“Hostile Crowd Forming”

The time was 4:38 pm on September 2nd when local NBC reporter Mark Seagraves broke the new on twitter.

While he used the dreaded phrase “police involved shooting,” the passive vagary that conceals the fact that he meant a cop shot a person, he offered nothing to suggest what happened or why beyond a person being shot. Yet, there it was. “Hostile crowd forming.” And the call to arms was seized upon by Black Lives Matter DC.

Police lie. Police also tell the truth. Police use excessive force. Police also use appropriate force. Black men are wrongfully killed. Black men also are justiably killed. Whether this was an outrage or an entirely justifiable and appropriate incident of a police officer shooting a black man depended on the facts of what happened. BLM DC didn’t care one way or another, which is one of the grave societal failings of the excess of passion and the dearth of reason.

The DC police gave a “community briefing” shortly afterward, no doubt to avoid the potential of protests and rioting that have become banal after a black person is killed.

The “split second decision making” trope is regularly ridiculed as an excuse to justify rules where there is no need for immediate, violent response. But the scenario here was one requiring a “split second decision,” as police responded to a “man with a gun” dispatch, found Deon Kay, who immediately tried to flee, gun in hand. He was shot once in the chest by Officer Alexander Alvarez.

The image shows the gun pointed downward, but unlike many other pre-emptive uses of force, he had a gun, it was in his hand and it could have been used to shoot Officer Alvarez in a fraction of a second. Kay shouldn’t have had a gun at all. He should have dropped it upon the police first arriving. He shouldn’t have run. He should have complied with Officer Alvarez’s command to “Don’t move.” He should have dropped it as he was being chased. Instead, the gun remained in his hand, he ran and Alvarez shot him.

This does not conclusively prove that Officer Alvarez had to shoot Kay. The video will be parsed, frame by frame, by advocates to “prove” their side. This, too, is a lie, because life doesn’t happen frame by frame but in real time.

The deaths of George Floyd and other Black people have underscored the need to hold police accountable for their use of deadly force. But anyone watching the video must also acknowledge the challenge officers faced in this case. Officer Alvarez did not have the benefit of being able to freeze and rewind before making a life-and-death, split-second decision.

There is always a list of possibilities, that Kay was wrong to possess an illegal gun, but he would never use it offensively against anyone. That he didn’t know what to do and made the wrong choice to run, but no one should die for making a dumb decision. Kay was only 18 years old, an age renowned for making stupid decisions. Sure, it was dumb to flee, but that doesn’t mean he should be executed.

While passionate activists put their thoughts in other people’s heads, no one knows what thoughts were in Kay’s head, why he had the gun and what use he planned to put it to. Nor does anyone know whether he was in the process of throwing the gun away when he held it in his hand and Officer Alvarez shot him. That could be the case. That could not be the case. Arguing about it adds nothing, not that the unduly passionate won’t argue over it anyway as if the harder they scream, the more real their cries will appear. We don’t know. They don’t know. Officer Alvarez didn’t know, but didn’t have the time to find out.

And as night follows day, outrage followed the death of a black teen at the end of a cop’s gun.

The local Black Lives Matter affiliate called for immediate protests outside the MPD’s 7th District headquarters, stating in a tweet, “DC police murdered a Black man today.”

Later Wednesday night, videos posted on social media showed dozens of enraged protesters jostling with a line of police officers, who used bicycles to help form a barrier in front of the station.

Black man killed is different than black man murdered, except to those who are desperately seeking victims and reasons to be outraged, reasons to protest, reasons to riot. Some find the knee-jerk and factually-empty outrage by BLM activists understandable, based on their “seething anger” and “centuries of oppression,” which somehow translates into the delusion that indulging in random acts of violence and destruction is an acceptable reaction. After all, they’re angry, and that somehow makes it all acceptable.

But they aren’t just angry. They are angry and validated by “official” sources.

The one-time civil rights organization, the ACLU, says he was murdered. They say his death was about police violence and racism. They demand justice for Deon. How can people not riot if this was true. But it’s not true, and the ACLU is no less spreading lies and fomenting outrage and its ensuing violence and destruction than anyone else. Yet, it’s different, as the ACLU doesn’t enjoy the excuse of being too passionate to be capable of thinking, too filled with “seething anger” to be compelled to consider facts and reason.

The ACLU enjoys its legacy of being a civil rights organization, occasionally bolstered by the few in its ranks who still try to hold onto its last shreds of its dignity and integrity, so when the ACLU screams murder and racism, the believers and the insipid seized upon it to confirm their bias and validate their violence.

But Deon Kay wasn’t murdered. Cops lie. Cops can be racist. Cops kill black men without reason or justification. But not this time. That didn’t stop the hostile crowd from forming.

9 thoughts on ““Hostile Crowd Forming”

  1. Kathleen Casey

    The ACLU is making a better livelihood from this spectacle. Reason has its place you know. Second place after passion. ?

  2. B. McLeod

    This has been a defect impairing BLM from the beginning. The chapters assail every use of deadly force against a black person as “murder.” It transforms their message from seeking any kind of justice to simply seeking race-based privileges for black people.

    1. SHG Post author

      It’s unclear to me what the impetus of this blameless call to arms is. Some say it relates back to the racism that denied them an education, generational wealth, a great job and family, so even though there may be justification at that instant to shoot, it’s premised on the history of oppression that led him to this moment.

      Or, sometimes, even a black guy does something bad or dangerous that justifies the use of deadly force. but they just don’t care and, given the white “fragility” of their allies, they get the support of their useless idiots anyway.

    2. Bob

      I agree, but I think the reason the most baseless cases have been pushed the hardest (like Travyon Martin, Michael Brown, etc.) is precisely because they’re divisive. Lots of people and institutions have a vested interest in making black people feel as alienated as possible.

  3. Johnny

    He was shot because he was black plain and simple. If he was white wearing a MAGA hat and a flag printed shirt, he could’ve been walking around with an assault rifle and the cops would’ve probably given him a pat on the back and an escort home, or a “we appreciate you guys” like they said to Rittenhouse after he killed 2 people.

    1. SHG Post author

      Your strong argument (who can disagree with “plain and simple”?) would have been even stronger had you not fucked up the facts on Rittenhouse.

  4. KP

    Well, he wasn’t murdered but he wasn’t executed either. He was accidentally ‘shot to death,’ rather than the intended ‘shot to incapacitation.’

    No-one said he had to be killed, and I’m sure the cop didn’t plan on killing him. If he hit him in the leg and the kid dropped to the ground without the gun, the results would be different but the intent of the cop would be the same.

    If he was white and was waving a handgun around, then ran when the cops said to stop, the result would be the same. If he had a rifle on his back and walked up to the cop with his hands by his side and said “yes, I’m armed, is there a problem?” then he wouldn’t get shot, but that’s nothing to do with race.

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