At first, it was only about the ingredients for the usual mindless reaction. Black 16-year-old girl shot and killed by cop. What more could anyone need to know? Of course, it didn’t take long to find out.
The cry of “split second decision” making is often ridiculed, but this was the moment when the cop had to make a decision. Did he take out the person about to murder another person or not? Only in a fantasy world were there alternatives, like the cop shooting the knife out of her hand or asking the killer to take a moment while he pondered his choice of weapons in the expectation that his Taser might do the trick before the knife plunged into the heart of the victim. But a black woman was shot by a cop, and that can’t happen.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the police officer who saved the life of a black woman would have been applauded as a hero. This is no longer that time.
It was bad enough that so many rushed blindly into the pool of outrage knowing nothing more than a cop shot and killed a black woman, but that they refused to let go of their outrage after learning, seeing, knowing what happened is where they completely lost touch with sanity.
The reporting of this story reflects where we are now and why we’re no longer willing to accept the premise that sometimes bad things happen and somebody is likely to die.
It was Valentine’s Day when Ma’Khia Bryant, 16, moved into the foster home where her younger sister had lived for more than a year. The girls were close, and would dance and make TikTok videos together, while Ms. Bryant nurtured a constant hope: to one day live again with her biological mother.
“That’s all she said, was, ‘I want to be with my mom,’” said Angela Moore, who said she provided foster care for Ms. Bryant and her sister on a quiet block on the southeastern edge of Columbus, Ohio.
Those dreams were cut short after a Columbus police officer fatally shot Ms. Bryant on Tuesday afternoon, just moments after arriving at a chaotic disturbance outside her foster home. Body-camera footage released by the Columbus police appears to show Ms. Bryant holding a knife as she lunges toward another person a moment before she is shot.
Talk about buried ledes. Did the girl Ma’Khia Bryant was about to murder have dreams too? I bet she did. I bet many killers had dreams, had people who loved them and liked puppies. But in the moment that the officer had to make a decision of whether to take Bryant out or let her plunge her knife into another human being, there really wasn’t much of an opportunity to share her dreams. She was about to kill someone. That was no dream.
The media reports showed Ma’Khia Bryant’s family talking about what a wonderful person she was. That may well be, aside from the fact that she wielded a knife and was about to kill another person, but if there is any question that should have been asked, it’s why this 16-year-old girl turned to deadly violence.
No, teens killing other teens with knives is not just some typical, insignificant thing for “eons.” That anyone would be so bold as to say things so utterly absurd, and that it’s not only acceptable to the terminally woke but applauded, suggests that we’re now off the edge of the cliff of reason. In this moment, someone was going to die. No ideological spin was going to stop that knife from plunging into a human being’s body.
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” …just moments after arriving at a chaotic disturbance outside her foster home.”
How about..
“… just moments after arriving at an ongoing attempted murder outside her foster home.”
We’re long past the need for re-education camps for the jurno’s.
“…we’re now off the edge of the cliff of reason.”
Considering the whole instance took roughly 10 seconds from when he left his car, I’m curious what the de-escalate folks think he should have done. Certainly alternate methods, such as a tazer, are *possible* but are they truly probable in that situation?!? I don’t know.
I saw someone last night saying they could de-escalate fights involving knives, nunchucks, and bricks using only a whistle. If that’s true, I would like to see training provided for that business and how it might correlate to policing at large.
But if I’m out there drifting too far, just smack me back into a lane 🙂
“Should have de-escalated” will be the new magic phrase that works in every case. Even if the suspect is about to trigger a nuclear device, the police should use their Jedi powers of de-escalation instead of resorting to force.
It still would be a use of (the) force.
The standard that would call this a “knife fight” would result in every officer-involved shooting being deemed a “gun fight.” Conclusion: some people have no use for standards.
I read something similar yesterday. Now every mass shooting will be known as a “gun fight”. Words don’t have meaning any longer, it’s sad.
Gotcha either way. Had the cop not intervened he’d have been guilty of allowing a black kid to be murdered.
At least sometimes being a cop really is a thankless job.
We’re getting too old for this, Jeffrey. We’re too stuck in our old man facts and reason mode.
That’s why I just mostly retired.
Now, get off my lawn!
