Home » Andrew C. McCarthy on the Rayshard Brooks shooting charges

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Andrew C. McCarthy on the Rayshard Brooks shooting charges — 25 Comments

  1. There exists a theory (obviously purely speculative) that, both in the case of Chauvin and Floyd and in the case of Rolfe and Brooks, the authorities are over-charging precisely because (depending on the location of the trial and the composition of the jury) there may be either a hung jury or even an acquittal (Medium posted an excellent and rational analysis pointing to the likelihood of the latter in Minneapolis if the facts and the evidence are followed). This would result in even more unrest (rioting, killing, and looting), which benefits those in power who thrive on the strategy of divide and conquer, now more by race than by class.

  2. Predictably, people I know who mere days ago were calling for the abolition of the Seattle Police are now blaming them for “punishing us by not doing their jobs” by responding slowly or not at all to calls.

    Make up your minds, idiots.

  3. Curiously the gullible white liberals who have jumped on the nihilistic defund the police bandwagon are exactly the people the alligator will eat first in a lawless society. Fools indeed, and useful idiots to boot.

  4. Do.Not.Resist.Arrest! Nothing good can come from it. If the arrest is illegal/a mistake, sort it out in court. Police carry weapons for a reason – to insure that they can win any battle with a perpetrator. They are trained to use the weapons responsibly, but you can be badly injured or killed when hit by fist, a baton, a Taser, or a Glock. When an arrestee resists, the officer will do whatever is necessary to complete the arrest. Up to and including killing the perp. That is the message that young people of all ethnicities need to understand. Black parents talk about having the “talk” with their children about how to behave if stopped by a policeman. That’s a “talk” all parents need to have with their children regardless of ethnicity.

    Put yourself in the policeman’s shoes. You are making a legal arrest. You don’t want to be injured or killed during the arrest. The arrestee suddenly attacks you. You’re trained to subdue him and complete the arrest with a number of techniques and/or weapons. At that point the odds of the arrestee being injured or killed are very high. And the policeman has the law on his side. Resisting arrest is a crime. Assaulting a police officer is a crime. Stealing an officer’s weapon is a crime. How much better it is to submit to an arrest for DUI and go home with a court date, than to end up in the morgue. Unfortunately, the ubiquitous videos available these days show violence that didn’t used to be observed by the public at large. Now, people are shocked by that violence, which has been there all the time, they just never saw it before.

    Many cases of the police killing perpetrators of every ethnicity involve resisting arrest. However, the number of those cases is quite small when compared to the number of arrests made every year. (Over ten million total arrests in 2019 and 1004 people killed.) Most people wisely don’t resist arrest. Yet, the MSM, Commies , and their fellow travelers (BLM, Antifa, etc.) want us to believe that the police are purposely executing black men. Just not true.

  5. I would imagine that a lot of Police will now think twice or thrice about interacting with a Black person. As another Blogger of note says “This will not end well”.

  6. I m surprised by how many of my white friends buy into the meme that police work attracts a certain element of white society that are already aggressive types, and that that’s the problem.

    I think policing in tough inner-city neighborhoods is much misunderstood. I’ve never done it, but I would imagine tagging along with one of those ‘ride-along’ programs (do they exist anymore? and were they ever in really tough neighborhoods?) would enlighten a lot of people to the issues confronting police on a daily basis. As it is, there’s an awful lot of armchair quarterbacking going on.

  7. Waiting for the backlash. Waiting and waiting.

    I would normally assume that the pendulum would swing back once people tire of the chaos; but, I am not confident. The political and thought leaders have staked a position; and it will be hard for them to back off.

    Ordinary people seem to be either in shock, or completely intimidated. Any grass roots push back will be hard to organize given the forces aligned against it.

    My emotions swing between fury, and apathy. Fury for what is happening to our country, tinged with apathy because I recognize there is little that I can do. My loved ones of the next two generations seem to believe that the street forces driving change are generally benign, and the results they seek will be controlled and beneficial. Much of their naivete is driven by ignorance as their lives have been largely tranquil and their education, while extensive, misguided.

