Police Officer Mistaking Her Gun For Her Taser Was Not Racism ⋆ Politicrossing
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Police Officer Mistaking Her Gun For Her Taser Was Not Racism

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Protesters have been rioting and looting since former veteran Brooklyn Center Police Officer Kim Potter accidentally used her handgun to fatally shoot Daunte Wright, a black man, instead of using her taser. If Wright had been white, there would have been little to no protesting or publicity. Potter would have been disciplined and received a typical sentence for a fatal accident like that. 

But because the victim was black, it’s been declared police racism and Potter is likely to get a long prison sentence. Afraid of saying otherwise, officials will chime in denouncing it as racism, giving it more credibility. The racism activists will use it as an example of how racist Americans are and create more division. 

However, let’s look at it analytically. Was it really racism? We are now living in an era of heightened awareness of racist police actions. Police officers realize if they do anything that could be remotely perceived as being racist, they will have their lives destroyed. They will have hate hurled at them from all over, forced out of their homes due to angry rioters, and subjected to high-profile criminal trials that may put them away for life. Attacking someone due to their race would follow them around for the rest of their life, changing their life in a horrible way. The last thing most police officers want to do is subject a minority to more severe treatment. As a result of this occurring, fewer and fewer people are becoming police officers.  

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Potter was well aware of this when she drew the gun instead of the taser. And there was no doubt she intended to use the taser, because video of the incident shows her yelling, “Taser! Taser!” several times. These kinds of accidents happen occasionally, less than once a year nationwide. In the heat of the moment, pumped up by adrenaline and fear, the officer reaches for the wrong gun and doesn’t realize it. There’s even a name for it, “slip and capture,” where officers perform the opposite of their intended actions under stress. But these incidents happen to white suspects too, you just never hear about them because they’re white. The fatal shooting of young black man Oscar Grant in 2009 was made into a movie, Fruitvale Station

Part of the reason the radical left activists get away with this mantra about racist police is because there is a problem with police brutality in many other countries. A lot of it is directed toward ethnic groups, religious groups or tribes. People are so used to hearing about that kind of police violence, that it’s not much of a stretch to believing it takes place here. No one questions that there may be an occasional racist police officer, or that there were more incidents involving racist police officers in the past. But it is not a systemic problem today and most of the incidents involving the police killing minorities nowadays do not appear to be a result of racism.  

The problem is not going to go away as long as things have gotten so twisted that to question accusations of racism by Black Lives Matter on incidents where cops shoot minorities is considered racist itself.  

In most cases, officers who accidentally used their gun instead of a taser did not face criminal charges. In 2019, a police officer who accidentally shot Brian Riling in the abdomen using a gun was not charged. His name wasn’t even released. Riling is white. In 2014, Officer Jason Schuck accidentally shot homeless man Eric David Butts, resulting in Butts being forced to use a colostomy bag. Schuck was allowed to keep his job and was only charged with a misdemeanor. Butts is white. 

Whereas in at least two cases where officers fatally shot black suspects, the officers received prison sentences. Johannes Mehserle, who fatally shot Grant, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 11 months in prison. Robert Bates, who fatally shot Eric Harris, was also convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison. 

Wright’s family hired well-known attorney Benjamin Crump to represent them, who says great things we all support about how we should not discriminate against minorities — but on the other hand insists that incidents like this are due to racism. He issued a statement that said in part, “What will it take for law enforcement to stop killing people of color?” Protests and rioting went on for days, resulting in the arrests of over 110 people. 

Compounding the problem is the nearby police killing of George Floyd last year. Most reasonable people believe former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin did not use good policing. So anger is extra inflamed in Minnesota. But even in his case, there is no evidence his actions were due to racism. He had a history of 18 complaints against him. Almost all of them were closed with no discipline. Maybe it was just plain old bad policing.   

There is no evidence that Potter was a racist. If she was, activists and journalists would probably have dug it up by now. She has been charged with second degree manslaughter, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years behind bars. Will she be treated fairly, or will she get a more severe sentence because the suspect was black?

 

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Rachel Alexander is a conservative political writer and pundit. She is the editor of Intellectual Conservative and a recovering attorney. She was ranked by Right Wing News as one of the 50 Best Conservative Columnists from 2011-2019.



 
 
 

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The Pickle DeSantis Finds Himself In

Ron DeSantis was in a real pickle…

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Ron DeSantis was in a real pickle… Should he or shouldn’t he run for President. Now that he has decided to run for President, he finds himself in a REAL pickle. PolitiCrossing Founder Chris Widener explains in this short video analysis:

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Mainstream Media: Intentionally and Diabolically Unfair and Unbalanced

All pretense that the mainstream media strives for objectivity is gone

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by Jay DeLancey and Jeff Davidson

The grandest mistake the American populace committed in the last half-century was assuming that our media was even somewhat fair and balanced. Likewise proceeding in the last two decades as if the Internet giants had no dog in the political arena proved to be a mistake of historical proportions.

Today because so many people, still, are conditioned as such, the mere fact that say, a CNN, has a website prompts some people to believe that the network have something of value to offer. Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, whose focus is classics and military history, says that the New York Times is “a shell of what it used to be.”

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Nothing Objective to Offer

The paper always leaned to the left, since it’s founding, but it did an intermittently semi-decent job in reporting the facts. The Times sent their reporters out to the streets to do hard-core reporting. The mission was to gather relevant data, identify sources, talk to people, find eye witnesses, speak to bonafide experts, attain corroboration, and then when they were sure of what they had written, submit the story or feature.

Their articles probably never represented a 50-50 balance – perhaps 55-45 or 60-40 in favor of the left. Today, no rational media observer would contend that the balance is 70-30, or even 80-20. Study after study reveals, say, in the case of covering Donald Trump, that 92% of all features are negative, and that is not to say the remaining 8% are positive. Mostly, they’re neutral.

If you are a Trump or DeSantis supporter, or a Republican running for Senate or the House of Representatives, for governor in your state, or for any other position of prominence, you simply cannot expect a fair shake from the press, nationally, and in most cases locally. Indeed, you’re likely to be demonized, endlessly, over issues foo which Democrats receive a free pass.

Compromised to the Breaking Point

The New York Times and The Washington Post of old, as biased as they might’ve been, at least offered some semblance of up-to-date information, with facts and figures when they had them, and timely reporting as situations unfolded. Hansen remarked that today the people who run these newspapers are trading on the decades of hard work and the reputations built up over more than 100 years.

Those who put in the seed work are dead and gone and thus, obviously, have no say about what’s going on today. The Times and the Post, in less than a generation, are destroying their own reputations. The people who currently run these ‘news’ organizations are dragging them down at warp speed and don’t even recognize the damage that they are doing.

By 2030, what is now a shell of an organization will be less so, and it wouldn’t be too wild to predict that the Times could totally morph into something else. The Post is not far behind in devising its own demise.

The Pretense is Gone

Each of the countless newspapers that feed off of these two publishing giants suffer as well. All such pretense that the mainstream media strives for objectivity is gone. The good news, if you could call it that, is everyone on the right is now vitally all aware that this has happened.

Those who strive for integrity in elections, those who are on the right, and those who are routinely demonized by the left, understand what’s occurring to the nth degree. It’s not fair, but to know what you face is a benefit of sorts.

 

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