Am I gonna have to make another sign?
That you have something against teens killing teens with knives is just a reflection of your privileged background. All the locals know to just let the girls fight it out, and maybe none of them will die.
What appears to have happened here reflects a serious lack of knowledge in the local community as to civics and police practices. Reports suggest it was the dead girl who called the police. She seems to have then thought that, because she made the call, once the police arrived she was free to attack and the police would back her up. But that isn’t how it works, and it is unfortunate that she didn’t understand that.
This is a mask-off moment for the anti-Black racism in the rhetoric and attitudes of these people…as in actual Black lives as opposed to a dehumanized “Blackness” as a political construct. (See also: “black bodies.”)
If the girl with the knife were white it would take a shameless supremacist to make these arguments, and the persistence of such attitudes would be shouted from the rooftops as proof of what’s wrong with America.
It’s almost as if the plan is to bludgeon cops into a reflexive slow roll on calls into certain neighborhoods. Sorting out the bodies is becoming a much better career move than wading into an ongoing incident. Besides, “they” have been settling their own differences for “eons”.
A cop friend’s first reaction after the Chauvin verdict is that a cop’s best protection is the gas pedal. Lighten up and you don’t get there until it’s all over. It’s terrible, cynical and wrong, but if there is nothing a cop can do right, the logic is unassailable.
Twenty years ago a certain washed up rock star (that I’m not a fan of) , in his self-assigned quest to make the whole country into the wild wild west, was often heard saying, “Arm yourself, cause 9-1-1 is just a clean-up call…”
Welcome to bizaro-world.
Would you like to meet one of our wise prognosticators, Mr. Theodore Anthony Nugent?
Hasn’t the SCOTUS said (paraphrased) that the cops only real duty is to get there after it’s all over and write the reports? Looks like the stupids want to enforce that ruling.
No, that’s not at all what SCOTUS said. And if you’re going to take a blind leap down a rabbit hole, at least don’t say something completely wrong before leaping.
I know you usually don’t post links to stories but this is a perfect example of all that is wrong with the militarization of our police:
Cop who killed Ma’Khia Bryant is military-trained marksman
[Ed. Note: Link deleted. You know why.]
With the military gun training, he was an accurate marksman and therefore did not create multiple victims. Why do you hate black people such that you would prefer multiple victims?
There were bystanders all around and two people involved in a fight, one of them with a knife. The cop fired four shots and hit only the person he intended to hit.
Whether he should have fired at all is what people are debating, but once he made the decision to fire, his marksmanship was a benefit, not a “perfect example of all that is wrong with the militarization of our police.”
There is a hell of a lot of difference between using a rifle firing at targets space 25 to 300 yds away and using a pistol
Well, let’s break that down. This means that when they put him on the range, his score rated him “expert.” Unless things have changed since the 40’s, that’s the top bracket, one above “sharpshooter.” Maybe he learned to shoot in the military, and maybe he learned growing up. But hey, he’s “a marksman,” and he was “military-trained” for the Air Guard. So there’s your canned media headline, right there. If you understand what the words mean, it really doesn’t tell you a hell of a lot.
I don’t see any connection with military training and the militarization problem. In fact, I think it works just the opposite, that a cop who has been in combat is far less easily shaken up and inclined to act out of unwarranted fear.
This type of comment is a significant reason why we have veterans’ hiring preferences, and why it’s been illegal since the 70s to discriminate in employment or in public accommodations against veterans on the basis of veteran status: the notion that they’re all trigger-happy, PTSD-afflicted, dangerous psychos about to let loose Rambo-style on hapless civilians with military precision.
Since plenty of vets served (for paltry pay) because they didn’t have plans for or weren’t cut out for college, police officer is one of the few decent jobs available to them after their service has ended that would allow them to afford a middle class existence. Plus, they’re well-qualified for it, knowing how to handle weapons and how to deal with and act as a team in high-stress, potentially lethal situations.
So… what’s wrong with militarized policing is actually being able to hit your target? That dog won’t hunt.
Edit: Apparently what they mean by “military trained marksman” is that he scored highly on his rifle shoot in the Air National Guard. Which basically means he can handle a rifle without being a constant menace to bystanders.
