If Black Lives Matter, why are so many young Black males packing guns illegally and shooting up black neighborhoods?
BY Greg ‘Gadfly’ Doyle
PACOVILLA Corrections blog
August 21, 2015
When I first joined police work in the summer of 1979, I repeatedly heard from my superiors, as well as from my academy instructors, that policing was much like being a goldfish inside a fish bowl. The premise was that, unlike any other profession, you were constantly being watched by members of the public (citizens as well as criminals) and elements of the press.
This became particularly important to remember on the graveyard shift because of stringers (news-for-sale videographers who used police scanners to jump hot police calls ahead of the major news outlets.) As a supervisor, after making certain a crime scene was safe, I often had to extend crime scene boundaries (move police tape) in order to prevent stringers from getting too close with their cameras during homicide investigations.
Unfortunately, with the advent of new phone technology, everyone in the general public is a potential stringer, especially the criminal element, their associates, advocates, and families.
Social media now enables militant activists and anti-government extremists to quickly mobilize and organize within hours of a police shooting and turn an incident into a full blown media event as recently witnessed in Missouri, New York, and Maryland.
The disadvantage for law enforcement agencies is the nature of criminal investigations (particularly shootings), which generally are bound by protocols and procedures, conducted by methodical redundancies, complicated by witness and suspect interviews, slowed by systematic evidence collection, and limited in public disclosures and discussions due to the confidential necessity of future prosecution.
The fact remains that, most often, the police cannot talk about criminal investigations even when cases are ready for submission to the District Attorney.
The press has no confidentiality filter except to protect their sources and within their respective editorial staff. The choice to use leaked material or run a story without fact-checking lies at the feet of each press editor. More and more, scooping the competition seems more important than getting each story straight.
Militant activists (like the group Black Lives Matter) can misstate the facts, misrepresent evidence, castigate (and agitate against) the police, stir up racial tension, encourage rioting, arson, and looting, and jump to conclusions without any apparent accountability while the press stands idly by and surrenders the camera and microphone. Why?
The latest offering of bad press and militant activism is a recent shooting in St. Louis, Missouri:
At least nine protesters arrested after St. Louis police shooting
St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said at a press conference late Wednesday night that a group of protesters who had blocked an intersection threw glass bottles and bricks at officers and refused orders to clear the roadway. Inert gas was used and when that didn’t have any effect on the crowd, police turned to tear gas to clear the intersection, Dotson said. Those arrested face charges of impeding the flow of traffic and resisting arrest, he said.
The chief blamed the crimes on people seeking “notoriety” in a neighborhood “plagued by violence.” Dotson added that police would release video showing that officers gave multiple orders to clear the street and repeatedly warned that the tear gas would be used.
Dotson said two police officers serving a search warrant Wednesday afternoon at a home in a crime-troubled section of the city’s north side encountered two suspects, one of which was 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey. The suspects were fleeing the home as Ball-Bey, who was black, turned and pointed a handgun at the officers, who shot him, the chief said. Ball-Bey died at the scene.
Both officers, who are white, were unharmed, according to a police report.
Dotson said four guns, including the handgun wielded by Ball-Bey, and crack cocaine were recovered at or near the home, which last year yielded illegal guns during a police search. Police are searching for the second suspect, who they said is believed to be in his mid-to-late teens. (for the full story read http://tinyurl.com/nm62dno.)
The First Amendment is vital to the freedoms we enjoy, including the right to protest and the right of a free press. I am not advocating that free speech be constrained in any way. But there should be some self-control exercised in both the press and protest.
What I do wonder is whether or not the public is being fed a fair and accurate representation of the truth by the press. After all, Americans can think for themselves and figure things out.
What I most often see in news reports during these White-cop-shoots-Black-male media events is political exploitation and militant activism courtesy of a circus-frenzied press. I wonder; would the malcontents and trouble-makers be rallying and rioting if the press failed to cover it?
Do we want police officers to not protect themselves and others from potential threats? Furthermore, do we want police officers to hesitate to engage armed and dangerous (or unarmed and dangerous) suspects (black or otherwise)?
Is it in the public interest to hand the microphone to militant activists with a political agenda and allow them to dictate police policy and procedure while using the threat of rioting and open hate-speech as their primary instruments of negotiation?
Is it not race-baiting by Black Lives Matter to assume (and openly accuse) that every White police officer must be bigoted, biased, or prejudiced when he or she is forced (by the actions of a male suspect) to engage that person with deadly force, just because he happens to be Black? Even more outrageous is the notion that police have nothing better to do with their time and resources than to hunt down and target innocent Black males for the purpose of engaging them with deadly force.
Have we lost our ability to reason, or is there not a problem within a specific segment of the Black community as it pertains to Black males and criminal activity? And is it not that group of Black males engaged in criminal activity within that specific segment of the Black community that has gained the attention of law enforcement?
As I stated in a recent article, thus far in 2015, American law enforcement officers are more likely to be shot and killed by armed Black males than any other ethnicity (see http://wp.me/p2wT3c-vaN.) If Black lives matter as the militant activists proclaim, what steps are being taken by Black Lives Matter to disarm Black males in specific high-crime areas within the Black community?
Isn’t the mainstream media the least bit culpable in helping the militants stir the race-baiting pot? We know that the original premise of White prejudice in the shooting death of Michael Brown was eventually determined to be unfounded. Yet the militants of Black Lives Matters ignore those facts and beat the broken drum of that racial injustice premise when it is very apparent that criminal activity is at the root of the matter where many young Black men’s lives in urban areas are concerned.
If Black lives matter so much, why isn’t the Black community properly educating and policing itself, instead of expecting the government to do it?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Let me add that it’s no longer just the shooting of unarmed black males that has activists, including white college students and recent graduates, all riled up. Now it’s also the shooting of armed black men! In the case of 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey, activists are declaring that, even though Ball-Bey was armed, the cops could have and should have “deescalated” the situation instead of resorting to the use of deadly force.
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