- Obama nurses rioters
- Data shows zero racial bias by police in the use of deadly force
Charlotte NC police shooting and riots:
Unsurprising but invariably the widelydisseminated “profile” of the “victims’ of such incidents are portrayed as “just having turned his life around”…was planning on going back to school and getting a PhD in Physics, etc, etc. May be the case here, but……
On an important note regarding the Charlotte (and Tulsa) police shooting incidents, I don’t believe I’ve heard a peep out of our usually very vocal president when race is an issue. Would be very uncharacteristic of Obama if he were “holding off until we get all the facts”. Where is the call for calm that “leaders’ are expected to issue in situations like this…regrettably, “leaders” is not an appropriate term for our current post-racial president.
Regarding the Charlotte North Carolina situation, as relayed by Paul Mirengoff at Powerline, the Charlotte Observer reports:
The friends and family of Keith Lamont Scott, the Charlotte man killed by police this week, portray him as a “family man” and “likable.” This may be true.
However, Scott also had a long police record that included gun violations. Buried deep in this Charlotte Observer story, we learn:
- Scott was convicted in April 2004 of a misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon charge in Mecklenburg County. Other charges stemming from that date were dismissed: felony assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and misdemeanors assault on a child under 12, assault on a female and communicating threats.
- In April 2015 in Gaston County Court, Scott was found guilty of driving while intoxicated.
- In 1992, Scott was charged in Charleston County, S.C., with several different crimes on different dates, including carrying a concealed weapon (not a gun), simple assault and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He pleaded guilty to all charges.
- Scott also was charged with aggravated assault in 1992 and assault with intent to kill in 1995. Both charges were reduced, but the disposition of the case s is unclear.
- According to Bexar County, Texas, records, Scott was sentenced in March 2005 to 15 months in a state jail for evading arrest. In July of that year, records show, he was sentenced to seven years in prison on a conviction of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman said Scott completed his sentence and was released from prison in 2011.
Mirengoff concludes:
None of this means, necessarily, that Scott had a gun when the police killed him or that the police reasonably felt threatened by him. But Scott’s record makes it all the more unfair to assume — as the Charlotte protesters do, explicitly or implicitly — that claims by the police that he was armed and potentially dangerous are untrue.
The picture is stacking up that Obama and his political cronies will nurse the rioting, play to the rhetoric of the rioters, dare we say foment more by not placing blame where it is obviously due — on the rioters who are using an incident to rampage and loot, and the political among them, engage in actual hate crimes. The purpose — energize get out the vote efforts for blacks. Foment resentment.
How many dominant media news outlets made it known, as local media did, that all the cops involved were black. The cop that killed the suspect is black and his dad was a cop.
Gary Bauer at Campaign for Working Families shares our concern about Obama’s motivations (or lack of motivation). Bauer writes (posted here in its entirety with permission):
There was another night of rioting in Charlotte, North Carolina. This time the city’s business district was targeted. Apparently the mob heard the demand of Nation of Islam leader B. J. Murphy for an economic boycott of the city.
Here are some observations after a second day of anarchy in Charlotte.
First, where is President Obama? For nearly eight years, he has commented on virtually everything from pop culture and sports. But when Charlotte is being trashed by rioters, the president can’t seem to find a camera or microphone.
Ninety-three percent of black Americans voted for him. Presumably he has some influence. He is a constitutional law lecturer. This is an excellent time for him to remind the rioters that everybody — not just accused Muslim extremists, but even police officers — has a right to due process.
There is a report, courtesy of White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, that Obama addressed the rioting in a call to the mayor of Charlotte. Obama told her that “any protests should be conducted in a peaceful manner and that local law enforcement should find ways to calmly and productively engage those protesting.”
The mayor has no ability to make the protestors be peaceful. And how do police officers “calmly” engage with rioters? That phone call had one purpose — to tell the mayor to make sure the police were not assertive in restoring order. The result, sadly, was obvious.
If you watched video from the streets of Charlotte last night, the response to the rioting was pitiful. The police were vastly outnumbered and were under orders to keep their distance from the rioting. The mob controlled the streets.
Multiple stores and business were ransacked. One man was viciously beaten in a parking garage. Reporters covering the riots were attacked. In one instance, rioters attempted to throw a photographer into a fire.
One man was shot during the violence and is reportedly on life support. Late last night, Governor Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency and called out the National Guard.
Second, journalists need a refresher course on the plain meaning of English words. Breaking windows, stealing cigarettes, Red Bull and drugs, attacking journalists and other innocent bystanders is not a protest. That is a riot. It has no relationship whatsoever to a black police officer shooting an armed black man. But most media continued to refer to the violence as “protests.”
Finally, I want to review some statistics. There is little evidence to support the left-wing narrative that there is a widespread problem in American law enforcement of black men being killed by racist white cops. For example:
- More whites are shot every year by police than blacks. The Washington Post reports today, “Law enforcement officials have fatally shot 706 people this year, 163 of them black men.” That means just 23% of fatal police shootings involved black men and the vast majority of those shootings were justified. (See below.)
- A Harvard study found that there was zero racial bias by police in the use of deadly force. The black economics professor who conducted the study said, “It is the most surprising result of my career.” The New York Times conceded, “The result contradicts the image of police shootings that many Americans hold.” But they have that image because of media bias.
- According to data from the Department of Justice, and confirmed by a study conducted by a University of Pennsylvania criminologist, black police officers were 3.3 times more likely to use deadly force at a crime scene than were other officers.
- According to Heather Mac Donald, a research fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black criminal than a black citizen is to be shot by a police officer.
- The Washington Post conducted a massive study of police shootings last year and concluded: “But only a small number of the shootings — roughly 5 percent — occurred under the kind of circumstances that raise doubt and draw public outcry. . . The vast majority of individuals shot and killed by police officers were . . . armed with guns and killed after attacking police officers or civilians or making other direct threats.”
Obama has done much to hurt race relations and hurt the lot of black Americans through his economic policies.
DLH with R Mall
