Regular readers will understand why I\u2019ve waited until now to talk about the recent police-involved shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota, the resultant cop-killing atrocity in Dallas, and the other deadly ripples we\u2019re seeing spread from it all.\u00a0 That\u2019s because regular readers know one tenet here is to wait until information is in from both sides before we judge and condemn.<\/p>\n
Our President, whom we are told once taught Constitutional Law, implied to the nation and the world that the two officer-involved shootings were bad acts, yet as details slowly emerge we find that in both cases the cops apparently shot armed men who appeared to be reaching for guns\u2026men who, the cops had reason to believe even before each contact was made, might well be armed and dangerous.<\/p>\n
We are seeing marchers turning violent. We are seeing them block highways, not just keeping decent working people from getting to work and home from work, but potentially blocking ambulances from saving innocent lives.\u00a0 All so those marchers can \u201cmake a point\u201d and feel good about themselves for doing something they think is positive.<\/p>\n
At the Denver airport today, I read in the Denver Post of a 14-year-old black youth who said he would run if he saw police, for fear they would murder him, because he had been led to believe that cops were epidemically murdering innocent black people for no reason.\u00a0 When you run from police, you arouse their suspicion and, in the Supreme Court\u2019s guiding Illinois v. Wardlow <\/em>decision, give them Reasonable Articulable Suspicion that warrants their pursuit of the fleeing person. Things have now escalated. Being chased by the police will seem to confirm the false fear that police want to kill that young boy, and if he panics and does something stupid and things get violent\u2026the cycle of tragedy will continue.\u00a0 Whoever told that kid to react that way should be ashamed.<\/p>\n For decades, I\u2019ve spoken against the old paradigm of law enforcement that says, \u201cWe don\u2019t discuss our cases in the press, it will all come out in court.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a paradigm born in the responsibility of the officers to remember that those we arrest are innocent until proven guilty, and we can\u2019t defame them and bring heartbreak to their loved ones until they have been adjudicated in a court of law.\u00a0 But when it is the police who are the accused, their silence and reticence to tell their side of what happened is seen by the public as a plea of no contest and, sadly, as an admission of guilt.\u00a0 Within 24 hours of a shooting like the ones in Louisiana and Minnesota, the investigators generally have a damn good idea of what happened.\u00a0 If the police had \u201cgotten ahead of the meme\u201d by publicly stating what the investigation showed thus far had actually occurred, might these ripples of tragedy have been prevented?<\/p>\n There is still much to be revealed.\u00a0 \u201cThe truth is out there\u201d \u2026 but not \u201cout there\u201d to the public and in the media.\u00a0 Much of the \u201cbreaking news\u201d that people acted upon was \u201cbroken news.\u201d And, I fear, those ripples of violence have not yet settled in the troubled waters in which our nation is now swimming.<\/p>\n Your discussion here is welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Regular readers will understand why I\u2019ve waited until now to talk about the recent police-involved shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota, the resultant cop-killing atrocity in Dallas, and the other deadly ripples we\u2019re seeing spread from it all.\u00a0 That\u2019s because regular readers know one tenet here is to wait until information is in from both sides […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3785","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-current-events"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}