Tag Archives: #MostlyPeacefulProtests™

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That which you sow, so shall ye reap

I might not have bothered with this story had the dead criminal’s name not been Winston Smith. Winston Smith is the protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

Winston Smith, apparently nicknamed “Boogie,” was a wanted felon in GeorgeFloydeapolis, and wound up on the wrong end of a gun. On Thursday, June 3rd, United States Marshals tried to arrest Mr Smith on a felony-arms charge. Mr Smith decided that no, he wasn’t going to go quietly, and “exchanged gunfire” with the marshals. He died of multiple gunshot wounds, the Hennepin County medical examiner’s office reported Saturday morning.

As always, Mr Smith’s family demanded answers from authorities.

“I want body camera footage … we want to see that footage of what actually happened,” Smith’s brother, Kidale Smith, told reporters Friday.

“And all other security surveillance as well,” chimed in Waylon Hughes, identified as a friend of the victim.

Of course, Mr Smith wasn’t really a bad guy!

His family claims the angry social media posts don’t reflect the man they knew.

Smith “was a comedian,” his sister Tiesnia Floyd told reporters Friday, adding, “So this doesn’t sound like him.”

She admitted he had a criminal record, but said her brother was trying to improve his circumstances.

Being a convicted felon, Mr Smith was legally barred from possessing a firearm, but it seems that that ‘common sense gun control law’ was not one which Mr Smith chose to obey:

Police officials in Minnesota say the U.S. Marshal’s Fugitive Task Force attempted to arrest 32-year-old Winston Boogie Smith on June 3 for a warrant for being a felon in possession of a firearm, the Associated Press reported. As sheriff’s office deputies assigned to the task force approached Smith’s vehicle, he reportedly refused to comply with orders and pulled a handgun. Officials confirmed Smith fired at least one shot from inside his car.

A statement from the Marshal’s Service said Smith was in a parked vehicle and “produced a handgun resulting in task force members firing upon the subject.” Smith died at the scene from wounds from two deputies’ shots.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension reported that state investigators found a gun in Smith’s car along with a spent cartridge indicating Smith fired from inside his vehicle, the AP article states.

Robert Stacy McCain noted Mr Smith’s anger at the killing of another convicted felon, George Floyd:

In the aftermath of the shooting, Smith’s social media activity came under scrutiny after we found posts on his Facebook profile in which he bragged about shooting a police officer if he was shot at and would not surrender “like the rest.”

“Officer please don’t shoot at me cuz ima [I’m gonna] shoot back I ain’t so sucker like the rest I ain’t going with my hand up” Smith wrote in a Facebook post in September 2019.

In other posts, shared days after the death of George Floyd as the city of Minneapolis erupted in riots, Smith wrote about burning down police stations and starting a “war” against law enforcement. “justice is an eye for eye u kill one of mine we need one of yours that’s justice!,” he wrote in one of the posts.

Smith was sentenced to 48 months in prison in October 2018 for aggravated robbery in the first degree but the judge stayed his sentence and let him out on parole.

Wait a minute! If he was sentenced to four years in the clink in October of 2018, he should still be alive today, behind bars, but alive. Mr Smith is now stone-cold graveyard dead because a soft-hearted and soft-headed judge stayed his sentence and let him out on parole!

“We got guns and bullet proof vest too or should be able to get em … why not just rush these fucks and start this war they keep asking for!” he raged on Facebook.

“Fuck justice anyway bitch justice is an eye for eye u kill one of mine we need one of yours that’s justice! Right or wrong fuck being right cuz they keep doing us wrong.

“I’m down with the burn everything government not touch shit else I don’t even need to loot I’ll buy my shit just kill them dirty ass cops off we tired of being scared at the red light!” he wrote.

Those Facebook posts quoted were from September 12, 2019 — before George Floyd was killed — and May 28, 2020, both after he was treated very leniently by the criminal justice system. It would seem that being easy on Mr Smith didn’t teach him any lesson.

