The body of a junkie ex-con who had robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint was placed in a golden coffin on a horse-drawn hearse while a nation whose cities were burning watched.
Cannon Hinnant was laid to rest quietly in a small funeral home across the street from a gas station. The mourners, some driving pickup trucks, parked out front and made their way through the puddles to hear his youth pastor eulogize the 5-year-old boy who had been shot in the head.
The deaths of George Floyd,a 46-year-old Minneapolis black ex-con strung out on drugs, and Cannon Hinnant, a 5-year-old white boy from a small city in North Carolina, are both symbols.
Floyd’s death during a struggle with police led to nationwide race riots, the destruction of statues and stores, hundreds of millions in damage, severe injuries and deaths, and a political inquisition. Hinnant’s death has been ignored outside the local and conservative media.
The out-of-context video of Floyd dying of cardiac arrest while high on Fentanyl became evidence of police racism, not just by the white officer restraining him, but across the country. And Cannon Hinnant’s murder at the hands of a black felon while riding his bike on a grassy winding street became evidence of a racist double standard and out of control crime.
The truth is that Floyd and Hinnant’s deaths were symptoms of the same crisis.
After Floyd’s death, it became fashionable to speak of crime and policing as inventions of white supremacists and symptoms of white fragility. Cannon’s small head proved fragile when he was shot, but Hinnant’s father regularly invited Darius Sessoms, his killer, for meals or a beer.
Sessoms had been in and out of prison. The common theme was drugs and guns. Year after year, he would go in for 3 months for possession, and then out again, he appeared to have stolen a gun, and then he had begun maintaining a house for drug activity.
It’s a familiar story in Wilson, North Carolina, a half-black and half-white city of under 50,000 which has seen huge drug busts over the years and where the crime logs focus on drug-related crimes by men with three names and no future.
In the age of drug apps, a former president who casually mentioned using cocaine, and a partnership between leftists, libertarians, and some GOPers to decriminalize drugs, focusing on the drug angle is considered politically incorrect. And yet it’s always lurking there anyway.
No one familiar with street level crime was surprised to find drugs in Floyd’s system or Sessoms’ drug charges. This is the world inhabited by police officers who patrol the streets and answer calls, knowing each time what they’ll see before they even arrive at the scene.
The Defund Police movement is right in one regard. We’ve outsourced managing the collapse of our society to men willing to deal with the worst elements of it for $28,000 a year. We have, justly, spent a great deal of time talking about the psychological traumas of veterans, but very little dealing with the state of mind of the men and women fighting the war on our own streets.
But the Defund Police movement and its allies, including top Democrats, insist that there is no crisis. Everything from the drug war to the concept of private property was invented by old white men to keep young black men down. There is no crime problem, only an enforcement problem.
After trying out this theory for a few months, freeing thousands of criminals, refusing to arrest or imprison new criminals, and tying the hands of police, the crime rate skyrocketed. And black elected officials, from the moderates to the radicals, have come out for law enforcement. Every poll shows solid majorities of black people want the police to stay right where they are.
The drug war and its massive police presence were not invented by white racists, they were lobbied for and demanded by black communities who wanted to end the violence. That painful lesson is being relearned at a great cost in human lives. And it’s a long way from over.
After twenty years of hard work and success, too many people forgot what made us safe.
The unhappy truth is that Cannon Hinnant is dead because his killer wasn’t in jail. And George Floyd is dead and a nation is on fire because he wasn’t safely tucked away in prison.
Cannons family should be allowed to Sue the murderer and all those who know him
Democrats pander to their base and that a large part of their base are criminals and thugs is significant.