  8. Excellent points JJ. A cop must assume that a battle with a violent resistor is potentially lethal. The best we should expect is that the cop will escalate only to the point necessary to gain and retain control. A very fine line.

    When I was young, ages ago in temporal and societal terms, it was a given that you never even talked back to a cop, much less resisted. Much conventional wisdom has been lost over the years.

    CapnRusty. I think Meth is in that category. Floyd had Meth in his system.

  9. Oldflyer,

    Excellent posts. I understand your pessimism, these are very disturbing days. But I believe the pendulum still swings. 1968 deja vu is on the horizon.

  10. Who would sign up for a job where you’ll be hated by those you serve, not allowed to protect your own life or health, and assumed guilty in any instance where your interactions with criminals go badly for the criminals?

    True enough, but I think for many (mostly) men, it’s a vocation in the Christian sense. Similar to the military. You don’t choose it. It chooses you.

    I’ve forgotten where I first encountered the sheep/wolf/sheepdog metaphor, but a lot of guys could be wolves, but realize they are sheepdogs.
    __________________________________________

    There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs.

    Some people prefer to believe that evil doesn’t exist in the world, and if it ever darkened their doorstep, they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep.

    Then you’ve got predators, who use violence to prey on the weak. They’re the wolves.

    And then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression, an overpowering need to protect the flock. These men are the rare breed who live to confront the wolf.

    They are the sheepdog.

    –“American Sniper”, Sheepdog speech
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar1WygVl_Vg

    __________________________________________

    God bless them.

  11. “I fear that police around the country will begin to feel a generalized disillusionment and betrayal, and recruiting good police officers will be that much harder everywhere in the US.” neo

    NYPD Planning ‘Strike’ on July 4 to Give People Their ‘Independence From Police’
    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/18/nypd-planning-strike-on-july-4-to-give-people-their-independence-from-police-n551959

    D.C. Police Union Survey Shows 71 Percent Are Considering Leaving”
    https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/18/d-c-police-union-survey-shows-71-percent-are-considering-leaving/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+breitbart+%28Breitbart+News%29

  12. Cap’nRusty, too bad that video isn’t shown over and over again on the nightly news. It might begin to dawn on people what the police face on a regular basis. Simple DUI arrest turns out to be fatal for the cops. It’s a tough and thankless job. If the citizenry doesn’t support them, their morale goes down and crime increases. That’s what we’re facing now.

    I’ve taken it upon myself to send e-mails to my local police and sheriff’s departments telling them that I support them and will not support or vote for any politician that Is anti-law and order or anti-police. Their response was one of hearty thanks for taking the time to let them know that they still have supporters out there. When we stay silent, they don’t know what’s going on. They have to assume the anti-police propaganda is working.

  13. Police in cities see bad people acting (very) badly commonly every day… the liberal crowd, rarely sees bad people acting badly, even when they see bad people, they often do not know it… the issue has been the modern era idea of insulating the public from what goes on around them. if you ever got to read the paper machines that put out crimes and information all day long (probably replaced by electronic screens)… you would have sat and heard about found body parts, descriptions of rings on fingers without the rest of it, dead found, all manner of torture and abuse heaped on people, and more…

    enjoy CompStat 2.0
    https://compstat.nypdonline.org/2e5c3f4b-85c1-4635-83c6-22b27fe7c75c/view/89

    week to date… 6/8 to 6/14
    3 murders
    25 rapes
    208 robberies
    365 felony assaults
    241 burglaries
    496 grand larcenies
    46 shooting victims (32 incidents)
    30 UCR rapes
    80 other sex crimes

    that was citywide… 38,576 crimes this year..
    when you click on all of them there is almost no place uncovered
    if your curious what is the tiny spot that is uncovered?
    mt Zion cemetery and Calvary cemetery…
    only the dead rest in peace

  14. “why would any sane person want to be a police officer, at this point?”

    This is true!

