Social Justice activist and lawyer Derecka Purnell
Posted on 07/17/2020 8:41:30 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
A powerful story published by The Atlantic has a serious problem: proof it ever happened.
"When social justice activist and lawyer Derecka Purnell was just 12 years old, she and her sister watched a police officer shoot a young boy in a city recreation center because he had ignored the basketball sign-in sheet. This jarring, emotional, and deeply unsettling story was published July 6 at The Atlantic, in the section reserved for ideas, under the bold, attention-grabbing headline, “How I Became a Police Abolitionist.”
Purnell’s deeply personal story of shattered innocence and shattered bones at the end of a policeman’s gun was shared widely among top journalists and activists. “I started her article thinking abolition was impossible and ending thinking it must happen,” the president of a social justice think tank at Harvard wrote on Twitter, quoting his mother. “This is a beautifully written piece,” the Atlantic’s constitutional law editor agreed. “Derecka is the future,” an activist journalism executive declared.
There’s a major problem with Purnell’s story, however. Based on a Federalist investigation of newspaper archives and the police department records, and questions to The Atlantic, the police union, and the office of the mayor, it does not appear to have ever happened.
“The first shooting I witnessed was by a cop,” Purnell, a widely published Harvard Law and Berkeley graduate who is now a columnist for The Guardian, writes. “I was 12. He was angry that his cousin skipped a sign-in sheet at my neighborhood recreation center. I was teaching my sister how to shoot free throws when the officer stormed in alongside the court, drew his weapon, and shot the boy in the arm. My sister and I hid in the locker room for hours afterward.”
“The officer,” she continues, “was back at work the following week.”
Purnell has led a prolific career, including writing for The New York Times and time at the helm of The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy. Because of her impressive rise from poverty, she’s been the subject of profiles and has been asked to write more than one personal essay on why she is an activist. Despite this, and despite this memory’s seeming impact on her life, her article in The Atlantic is the first mention it ever earns in her publicly available writings. In fact, it appears to be the first mention of the incident in any publicly available record The Federalist was able to uncover.
In The Atlantic, Purnell says she was 12 years old. While her current age is not public information, when she sat for a Kansas City Star profile in 2014 her age was reported as 24. Based on this, we can safely assume the alleged police shooting occurred between 2001 and 2003. A broad search for “police” and “recreation center” in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s archives for those years yields 37 results. Those results include voter guides, community events, feel-good stories, budget updates and all the standard business of local news coverage, but no stories remotely resembling a police officer shooting a boy.
It’s worth noting that 2001-2003 is not, say, 1971-’73 — in addition to a still meaty local media, the United States was on edge: George W. Bush was in the White House, the country was involved in one war and on its way to another, and the police state’s response to terror attacks was under close scrutiny. In all likelihood, a police officer shooting would merit at least one local news story, but it’s possible that more specifics were needed.
Based on the vivid-if-imprecise description of her neighborhood, her “neighborhood recreation center” was most likely the Buder Recreation Center. Having a location allowed The Federalist to launch a Sunlight Law records request with the St. Louis Police Department, but just in case the sisters had attended a different rec center, there was one more that could be walked to from the general neighborhood without having to cross a major highway. Both community centers were included in the records request.
The results, though, do not support a shooting, and certainly not one involving a police officer shooting an unarmed child in front of witnesses.
Between 2001 and 2003, there were 23 police responses to the Buder Recreation Center and 38 to the 12th & Park Recreation Center. The nature of the calls cover a range of incidents, from accidents to domestic disputes, from pedestrians in need to suspicious vehicles, from larceny to arson. None of the police responses, however, involved a shooting except perhaps one attempted suicide at the 12th & Park rec center.
“I’m a little bit at a loss for words here because the shooting of a young boy by a cop in a St. Louis rec center, even if it had happened 20 years ago, I feel like that would be in my mind somewhere,” mayoral spokesman Jacob Long, a former reporter, told The Federalist over the phone. “That does not sound remotely familiar, and I’m from here … I was here in 2001, 2002, 2003.”
“You went to the right place to try and verify that incident, the police department,” he added.
The Federalist sent two emails to Yoni Applebaum, The Atlantic’s editor of the Ideas section, asking if the magazine fact-checked the claim:
…can you detail the fact-checking process for this story? IE which editor was tasked with confirming the details alleged in the story?
Did The Atlantic verify the details of the shooting with local authorities?
Did The Atlantic speak to any other eyewitnesses to the alleged shooting, or to any witnesses who recalled the incident and corroborate the claims made by the author of the story? Did The Atlantic speak to the police officer allegedly involved in the shooting, or to any of his representatives, legal or otherwise, prior to publishing the story?
Can you provide the name of the officer responsible for the alleged shooting? Can you provide the name of the recreation center where this allegedly happened? Can you provide a police report of the incident? Can you provide the date of the shooting?
Applebaum did not respond. Purnell also did not respond to a request for corroboration.
In her essay, Purnell used the story of the shooting to ask readers to consider the innocent victims of policing, going on to make the case for abolishing the police. If her ideas had been implemented before her experience, she writes, “I wouldn’t have hid in the locker room for hours because of a police shooting, and maybe my sister would have a better jump shot.”
Video or it didn’t happen...
That shooting story is a lie.
The truth will make you free. Lies will enslave you.
Yet another victimization hoax. I wonder if the readers of THE ATLANTIC will ever be informed.
A story in The Atlantic.
The Atlantic is full of garbage, crabs and sewage.
It’s also the name of an ocean.
The scum will do and say ANYTHING to further their narrative....anything!
Social Justice activist and lawyer Derecka Purnell
It’s such a massive injustice that whether it is true or not is rendered irrelevant
“because he had ignored the basketball sign-in sheet.”
Of course it never happened, but look at their made up premise. It is built around not being able to follow a simple rule; and they saw this as a believable scenario. Telling.
The propaganda machine that is MSM dues not worry about the truth. Get the narrative out and if the story turns out to be false it doesn’t matter.
What a bunch of malarkey.
“I was teaching my sister how to shoot free throws when the officer stormed in alongside the court, drew his weapon, and shot the boy in the arm. My sister and I hid in the locker room for hours afterward.”
Such obvious BS.
Yep.
The story also says the cop shot “his” cousin. So was it a black cop? Why would he be upset at his cousin for not not signing a sheet.
She apparently caught COVID, even though she insists she wore her mask and social distanced and washed her hands. Her doctor said people can get it through their eyes (which is true, although more if you wipe it onto your eyes).
But either she didn’t do as good a job with masks as she thought, or maybe she is trying to prove masks don’t actually work.
In any case, the article is still interesting; i’m not for abolishing the police, but it is not often someone at least TRIES to make a real argument out of it, even if they do manage to have made-up childhood memories driving them.
The editor responsible for publishing this load of b.s. is named Yoni Applebaum?!?!?! YONI?
What an amazingly appropriate name.
““I started her article thinking abolition was impossible and ending thinking it must happen,” the president of a social justice think tank at Harvard...”
It takes an extraordinarily weak mind to make a 180 degree shift in thinking based on a silly story. Such is the mental capacity of the social justice wizards at Harvard. Even if this type of incident happened once a year it is still STUPID to abolish the police, just based on cost/benefit analysis.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.