We noted on the 23rd how credentialed media institutions like what I like to call The Philadelphia Enquirer have been pushing the “cops shoot black people for no reason” meme, and how such an august newspaper — founded in 1829, making it decades older than The New York Times — responded with such glee at the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin over the death of George Floyd:
- Relief, calm, and a sense that ‘justice was served’ as Philadelphia watches Chauvin’s guilty verdict
- Looking into Derek Chauvin’s eyes as he was convicted of George Floyd’s murder: It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be Black in this moment.
- George Floyd’s family members celebrate verdict and vow to fight on for racial justice: The guilty verdict against Derek Chauvin came as a validation of the Black Lives Matter movement, one in which Floyd’s relatives have emerged as central players.
- The Derek Chauvin verdict is in. These are the lessons of this painful year, and where to go from here. If Chauvin was freed, the real tragedy would have been that those of us fighting for justice would have lost hope. Now that we haven’t, it’s time to take care of ourselves.
- Yes, celebrate Derek Chauvin’s conviction, but we’re not done. Not by a long shot. Today, we rejoice. We laugh. We cry tears of joy. But tomorrow, we need to get back to the business of advocating for real change in terms of policing in this country.
Even on Sunday, April 25th, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page is running a big section on the verdict against Mr Chauvin:
Screen capture, The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 25, 2021, taken at 11:25 AM EDT, by Dana R Pico.
Now comes former Washington Times reporter Robert Stacy McCain, noting how the credentialed media — if you can actually call the HuffPost “credentialed” — are still fanning the flames:
by Robert Stacy McCain | April 25, 2021
Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics remarks on Twitter:
Hard to imagine a more divisive, sensational, context-less headline. A textbook example of the media being the enemy of the people.
The story in question is by the Associated Press:
Even as the Derek Chauvin case was fresh in memory — the reading of the verdict in a Minneapolis courtroom, the shackling of the former police officer, the jubilation at what many saw as justice in the death of George Floyd — even then, blood flowed on America’s streets.
And even then, some of that blood was shed at the hands of law enforcement.
At least six people were fatally shot by officers across the United States in the 24 hours after jurors reached a verdict in the murder case against Chauvin on Tuesday. The roll call of the dead is distressing:
- A 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio.
- An oft-arrested man in Escondido, California.
- A 42-year-old man in eastern North Carolina. . . .
- An unidentified man in San Antonio.
- Another man, killed in the same city within hours of the first.
- A 31-year-old man in central Massachusetts.
The circumstances surrounding each death differ widely.
Were they engaged in crime? Were they resisting arrest? Did they pose a threat of deadly violence? “Circumstances . . . differ widely,” we are told, but all the Associated Press and the headline writers at the Huffington Post are interested in is the number, with the implication that the lives of innocent Americans everywhere are endangered by the police.
There’s more at Mr McCain’s original.
The “16-year-old girl in Columbus”? A police officer shot her as she was attempting to stab another girl to death! The Inquirer ran two stories on the death of Ma’khia Bryant, but I have not been able to find a single story on the newspaper’s website main page concerning the individual deaths of people virtually every single day in the City of Brotherly Love, which I believe to be because there’s no perceived political advantage to be found in stories about young black men being shot by other young black men. Jaslyn Adams, the seven-year-old girl killed in a McDonald’s drive-through lane, because gang-bangers were trying to kill her father? Her black life doesn’t matter, because it wasn’t taken by a white policeman.
Mr McCain noted:
Even if someone is charging at you with a knife, cops can’t shoot them — that’s the madhouse toward which the media seek to lead us.
When I saw that brief paragraph, with the internal link about Ma’khia Bryant, my mind went to the shooting of Walter Wallace, Jr. There were riots in the City of Brotherly Love last fall after two officers shot Mr Wallace, a mentally unstable man who had been the subject of several calls to police, by his own family, that very day due to his rampages. Body camera photos showed the whacked out Mr Wallace charging two officers, on the last call concerning Mr Wallace’s threatening behavior, with a raised knife.
Of course, the Usual Suspects waxed wroth. Why didn’t they shoot him in the leg, the Snowflakes™ chimed in? Why didn’t they use tasers? (The responding officers did not have tasers.) William Teach noted that the San Diego Union Tribune’s Editorial Board said that Police urgently need a more humane alternative to lethal weapons. It’s time to design one, as though no one is trying to do that right now. Sometimes I think that these people have watched too much Star Trek and think the police can just set their phasers on stun.
Naturally, the family, the same family who called the cops on Mr Wallace, “wanted answers.” The answer was simple: two officers responded, had to make a split second decision on a guy charging at them with a knife, and took the right one. Riots followed in Philly, and the Inquirer’s website gave 99 returns in a site search for Walter Wallace.
The activists at Ohio State University, which is located in Columbus, the city in which Miss Bryant was killed, were just thoroughly upset about it:
Destiny Brown, a senior at the Ohio State University, breathed a sigh of relief in her dorm room on Tuesday when the guilty verdict came down for former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. But the moment of respite proved short-lived. Minutes later, she scrolled on Twitter and learned that a 16-year-old Black girl, Ma’Khia Bryant, had been shot and killed that afternoon by Columbus police.
“I can’t even begin to process the fact that we live in a world where people’s lives — regardless of what they’re doing, what they have going on, guilty or not, innocent or not — their lives just do not matter,” Brown told Yahoo News. “It doesn’t make sense to me and never will.”
Overcome with a feeling of helplessness, Brown fired off a group text message to her friends Tuesday evening. “I’m ready to organize again,” she told them.
In a matter of hours, Brown and her friends had planned a sit-in to be held the following day at the Ohio Union, the university’s student center in Columbus. Their goal, Brown said, was simple: to demand that the school sever ties with Columbus police over Bryant’s killing and its mistreatment of students of color.
Columbus, Ohio, saw 175 murders in 2020, and, as of mid October, 75% of the victims were black:
Columbus Police also shared details on the homicide suspects. Of the 79 identified, 65 are Black with 59 being Black men, and nine are white with eight being white men.
Of the cases police say were solved, 56 had a Black victim and a Black suspect, two had a Black victim and a white suspect, seven had a white victim and a Black suspect and six had a white victim and a white suspect.
I couldn’t find more recent numbers, but in 2010, the population of Columbus was 28.0% black. Shouldn’t Destiny Brown, a senior at Ohio State, be asking why a city that’s 28% black is seeing 75% of murder victims being black, and that 96.6% of the solved murders of black people were committed by other black people? Then again, if the local media in Columbus are anything like the media in Philadelphia, Miss Brown may never have heard that so many black people had been killed locally, the vast majority of them by other black people.
The lovely Miss Brown wouldn’t admit it, of course, because she’s too #woke to do so, and asking the question leads to an uncomfortable truth: in urban America, the black culture allows these killings to happen, and the credentialed media have been their willing accomplices.