The reaction to this event reaches peaks of absurdity that I could not even imagine existed. By now I’m used to reading the unetethered from reality demands that the policeman “shoot to wound”, “shoot the legs”, “deescalate” and “restrain” – it’s at least understandable that people want to monday morning quarterback as they try to rationalize that the solution to all bad things is always there to find. There’s also the bog standard “anti-racism” take, “would have done something else if she was white”, by people who should really consider a career change to astrology, but at least these are statements from plausibly constructed fantasy worlds, if not necessarily the real world. Finally, there’s the trumpeting of outright lies, like “she had dropped the knife already” and “the officers arrived and immediately started shooting”, but lying(or wishful thinking) for the cause is nothing new, as long as it starts a conversation, right?
But this particular event has sparked commentary that is so beyond batshit crazy that my brain just shuts down as I read it. “We don’t need police to address knife fights”, what the actual fuck? Maybe this particular bastion of intellect should consider that the police were called to the scene. Or how about the thousands of comments with the other hot take, “she was the one that called the police”, as if that justifies lunging and stabbing at two different people, with the police already there? And to top it off, the beyond-the-pale rationalizations that “this was revenge for the verdict”, which not only require time travel, but also a level of dehumanization of police that is downright terrifying.
Thankfully, there’s plenty of pushback to this insanity, and every such comment is at best controversial, if not outright derided and made fun of. Still, I’m disturbed. How do you even communicate with these people, when they seem to be willing to throw away any common ground, any shared reality, to push a narrative that doesn’t even need this kind of help?
The fact that we’re even entertaining such absurd claims suggests how left far the Overton Window has moved. We can pretend it’s too crazy for discussion, but people are indeed discussing it.
While the term “bog standard” is used to mean something approximating to ersatz or generic, today, it originated as an engineering term in Victorian England. Back then, the first word (possibly one of the first acronyms, now that I think of it) stood for British Or German, the sense of the whole term being that reliability was to be found only in British or German standards.
The horse is out of the barn. We can keep talking about how silly it was to build a barn door with straw or get on with catching the horse.
You got any new cheese in this here shop?
Dammit, Barleycorn. Do not steal Jake’s handle when you comment.
lol. The first cut also included a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson and I took it out because it was just too Barleycorn.
How long before the police get these kind of calls and just say “No thanks, deal with it yourself?” Will that be applauded by these people?
How long?
This is from 2015…
If only a trained social worker had responded . . .
And not a MILITARY-trained social worker, either!!
What I am wondering is if the girl whose life was probably saved will vouch for the officer. Or will she be pressured into silence for the “greater good”.
Not sure what vouching will be called for her, but that’s a good question. If she backs the cop, will she be castigated for it?
Given that her choices are between “thank fuck I didn’t get stabbed in the guts”, thus implicitly vouching for the officer, or being the poster child for cognitive dissonance, I don’t envy her. Personally, I’d never wear pink again, and try to melt quietly into the background.
How often did you wear pink before?
I’m wearing it now. Not head to toe though.
I love pink shirts, but keep that between us, please.
Dear Mr. Greenfield
This would be the time for your President to step forward and be a leader. A clear statement, that while the situation was tragic, the police officer seemed to have acted in best possible manner under the unfortunate circumstances. I noticed that he seemed fine to comment on the Chauvin trial. So why not be the leader and unifier he claimed that he would be. Perhaps I am being too optimistic ?
Kind Regards
Mark Brooks
St. Elizabeth
Jamaica
Unity and sanity are the lima beans of US politics.
Good to hear from you, Judge. I get a little worried about health these days. Our president hasn’t had much to say about these matters beyond empty platitudes and how much he can give away for “free” to buy a legacy.
I just realized that this happened just before the Chauvin verdict. I am almost certain that the outcome would have been different had the cops showed up today.
It actually happened about 20 minutes after the Chauvin verdict. So that feeling of having “realized” anything is an illusion.
One participant in this spectacle had a knife, not both. “That’s not a knife fight, that’s a butcher shop.” A wise comment I ran across. It says it all.
If only. ?Never start a fight but finish it by fighting dirty if someone starts it with you. My Dad’s rule. No LEOs necessary. He’s flash his big white smile and say See all these teeth I have??