    I’ve thought the same about politicians for years now. Especially Republicans. Why would any sane person want to put his or her family through the garbage that the Democrats and the news media do to Republican politicians and their families? As a result, we end up with the good guys not willing to sign up for public service.

    And with cops it will be the same. Few who would make excellent cops are going to be willing to sign up; with the result being the “less than ideal” people signing up. Not good for anyone.

    I’ve lived outside the USA where no one decent ever becomes a cop. Where everyone believes cops do one thing – shake down the average citizen for bribes. Is that what we are going to end up with here in the US?

  15. I say let’s embrace no police society. I can defend me and mine. The idiots can’t. So reality will rule.

  16. As for evidence of people being intimidated into apathy or compliance I read that when the rioting and looting began only about 10% of the public believed that such violent activities could be justified, but after a couple of weeks of rioting and an increasing toll of injuries and property destruction support for violence increased to about 40%???? I doubt it was folks witnessing the police arresting rioters having a change of heart. I think people were afraid of being attacked for expressing their true beliefs. Who can blame them when the media tells of school principals being suspended or fired for telling their students “Peacefully protest, but avoid violence.” And when spouses and parents of SJW targets are being fired. And when refusal to put a Black Lives Matter sign in your window gets your store torched.

  17. Oldflyer on June 19, 2020 at 6:57 pm said:
    Waiting for the backlash. Waiting and waiting.

    I would normally assume that the pendulum would swing back once people tire of the chaos; but, I am not confident. The political and thought leaders have staked a position; and it will be hard for them to back off.
    * * *
    One of the things about pendulums is that the higher they go before swinging back, the further they go in the other direction.
    When you have pushed the pendulum up as high as it will go one way and then blocked the natural return for awhile, there is eventually a lot of energy released in going the other direction.

    Or as someone said about Americans (as opposed to TWANLOC): long fuse, big bomb.

  18. another reason why violent confrontations with the police WILL go up is because many will now correctly conclude that the police aren’t going to respond in kind when they’re attacked out of fear of being arrested and killed by their own colleagues and the courts and legal system that it is their job to work with.

    This is the same reason many conservatives are not yet out there on the streets with armed posses taking the fight to the far left rioters and looters. They know full well that the police and courts going to side with the far left.

  19. They know full well that the police and courts going to side with the far left.

    Not the police. The scummy politicians they have to answer to. The courts, as always, are a scandal.

  20. Note about pendulums: cf Maggie Thatcher and the Leftist Rachet.
    When the Left goes too far and the Right regains control, the conservatives clean up the mess, but the culture never goes back to the right.

    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/the_ratchet_effect_on_american_politics.html
    May 10, 2018 The Ratchet Effect on American Politics By Ryan Walters

    In a 1977 speech to the Institute of Public Relations (link below), Margaret Thatcher said, “Britain is no longer in the politics of the pendulum, but of the ratchet.”

    https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103192
    (handwritten notes for speaking text by MT)

    The essence of Conservative economic strategy is less taxation, less interference, less government.

    The essence of Socialism is more taxation, more interference, more government.

    Experience tells us that to try to mix Socialism and real tax cuts is to attempt the art of the impossible. [end p18]

    But some people may think that the Denis HealeyChancellor’s approach is now right and that he can safely be left to continue down the right road, to the benefit of the nation. To believe that he could be expected to go far is to ignore his Socialism, and it is to forget his reluctant companions tugging at his left sleeve.

    As one former Socialist MP (Woodrow Wyatt) wrote: “Productivity was never of any interest to the extremists. They would rather control men’s lives in uniform misery, according to their definition of the public good, than allow them to flourish freely.” [end p19]

    There you have it in a nutshell.

    No Socialist could follow our way to prosperity without rejecting his own beliefs and without losing his comrades on the way.

    But the Government relies on those comrades for its majority. That is why the Chancellor can never take many steps in the right direction. Manuscript addition by MT

    Today we are no longer in the election politics of the pendulum, but of the ratchet. Next time the choice will be yours for the voting.

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