Too deep in the morass of news ranging from bad to awful to make the cut, there was a stabbing at an AutoZone in Columbus, Georgia. Had it been at a protest or riot in Portland or Kenosha, it might be the subject of infinite discussion on social media, but it was off the map and few noticed it. But it’s worthy of notice.

Columbus Police are looking for the person responsible for attacking an AutoZone employee with a knife Tuesday morning.

The incident happened on at the AutoZone located on 32nd Street at around 8:26 a.m. According to police the suspect entered the store and attacked the employee with a knife in an unprovoked incident. Continue reading →

As much as I abhor Trump for being a vulgar, amoral, lying ignoramus, neither one more voice saying it nor one more person harping on his every word, every move, every act, is going to change anything. Trump lied? Oh no, it’s another Tuesday at 10 a.m. So what? Who expected otherwise? And so if it goes without saying, don’t say it. There’s no reason.

It’s also bad tactics, despite the Trump-hating obsession so many carry, to exhaust any utility to challenging the president. People are so inured to attacks that they mean nothing, and nothing he says or does has much of an impact. One lie is an outrage. A million is a statistic. Things that would have toppled any administration before just roll off his back, both because he does such wildly inappropriate stuff so regularly and there is so much screeching that it’s just background noise at this point. No outrage lasts longer than a few hours, tops, before the next comes along and captures the moment. Continue reading →

The contrast is jarring. Videos were everywhere showing Kyle Rittenhouse shooting his rifle. Yet, there was a killing in Portland, a bullet to the chest that left one man dead, and the only piece of information about it is the hat.

The man who was shot and killed was wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a far-right group based in Portland that has clashed with protesters in the past.

There may be video, but it’s not offered, no link, no embedded video. And apparently it doesn’t really do much to illuminate what happened. Continue reading →

The looting and rioting was the outgrowth of the news that police had killed yet another man, except the man was a killer himself, and then killed himself as the police were about to arrest him. It doesn’t take much to light a tinder box, especially one where you get free stuff. Well, free for looters. Whoever had it before had to pay for it, but if you make up stuff about how people you don’t know are undeserving or evil, it all becomes magically fine.

Then the Minneapolis police came and someone in the crowd decided to engage in mostly peaceful protest. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

There is further information relevant to the situation in Kenosha on more than one front. This deals with both the situation with Jacob Blake and the situation with Kyle Rittenhouse. I imagine that both sides are not going to like what I have to say, not that this will stop me from saying it. Continue reading →

It’s been obvious for a long time, though denied with a vehemence that only the unduly passionate could love: Identity trumps facts, law and reality. Orin Kerr summed it up.

These days, if it's announced that X assaulted Y, a lot of people can't decide whether that's good or bad until they know the politics of X, Y, and the reporter who wrote the announcement.

That's not good.

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) August 28, 2020

Simultaneously the excuses and condemnations fly, ranging from the inane to the outright lies, all to achieve the only possible outcome: as to the shooting of Jacob Blake, that this was a clear example of racist police attempting to murder a black man, and as to Kyle Rittenhouse, that he was a white-supremacist vigilante out to murder protesters. Continue reading →

At Reason, Zuri Davis runs through the failures, bit by bit, of how Tennessee cops searching for a 16-year-old suspected of breaking into cars managed to not merely end up pointing guns at a naked woman in her own home after breaking down her door because she didn’t open it within 30 seconds, but it ended up being the wrong house.

Several minutes later, the officers told Hines they had the wrong home.

How is that possible? Continue reading →

The rape and murder happened in 1983. At the time, people thought we were a fairly advanced society. Horses had long since given way to cars. We had science. The law had gone through the Warren Court and come out better on the other side, protecting the rights of defendants in what today might be considered some social justice fashion. So a conviction for a rape and murder in 1985 had to be pretty reliable, because we were a caring, smart, advanced nation trying to do the right thing.

Yet, the conviction of then-18, now-55, year-old Robert DuBoise, by a unanimous jury beyond a reasonable doubt, got everything wrong. Every single thing wrong. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

In 1862, in Minnesota on the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation, the Santee Dakota Indians were starving to death. They had agreed to cede land to the United States and move onto the reservation, and the government agreed to provide for their needs, including food.[1]

In 2020, blacks had suffered for years with young blacks being killed by police officers, culminating in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, without officers being held accountable for misconduct.[2] In both cases, the affected population did what people do when they have taken all that they can take and have no other readily available options—they reacted with violence.[3] Continue reading →

It was bound to happen, and it happened. What exactly happened is unclear, although one side claims some men with guns were defending a gas station while the other side claims they were just random vigilantes looking for a fight. Either way, it happened.

Three people were shot early Wednesday, two fatally, law enforcement officials said, during a chaotic night of demonstrations over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black resident whose children were nearby as their father was shot this week by a white police officer.

Continue reading →