Regarding recent Minnesota shooting by police,

• Protestors refuse to wait for a more thorough exposition of facts about the incident and the individuals involved.  Given the heretofore one-sided presentation of facts and non-facts, one would hope that responsible political leaders would caution people.  Unfortunately that is not the case with the likes of Black Lives Matter.

• Snopes once again exposed as partisan liberal spin machine it is

The shooting death of Philandro Castile, a 32 year old black man, by a policeman in a Twin- Cities suburb a few days ago, was immediately glommed on to by the usual suspects to incite demonstrations denigrating police for being racist and targeting blacks. We have seen article after article referencing the shooting as after a routine “traffic stop”  and referencing sketchy information associated with a video taken at the time by Castile’s girlfriend which did not record the full play of events or all relevant angles.

There are reportedly 600,000 police officers working in the field.  We fully expect that in that number there are some bad cops. However the impression irresponsible people want to give is that police departments operate in a racist manner and that crime statistics indicate black people are being profiled and picked on.  You can only subscribe to the later if you believe against all objective evidence that crime does not occur inordinately in “some communities”  and that the police are not accordingly engaged in protecting law-abiding citizens of and solving crime in those communities.

Now we are starting to hear of additional relevant information about the Minnesota shooting, as yet perhaps not exculpatory of the policeman as such, but certainly of a nature that would give reasonable people pause before their rush to antagonistic judgement of police on patrol as racist and trigger happy.

Newer released information (article from Conservative Tree House) boils down to that Mr. Castile was not pulled over for a routine traffic infraction (although according to police records Mr. Castile’s traffic violations were routine, to the extent of dozens of them). It seems he was pulled over on the basis of a very reasonable observation by the officer that Castile resembled the description of an armed robber who held up a convenience store in the same neighborhood only a few days before. Castile had a similar beard and haircut to the armed robber seen in the store’s surveillance video.  They were distinguishing features and easily noticeable by a patrol officer in passing traffic.

Mr. Castile, note similar facial hair and hair down neck as in photo at right

surveillance picture of armed robber — same town just a few days ago.

That Castile matched the basic description, enough to warrant investigation, that the offense being investigated was armed robbery (with intimidation as indicated in the surveillance video), that Castile had a visible gun as seems to be indicated in the girlfriend’s video, that we do not know where he was reaching in relation to the weapon (the assertion that he was reaching for his wallet, if true, indicates tragedy not necessarily “racism”) definitely indicate a much more complicated situation than “racism.”

Snopes on the matter

We knew that the latest information filtering out about the incident is a serious challenge to the liberal narrative about what happened (that of a trigger-happy-racist cop if not racist-assassin cop) when Snopes got hold of it so soon. Snopes of course is the place where reports not in keeping with liberal doctrine are challenged by denigrating select or even straw man rumors and ignoring more serious challenges to liberal orthodoxy.

Snopes could only be picayune in trying to disqualify the Conservative Tree House report by making an issue that Philando Castile was not wanted for armed robbery and not a suspect.  Snopes point was based on that Castile  was not specifically named in a warrant or other directive. The investigation had not gotten further than the issuance of a BOLO (Be On Lookout) for someone with a particular discription, which is what the police officer was responding to. The main point of the Tree House article was clearly that Castile could be seen to at least resemble the armed robber and that detaining him (pulling him over) was reasonable. The reference to Mr. Castile being a named “suspect” was crucial to nothing and in this case merely an arguable choice of words.

R Mall

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