by Robert Stacy McCain
When I first heard that there was a controversy about a black man being beaten to death by police in Memphis, I certainly did not expect to discover all the cops were black:
Five Memphis police officers have been charged with second-degree murder, among other charges, in connection with the death of Tyre Nichols, who died three days after being stopped by the officers.
Nichols, a 29-year-old black man, died on January 10, three days after Memphis police officers stopped him for “reckless driving.”
A “confrontation occurred” between Nichols and the police officers when he was stopped around 8:30 p.m. on January 7, according to an initial statement released by authorities.
However, “another confrontation occurred,” while officers attempted to take Nichols into custody.
“While attempting to take the suspect into custody, another confrontation occurred; however, the suspect was ultimately apprehended,” the Memphis Police Department said. “Afterward the suspect complained of having shortness of breath, at which point an ambulance was called to the scene.”
Nichols was transported to St. Francis Hospital, where he was reportedly in critical condition before dying days later.
Notably, Memphis Police Department officers Demetrius Haley, Tadarrius Bean, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills, and Justin Smith are all black.Everybody was waiting for the police bodycam video to be released, and what it shows is . . . Don’t resist arrest in Memphis.
Also, while we’re dishing out advice here, let me suggest that if you’re driving a stolen KIA in Arkansas, don’t run from police in a high-speed pursuit that ends in a fiery fatal crash. (Video here.) By the way, I don’t even know what race the car thief in that case was except, well, after someone gets roasted in a gasoline fire, what’s left of them is black, no matter what race they were before they got roasted.
Excuse me for being sarcastic about matters of life and death, but if sarcasm was a crime, I’d be a habitual offender. Sarcasm is my response to everything, especially tragic circumstances over which I have no control. Do I want people to die because they resisted arrest or fled at 130 mph in a KIA? No, this is not what I want, but these people don’t seek my advice before they do the things that get them killed, so what happens to them is not my responsibility. That was my basic reaction to the whole George Floyd thing. All the white liberals were running around shouting mea culpa and I was like, “OK, culpa tua non est mea.”
How can I be to blame for what cops do in Minneapolis? The only time I was ever in Minneapolis was three days in a hotel for a conference more than 10 years ago. Yet you had white liberals all over the country declaring themselves guilty of racism — complicit in systemic oppression — because of what happened to this guy in Minneapolis, who magically obtained civil rights sainthood merely because he died in police custody.
If everybody is to blame, nobody is to blame — what this progressive rhetoric about “systemic racism” does is to absolve people of responsibility for what they actually do in their own lives, by extending the blame to the vast abstraction of “society,” so that innocent people who are simply minding their own business can be guilt-tripped for unfortunate events in which they are not involved. And if you refuse to play along with this game, if you don’t cooperate with the demand that you blame yourself for other people’s problems, the Left will interpret this as conclusive proof that you’re guilty of “white supremacy.”
There is no court to which you can appeal this conviction, because the mere accusation is sufficient to destroy anyone’s career and reputation, which is why so many people tiptoe around uncomfortable topics so as to avoid expressing any opinion that might offend a liberal. There’s a lot of white silence on the subject of race whenever we are compelled to listen to angry lectures on the subject, because nearly all white people are afraid to criticize the Al Sharptons and Ben Crumps of the world.
Van Jones of CNN claims all cops are racists and white supremacists, even the black cops.
That’s diversity!
It’s also “state of being instead of action.
We had a Supreme Court decision YEARS ago that crimes had to be behavior, never state of being.
Color, sex, age, mental capacity, employment status, wealth status, and many other things are states of being and therefore should not be criminalized.
Behavior, activity, actions can be crimes.
These cops should be charged over their wrong behavior, not color.
It appears the cops went over the top.
Well, I didn’t sell Floyd the fentanyl and I didn’t tell him to eat enough of it to kill 3 people, so I ain’t to blame. In fact, I bet if I could make recommendations and they would be explicitly followed by both police and citizens, there would be NO deaths OR traces of racism.