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Horowitz: Atlanta shooting exposes the lie of BLM

Horowitz: Atlanta shooting exposes the lie of BLM

BLM: Blood libels matter.

They matter because when a dangerous lie criminalizing all police and victimizing every black criminal is allowed to metastasize, it turns America into a violent, lawless nation, harming the very people that movement purports to champion. The new rioting over what appears to be an act of self-defense on the part of an Atlanta cop demonstrates that this movement was never about justice for George Floyd.

The reason why the video showing the killing of George Floyd sparked so much outrage is precisely because it was so anomalous in police encounters. The video appears to show Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeling, presumably with a lot of pressure, on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, in a contained situation long after Floyd had been subdued.

Well, now we know that the outrage was not over that anomalous act. What the latest blood libel in Atlanta demonstrates is that those pushing the lie seek to criminalize basic police work and lionize career criminals who needlessly escalate arrests into violent altercations, often killing others.

“Cop who shot Rayshard Brooks dead is fired as bodycam shows the black man talking politely to cops” was the headline the U.K. Daily Mail used to describe the shooting of Rayshard Brooks, 27, in Atlanta late Friday night.

“Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed when he was merely asleep on the passenger side and not doing anything,” proclaimed NAACP vice president Gerald Griggs.

Here is a tweet from the AP regarding the incident:

This is no different from the old blood libels against Jews in Russia.

Any sane person watching this video will realize that, yes, the police were very amicable to him. But that all changed when Brooks violently resisted arrest and grabbed the taser from one of the cops on the scene. You can clearly see in the video that the cop only drew his gun when the fleeing Brooks turned around and fired the taser at him.

Clearly, this case is in line with the vast majority of police shootings of both black and white suspects and many of the others that the media turned into a blood libel against the cops, such as the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. It was clear self-defense, and had the suspect been white, we would never have heard of it. The cop wouldn’t have been fired and rioters wouldn’t have burned down the Wendy’s where the shooting occurred, nor would they have blocked an interstate. And frankly, had they done so, the power of government would immediately have crushed their actions.

But this is what happens during a blood libel that revolves around race instead of justice and facts. Riot first, get the facts later.

I’m seeing some commentators who clearly concede the self-defense point but lament that something so low-level, such as a drunk driver blocking the Wendy’s drive-through, could result in a death. Yes, it is tragic. This is what many cops have to deal with regularly. Many violent career criminals are often caught committing low-level crimes. Cops approach them as if they are innocuous, just as in this case, where clearly the cops treated him as just someone who had too much to drink. But there’s something interesting about violent criminals who barely serve time for past offenses: They are not deterred from acting violent again. Cops never know when someone is going to turn violent on them.

In this case, Brooks appears to have had an extensive criminal record, which included violent criminal charges in Georgia.

It appears that his last bout with the law was in Lucas County (Toledo), Ohio, on December 30, when he was charged with violating his probation as a fugitive from Georgia and was returned to Georgia on January 6.

He also appears to have had a criminal record dating back to 2010 when he was a juvenile, along with numerous parole violations. The system really gave him a lot of grace.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he was working for a restoration company in Toledo, Ohio. The paper doesn’t say when he worked there, but the company evidently put out a message on Instagram praising him.

Could Brooks have been running from the law? He appears to have served only four months of a seven-year sentence in 2014 for charges and convictions of simple battery, cruelty to children, false imprisonment, family violence battery, receiving stolen property, criminal interference with government property, weapons charges, and obstructing a law enforcement officer in the preceding years.

It looks like there were numerous probation violations until a parole officer issued a warrant for his arrest on December 20, 2018, when he had fled to Ohio. It’s not clear why he wasn’t put back in prison when he was returned to Georgia this past January, but it does appear he was supposed to report to the Clayton County Probation Office and was scheduled for a February 5 parole revocation hearing, according to court records.

That would explain why he violently resisted arrest on Friday night. Could he have been a criminal with a violent record who got parole instead of hard time and continued to violate his parole?

Well, thus far, the media has been silent about his record and has lauded him as the ultimate family man. ABC News did an interview with his employer in Toledo and praised him as  “dedicated to hard work and his family” for moving to Ohio in the spring of 2019 to support them. They fail to mention that he already had an arrest warrant in December 2018, and perhaps that is why he left the state. They fail to mention the original underlying crime of family violence and cruelty to a child.

ABC quotes his former employer as saying that Brooks left the company in December to go back to his family in Atlanta “but indicated that he was going to return after "getting some ducks in order." Well, those ducks might have been his surrender to the extraditing authorities on December 30 thanks to the cooperation of Lucas County.

There is a video of Brooks lamenting his probation situation just a few weeks ago.

In the same interview, he says "The moment I get out of hand, back to jail I go."

The full 5-minute interview can be viewed here.

The truth is that the George Floyd protests were never about justice or racism. There was never any indication of racial animus involved, and the cops were indicted very swiftly. The entire premise of police brutality directed specifically toward black victims is nonsense. But when it comes to suspects who are black shot by police, the media and culture create a soft bigotry of low expectations that rioting is acceptable.

Take the police shooting of Daniel Shaver in Mesa, Arizona, for example. On January 18, 2016, cops were called to the scene of a hotel where someone thought Shaver was brandishing a firearm, when in fact he was showing someone the pellet gun he was using for his job as an animal trapper. The following is a video of the encounter, and it is very graphic, ending with the shooting of Shaver in what appears to be cold blood.

The cop was acquitted on all charges by a jury. The cop was white and Shaver was white. So nobody rioted, and few people in the entire country even know who Daniel Shaver is.

The bottom line is that among the nearly 1 million law enforcement officers, there will always be bad people who abuse the force of authority they are given. This is also true of the military. Those bad people tend to be brutal or overreact under stress no matter the race of the individual they are confronting. As researchers from the University of Michigan and University of Maryland reported last year, “We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime.”

We only hear the times police actually use force, usually in a justifiable manner with few exceptions. We never hear about the times they use underwhelming force and endanger their lives or the lives of others and allow dangerous criminals to get away. What people often forget is that cops’ lethal force is a double-edged sword of “use it or lose it.” While a taser is not always necessarily deadly force, had the cop allowed Brooks to incapacitate him with a taser, Brooks could then have taken his gun. Remember Sgt. Michael Chesna – the Massachusetts cop who was incapacitated by a “nonlethal” rock thrown by a criminal who then grabbed the cop’s gun and killed him? Yes, I’m sure you don’t remember it, because nobody rioted over it, but clearly cops have the right not to become another victim.

This is not the true equality real justice warriors like Martin Luther King dreamed of. This is nothing but a blood libel against cops who encounter black criminals and will ensure that they don’t respond to calls from black victims in the future.

This cop clearly had no interest in being at that location late at night, but he was called there by a witness because the drive-through was being blocked. Much more of this, and cops will just sit back and let the violence play out among citizens.

To the political agitators, however, it’s not about black lives, but blue votes and green dollars going into their coffers from giant corporations. For us, it’s the blood libels that matter. Gauging by the Baltimore “Freddie Gray effect” — the phenomenon of deterring cops and emboldening criminals — now going national, countless thousands of African-Americans will become victims of homicide and other crimes.

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