Mr McCain began his post on the subject with a seemingly rhetorical question:

What is the goal of the Black Lives Matter movement? To make it impossible to arrest and prosecute criminals? Because that would seem a logical inference from recent events in Minneapolis.

Those “recent events” are several nights of rioting, burning and looting Mostly Peaceful Protests™. But Mr McCain hit the nail on the head: to the American left, the victims of crime might as well be written off. They are already dead, or maimed, or robbed or raped, and bringing their killers or assailants or robbers to justice doesn’t make those victims any less victimized, it doesn’t bring the dead back to life. Pursuing ‘justice’ at this point simply contributes to ‘mass incarceration.’

But when the American left promote lawlessness, they may find that they get lawlessness. And when the mob take over, the left will find themselves among the first stood up against the wall.

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Does Amelia Carter believe that the law should not apply to black Americans?

Conservatives have roundly mocked the chyron used by CNN to tell us about the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” as a television reporter who might as well have been called Baghdad Bob stood in front of a burning building.

So now we come to Amelia Carter, an organizer for the Philly Human Rights Appeal event, Human Rights Violated Here, scheduled for May 31. She is from Philadelphia and lives on 52nd Street. Miss Carter was granted OpEd space in today’s what might as well be called Philadelphia Enquirer:[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, which brings to my mind the National Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.

A year ago, 52nd Street was teargassed by police. Now we’re fighting back. | Opinion

To make change in policing locally, we need to look in new directions.

By Amelia Carter | May 28, 2021

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. One year since the public flooded the streets, calling for an end to police impunity, the defunding of police budgets, and investment in Black people. And one year since our communities — including mine on 52nd Street — experienced the severe state repression that followed that call.

I have never seen or felt anything like the seven-hour police occupation of my predominantly Black neighborhood, Cobbs Creek, on May 31, 2020. Although neighbors screamed, “Kids live here! Please don’t shoot,” tear-gas canisters flew relentlessly through the air, landing on residential streets. Gas quickly filled the nurseries where babies napped and the hallways where everyday people did everyday things. To escape the tear gas, families were forced from their homes into the street, where police were indiscriminately shooting people with rubber bullets. The cops said they were there to protect us from rioters — but it was them we feared.

The thing that struck me most about that day was the unity I experienced with neighbors. People sprung into action: bringing milk for our stringing eyes, picking us up off the ground, even as they were stumbling. Some made makeshift protest signs and confronted police directly on Chestnut Street as the tear gas finally subsided. At one point, we all decided — without speaking — to hold the line at Chancellor Street to ensure tanks didn’t press farther into our neighborhood. Without realizing it, we all became activists that day.

There’s much more at the original, which you can read if you follow the link embedded in the title. But what you will not find in the 802 words the Inquirer granted Miss Carter is why the police were using tear gas, were using force along 52nd Street. Fortunately, the Inquirer did report just why that happened:

Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?

That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.

Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered.

What Miss Carter told her readers was “the public flood(ing) the streets, calling for an end to police impunity, the defunding of police budgets, and investment in Black people,” was in fact, a destructive riot. The Inquirer reported that:

  • A crowd had broken into the Foot Locker store at the intersection of 52nd and Chestnut Streets;
  • people breaking into stores;
  • a few setting police cars on fire; and
  • some officers pinned down by people throwing rocks along one of West Philadelphia’s busiest business corridors

From the story:

Just before 3 p.m., an officer’s voice crackled over police radio.

“Just to advise you, at 5-2 and Chestnut off of 5-4 and Market, we’ve got a large crowd gathering.”

Radio calls from that afternoon depict an increasingly volatile scene stretching from Arch to Chestnut Streets growing chaotic, and quickly. For 90 minutes, police asked for backup, and as it arrived, people pelted police officers with debris, according to radio calls. People smashed the windows of police cars, looted their contents, and set some ablaze. Others put a burning squad car in drive and pushed it toward officers on the street.

