it’s easy to lump everybody in Latin America together just based on the culture/language commonalities. It’s much more difficult than that. That’s like us calling all the East Asian nations the same because they have slanted eyes - the epitome of ignorance.
I guess start with calling them their nationality. Refer to them as Cubans, Venezuelans, Argentines, Mexicans etc. I’m not PC by any stretch of the imagination, and I hate BS too - like referring to all Hispanics as “Latinos”. It’s a fake Marxist term that is IMHO using a racial term to describe multiple ethnicities in a sub-continent of people who happen to speak the same language. And that is probably the only thing in common these people have.
Latin America has probably the highest diversity mix of races in any part of the world.
Wow!
Didn’t expect my post to create a rant, or maybe that was not your intention?
I used my post to throw a stone at a personal issue I have with ignorance within the “Hispanic” community and the bed-wetting liberals who make up terminology that is both politically and historically incorrect.
Hope your tomorrow is better!
Not sure?
If they are white probably ethnicity. Language for sure.
Spanish = Direct descendant of Latin.
Perhaps during his young adolescence, that was true.
Thomas Sowell wasn’t too kind when referring to poor blacks in the US in his book Blacks, Rednecks, and White Liberals.
+100
That’s one of my biggest pet peeves about them using that term too. The irony of it all. LOL.
That could be true, although most people wouldn’t confuse Brazilians with Hispanics. Unless you’re a professor at some university who insists they speak Brazilian in Brazil - yes I heard some doofus say that once.
Very good point...it also bothers me that there were customers still in the vicinity of the perp when the police arrived. Why didn't they get themselves out of there?
I can understand your points but what I was talking about his pushing past two other officers who did speak words of caution to him at a time when all he could possibly have known were the screams of someone - he did this before he saw anyone being beaten and bloody - at least as I understand it
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