Courtesy of Shreveport, the political left has another bullet in the chamber to attempt to indoctrinate the culture into molding the notion of endemic systemic racism in America a non-falsifiable concept.
Over the past week, leftist media outlets have become aroused by the brutal beating in police custody of black Memphian Tyre Nichols that led to his death. Slowly but surely after news of what on the surface appears to be police misconduct, the usual suspects have, as often they do when a black man suffers this fate at the hands of police, begun to use the incident as another alleged indicator of a police war on blacks, as an extension of ingrained and irredeemable racism against blacks in America.
Even though that argument never has had a chance given the data. Although the majority of crimes, including murders, are committed by blacks, fatal police shootings disproportionately involve whites, two-to-one relative to blacks, making whites 2.5 times more likely to be shot fatally by police. Moreover, police are 400 times more likely to be shot fatally by a black man as an unarmed black was to be shot fatally by a police officer. There is no police war on blacks, if there’s a police war on anybody.
Yet professional activists and the media continue to propagate, directly and indirectly, the narrative. However, in this instance hesitation came because of an inconvenient fact: all five officers involved themselves are black.
That’s not unusual. In Shreveport, four officers, three of whom are black, were tried for the 2020 death in custody of Tommie McGlothen, a mentally disturbed black man. A court acquitted them, which triggered semi-progressive First District Attorney Democrat James Stewart so ballistically that he demanded the judge in question not handle cases involving alleged police misconduct due to bias. No merit was found to that claim, another trial judge ruled.
Scarcely anything about the McGlothen case appeared in national media because of the inconvenience caused by the race of all but one officers involved. Add to that yet another inconvenient fact: numerous studies have determined black officers are disproportionately more likely to kill black suspects.
But the leftist media/activist diaspora appears to have come up with a solution to keep the narrative alive, introduced in aftermath of the Nichols case – that being, anything bad that happens to blacks is a function of racism, determined solely by the race of the victim, not by the intentions or identity of the perpetrator. In other words, black police officers either are Oreos or dupes, willing if not eager to perpetuate racism onto other blacks to maintain a white privileged power structure.
Yet if they just recently have discovered their newest iteration that proclaims racism alive and well throughout government and society regardless of the volume of disconfirming data, another Shreveport case has dangled it there for them since last year. The city this week paid $20,000 in damages to Brandon Kennedy, a black man who in 2020 was roughed up mildly by one Shreveport officer while another observed, with both hauling him off for a night of psychiatric observation. He was released the next day.
The suit also named others for supposed impeding a resolution including Chief Wayne Smith. Although payment was made, the city admitted no fault. And the deal was made in the waning days of Democrat former Mayor Adrian Perkins’ term after his reelection defeat, who shortly thereafter escaped with his progressive reputation intact to a like-minded think tank for the next few months.
Kennedy was backed by attorneys affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union, who claimed in an announcement that he had been abused because he had made approving remarks about the racial activist group Black Lives Matter and disapproving ones about Shreveport police. That, so the claim goes, caught the attention of the SPD’s Montrell Jackson, leading to Kennedy’s forceful detention and, with the assistance of Officer Justin White, subsequent sleepover in the ward.
The ACLU news release about the case thundered how the “case confirms what research across the country and this state has shown: that police gratuitously use unnecessary, excessive, and violent force against unarmed non-resisting Black [sic] men. Mr. Kennedy’s case was particularly appalling because he was brutalized for speaking out against racial injustice” and that “Shreveport police’s history of violence against Black [sic] citizens, Mr. Kennedy’s team wrote, is the ‘inevitable consequence’ of the Chief’s policies.” However, an internal review of the matter made it more of a he-said/they-said proposition, reporting that Kennedy initiated inflammatory remarks, accepted a Jackson invitation to talk further where Kennedy then talked in a manner that Jackson believed meant he wanted to initiate a fight, and that Kennedy appeared intoxicated and perhaps mentally ill, leading to the trip downtown.
But, as in the Nichols case, there was a problem in ACLU’s implicit declaration that racist sentiments lay at the heart of alleged police antipathy towards Kennedy: Jackson is black. For that matter, so is Smith, who didn’t even take over as interim chief until months after the incident (and named permanent chief last year) so his “policies” could have nothing to do with the alleged attitude instilled into Jackson or any officer at that time.
(Ironically, Jackson shares the same first and last name with a Baton Rouge officer killed by a sniper in 2016 who pledged to take out as many law enforcement officers as he could as payback for the death of a black man Alton Sterling at the hands of two white officers. Montrell Lyle Jackson was black, as was the disturbed shooter who after shooting five others, leading to the deaths of three, was killed by law enforcement.)
No matter, the new paradigm fits. And so it continues, this insistence on seeing the world as one wants to so as to fit ideology, rather than the facts, as a means of acquiring power and privilege, with the Shreveport incident part of the new vanguard in this crusade.
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