Fifteen officers were injured. A captain took a cinder block to the leg and developed a blood clot and needed emergency surgery. Inspector Derrick Wood, a 22-year veteran who oversees police operations in West Philadelphia and has made rebuilding the relationship with residents a focal point of his command, suffered a fractured nose in two places when he was hit by a brick.

To be fair, Miss Carter did link that story in her original, but she never indicated, in any other way, that the police were using force because the Mostly Peaceful Protesters™ were rioting.

52nd Street is a mostly black business corridor; the police were attempting — sadly, with little success — to protect the black residents who were not rioting, and the primarily black businesses from being damaged or destroyed. “Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed,” the article originally entitled “Buildings Matter, Too” noted.

I suppose that Miss Carter doesn’t think that buildings matter, despite the fact that people, including a majority of black people, live and work in the neighborhood the police were trying to defend.

But, let’s tell the truth here: the neighborhood are afraid that 52nd Street is ‘gentrifying.

The topic of the community meeting — a plan to beautify 52nd Street, to make it safe, welcoming, and prosperous once again — was, on its face, nothing but good news for West Philadelphia’s long-declining business corridor.

Yet the audience of about 50 residents and retailers, mostly African American, grew increasingly agitated as urban designer Jonas Maciunas flipped through a PowerPoint presentation of proposed improvements. Many weren’t seeing a vision of a neighborhood revitalized from Market to Pine Streets. Instead, in the talk of redesigned intersections, leafy thoroughfares, and better bus shelters, they heard the ominous whisper of gentrification.

“It just seems that when white people decide to come back to a certain neighborhood, they want it a certain way,” said Carol Morris, 68, a retired elementary school teacher. . . . .

The area’s population remains predominantly black, but residents say they’ve noticed a growing white presence.

I suppose that, for that neighborhood, more white people is considered a bad thing.

Integration was supposed to bring white and black Americans closer, to beat down prejudice and discrimination. I guess that the (mostly) white liberals of the 1960s thought that to be a good thing, but apparently many in black neighborhoods don’t see it that way.

And so we return to Miss Carter. Her complaint is that the law applies to black people as well as whites:

As Malcolm X pointed out, we will always be limited in our ability to fight for the rights of Black Americans through civil rights, because that requires asking for justice from the very systems built on our oppression. Instead, just as the NAACP and W.E.B. Du Bois appealed to the United Nations, we must claim the rights and freedoms entitled to us in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — and join hands with survivors of state repression around the world to upend this broken country. We must recognize that, just as America weaponizes diplomacy to wage long-haul wars abroad, the police are its mechanism for shoring up the empire at home.

The City of Brotherly Love, the city in which Miss Carter lives, has seen 211 people murdered so far this year, and the great majority of those murder victims, in a city that is not majority black, are black. Does she not want the police to respond to calls over robberies or rapes, over arson and vandalism, over muggings and murders?

The police are not there to oppress black people; the police are there to try to enforce the law. Does Miss Carter believe that enforcing the law is “oppression” of black people? Does she believe that the laws should somehow be different for black Americans? Philadelphia got its ‘social justice’ prosecutor in District Attorney Larry Krasner, and all the city, all the black neighborhoods like Miss Carter’s, got for that is more Philadelphians, primarily more black people, pouring out their life’s blood on the city’s mean streets.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, which brings to my mind the National Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.
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The proper way to deal with the not-so-peaceful parts of Mostly Peaceful Protests™

We already know that District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) hates the police and will not seriously prosecute #BlackLivesMatter protesters who break the law and destroy property, so, to do the right thing, unfortunately, requires that the feds take action. It’s a good thing it was Donald Trump and not Hillary Clinton appointing United States Attorneys! From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Arson charges against prominent West Philly activist draw swift rebuke from protest movement

by Jeremy Roebuck, Posted: October 29, 2020- 10:43 AM

A federal indictment charging a prominent West Philadelphia activist and two others with setting a police car on fire during racial injustice protests this spring was unsealed Thursday, drawing a swift response from protesters and lawyers who questioned the nature and timing of their arrests.

