Here We Go Again

Maybe it's a sign of the times, but I find myself not disagreeing with Don Lemon, insofar as his take on the shooting of a teenage black girl by a cop, where he was roundly slammed by the self-styled epitomes of compassion and justice at the View.

It's a day that ends in "Y", so yes, there's another case where cop has no right choices to make. I, for one, can grok why even a milquetoast like Tim Pool is saying he couldn't give a squirrel's left nut about cops or "back the blue" types if they're not willing to stand up for their own when it counts - such as the Norfolk, VA cop fired because he dared donate to Kyle Rittenhouse anonymously (but for an illegal hack and leak).

So - what are the known facts?

A 911 call comes in related to someone getting all stabby. Cop drives over to look into things, and almost immediately, without a chance to talk to anyone, sees someone bowled over, then a girl get up and charge at another girl, knife out, pinning the other girl in pink to the car, and raising the knife to strike,

He shoots her.

Immediately, the crowd begins to yell at the cop. Why'd he have to shoot a teenage girl (She had a knife, and was about to stab someone, duh...). And so on.

The media was, predictably, no better. They uncritically took the word of the teen's family and neighbors, and the narrative was that the teen was unarmed, or had dropped the knife already, and there, not an hour after Chauvin was declared guilty, we are still murdering black people who weren't doing anything for no reason whatsoever but racism.

Not that the body cam video or the across-the-street surveillance video helped much. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that there was a knife in her hands, that the cop didn't simply walk in with his gun up and start shooting, the narrative in much of the black community was still racist white cop (but I repeat myself) shoots unarmed black kid for no good reason. The story went out, as well, that it was M'Khia that called for help.  

Most of the excuses boiled down to a variant of "it's just a knife," dismissing the lethality of a blade, or how much time the cops had to react. He should have fired warning shots, etc. The cop should have fired warning shots for the girl who ran past hi to get to her intended victim. Or tazed her. Or the oft-stated "why more than one shot question."

These comments betray an ignorance of not only the lethality of a knife in close quarters, willful or otherwise, but also how little guarantee there is that a single bullet or tazer would stop the murder of the girl in pink in a timely manner.

What truly raises this to the level of clown world is the insistence of a large swath of the media that knife duels were a normal and everyday part of teenage life, and the cops should have just let them be. And of course, the belief that the teen girl was flat out murdered by the racists she called for help because racist is running wild in the black community, much like the belief that Dylan Roof was fete'd at a Wendy's by the cops before being taken to jail (why is it always Wendy's?), to the extent that you can find tikitok videos of blacks interacting with cops where the "youth" (I assume) holding the phone and recording asks, "are you going to kill me like M'Khia Bryant?", and scoffs when the cop asks in return "are you going to stab somebody like her?".

"She called y'all for help."

Let's just say for the sake of argument she did call for help, in all sincerity, and in the intervening couple minutes, felt sufficiently threatened to completely lose her temper and start charging after people.

It doesn't matter if she had needed help - she was now the aggressor, and not backing out.

Worse - assuming she had placed the call - there is the possibility that she was trying to get the cops to take care of and possibly even kill someone for her, to be used as a proxy.

As to cops? Find yourself a different job. If you don't show up, you're racist for not caring. If you do show up, you are implying by your presence that blacks need more oversight, you racist. Once on site, if you don't act - you don't care, you racist. If you do act, well,  you know.

And as icing on the cake, glorified idiots like LeBron James will threaten you with directed violence.

Unless your community, fellow cops, and department leadership have your back - what the hell are you doing staying in that job?

Once again, the truth doesn't matter, just the narrative.