A 16 year-old girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was seen in body cam footage about to plunge a knife into the body of another girl (both girls are black, not that it should matter).
The cop arrives on the scene and right in front of him a male is kicking a third girl laying on the ground while the cop shouts warnings to stop. They don't. A girl is about to be stabbed. The cop has a fraction of a second to act. He fires and kills her assailant.
Sadly, lots of people evidently felt it very important to make a judgment on the matter before getting any facts.
Former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett tweeted that "A Black teenage girl named Ma'Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Demand accountability. Fight for justice."
This is absurd. It wasn't a knife fight. It was a unilateral assault with a deadly weapon. The officer immediately decided to fire because if he hesitated the girl on the receiving end of the knife could well be dead. He shot multiple times because that's what they're trained to do.
Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki implied it was a case of "systemic racism": Psaki said, "She was a child... Our focus is on working to address systemic racism & implicit bias head on."
Psaki is suggesting that any case of a white cop shooting a black victim is ipso facto an instance of "systemic racism." It's an easy claim to make because although it's impossible to prove, it's also impossible to falsify. Her statement is vacuous, but no matter. Regardless of its truth it exacerbates racial divisions and thus has political utility for those who benefit from those divisions.
NBA basketball star Lebron James tweeted that the officer who shot Bryant will be the next to experience Derek Chauvin's fate. He subsequently took the tweet down, hopefully because he realized how foolish it was.
There were other expressions of anger and outrage over the shooting mentioned in the piece linked to at the beginning of the post and also here.
Here are a few questions for those who are so quick to pass judgment on events when they don't have any idea what they're talking about:
- What do these people suggest the officer should've done? The alternatives that some have suggested range from the impractical to just plain dumb.
- If the girl about to be stabbed had been the daughter of Jarrett, Psaki or James, and the police failed to do the only thing they could do to stop it, if their daughter was fatally knifed while an officer stood by and did nothing, would they have exonerated the officer and praised him for doing the right thing? Or would they be bitterly accusing the police of obvious racism because they let an innocent black girl be murdered?
- If Mr. James thinks that the officer who shot the knife-wielding young woman should be prosecuted, why hasn't he spoken out to protest the decision of the DOJ not to prosecute the police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt on January 6th? Unlike Bryant, Babbitt had no weapon and was not threatening anyone. Why doesn't James, and indeed the whole nation, especially our media, seem to care about her death? Is it because she was white?
There's a very distressing and dishonest double standard prevailing in our politics and in our media, the resentment it fosters is one of the reasons for the success of populists like Donald Trump, and it's just not going to end well if it persists.
