The conviction of Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd allowed (Black) America to exhale – but only for a minute. Because viral videos of tragic encounters between white cops and Black men since then have had Blacks hyperventilating non-stop for criminal justice, hoping against hope that such videos become obsolete.
But the first thing to be said about this trending video is that the Black man involved actually survived the encounter. It features several white cops in a scrum over a Black man when one of them starts kneeing him with a vengeance, apparently, to get him to stop resisting arrest.
You’d be hard-pressed to find reporting on this incident anywhere that is more objective than The Washington Post’s. Here is how it led off its report yesterday:
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On Saturday evening on a boardwalk in Ocean City, Md., police enforcing a ban on vaping surrounded and tackled a teen as an agitated crowd gathered. Then, one officer repeatedly kneed the teen in the stomach.
‘Stop resisting!’ one of the officers yelled. …
Ocean City officials pledged to review the officers’ actions but also noted in a news release, ‘Our officers are permitted to use force, per their training, to overcome exhibited resistance.
But the videos left many people questioning whether police needed to use such force over a vaping ordinance.
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I’ve seen the video. Here’s my take.
The officer who repeatedly kneed this kid should be fired, and prosecuted. I used the word “vengeance” to describe his behavior advisedly. Ironically, he seemed as hell-bent on doing harm with his knee as Chauvin seem indifferent to the harm he was doing with his.
That said, ask yourself if the video would plainly show three grown policemen struggling to arrest this kid if he were not resisting arrest? This, I submit is too often the preventable cause of these deadly encounters, namely Black men resisting arrests.
This is why civil rights and BLM leaders do Black men no good when they rush to defend them unconditionally. In fact, that these leaders invariably fail to admonish Black men against resisting arrest amounts to salutary, if not willful, neglect.
After all, their activism has done little more than acculturate young Black men to resist arrest pursuant to some misguided “black” badge of courage. Not to mention that these leaders invariably use the rioting and looting that so often follow viral videos of these encounters as leverage for the lawyers who chase them to compel financial settlements; this, as surely as some lawyers chase ambulances to compel the same.
But, trust me, you do not want to live in a society where kids bullying cops becomes the norm. And bullying is what it amounts to when they not only refuse to obey lawful commands but hurl defiant obscenities at cops as they do so.
I’ve heard the despairing cries of New Yorkers who are getting just a little taste of what that life would be like. No doubt this is why Eric Adams, a retired police officer, is now leading in the polls in the race for mayor. He’s a law-and-order candidate who is now poised to win the Democratic primary on June 22, which will effectively make him mayor-elect of New York.
But I have raged, bemoaned, and implored in too many commentaries to count. I even addressed these interracial and intra-racial issues in a recent Talking iPINIONS podcast episode titled “American Menace: White Cops Killing Black Men,” on April 17.
Therefore, I invite, no I urge, you to check those out for more of my take on recurring encounters between white cops and Black men that too often end in all-too-avoidable tragedy.
Related commentaries:
George Floyd… American menace…
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