The filing, though sparse on details, alleges Anthony Smith — a social studies teacher and one of the lead organizers of the Philadelphia Coalition for Racial and Economic Legal Justice (Philly for REAL Justice) — was involved in burning a police vehicle during demonstrations outside City Hall on May 30 in reaction to the police killing of George Floyd.

But the document does not indicate whether prosecutors believe Smith, 29, actually set the blaze or assisted those who did or whether they have evidence to suggest he was working in coordination with the other two men charged — Carlos Matchett and Khalif Miller — or any wider group.

All three face charges arson charges that carry a seven-year mandatory minimum sentence upon conviction. They have also been charged with obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder — under a rarely used before this year civil disorder statute that was enacted during the Nixon administration’s efforts to crack down on anti-war and Black Power movements in the late 1960s. They remain in custody pending court appearances later this week.

The .pdf file of the indictment is here.

U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain, who we have previously noted has clashed with Mr Krasner before, released the indictment by grand jury. The Usual Suspects complained about the timing, just a few days prior to the presidential election, and during the Mostly Peaceful Protests™ over the killing of Walter Wallace, Jr, by two Philadelphia police officers as he approached them with a knife that he refused to drop.

Smith’s attorney, Paul Hetznecker, balked at what he described as “the blatant political nature of this prosecution,” noting that his client was arrested less than a week before Election Day for crimes that allegedly occurred five months ago.

“Utilizing the awesome power of the federal government to target activists and select them for federal prosecution during one of the most important social justice movements in our history sends a dangerous message,” he said. “The prosecution of my client, Anthony Smith, a respected teacher and political activist, is part of a broader effort by this administration to criminalize and quell dissent expressed by progressive political movements.”

If Mr Smith truly was involved in the arson of a Philadelphia Police Department vehicle, then he is not only not a “respected teacher,” but is not a person who should be teaching young people at all. What, I have to ask, is Mr Smith teaching his students?

There was a scene on the television series Blue Bloods, in which a leftist teacher was causing problems for Nikki Reagan-Boyle. The fictional student and her mother met with the fictional teacher in the fictional Catholic high school, and there was a picture of Che Guevara on the wall. I laughed at the obvious political message of the program, that one would ever suppose that a parochial school would allow a teacher to have Señor Guevara’s photo displayed, but it does make me wonder what some public school teachers, whose unions are essentially Democratic Party operatives, are teaching their students.

Mr Hetznecker was appalled that the indictment was for crimes that allegedly occurred five months ago? The indictment was brought via a grand jury, something that takes time. Mr McSwain could not move before the indictment was delivered.

Does it send to Philadelphia voters the message that President Trump will try to protect people from lawlessness? I very much hope so!

Since May when Floyd’s death in Minneapolis sparked demonstrations across the country, Attorney General William Barr has urged U.S. attorneys to pursue cases against “violent rioters” using specific charges like the ones deployed against Smith, Matchett and Miller on Thursday.

Nationwide, federal prosecutors have lodged more than 300 felony cases against defendants espousing both progressive and right-wing ideologies connected to the demonstrations, with 20 of them in Pennsylvania, according to research by The Prosecution Project, which has tracked protest-related arrests.

Note the media bias in that paragraph. “(B)oth progressive and right-wing ideologies” would not be politically loaded had it been formulated “both left-wing and right-wing ideologies” or “both progressive and conservative ideologies,” but the way the Inquirer phrased it, bias is indicated.

Of course, if the Justice Department is pursuing cases against both left and right in riot cases, that isn’t bias, other than the structural bias that conservatives are much more likely to do something really radical, and not riot.

In June, FBI agents arrested Germantown massage therapist Lore-Elisabeth Blumenthal, alleging she set fire to two police cars parked outside City Hall during the same demonstration during which Smith, Matchett and Miller are accused of committing crimes.

It’s good that they nailed Miss Blumenthal early on; it’s unfortunate that the cases against Messrs Smith, Matchett and Miller took as long as they did, but, if they are guilty, it will be good to see justice eventually being done.
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