White is right — in activists’ book.
That is, the right color to ignore when it comes to stories of people shot by police.
So says American Thinker editor Rick Moran while reporting on the shooting of a pellet-gun wielding white man on Sunday by San Francisco police. The Washington Post describes the incident:
The shooting occurred in the parking lot of the San Francisco Police Department’s Mission Station [at 5:20 p.m. PT]. In a statement, the department said that the confrontation began when police sergeants asked a man in the station’s restricted lot to leave. Instead, the man stood in the middle of the driveway blocking their exit, police said.
When the sergeants approached him again, asking the man to take his hands out of his shirt pockets, they said they saw “what appeared to be the butt of a handgun” sticking out from his waistband, the statement said.
“Fearing for their safety and in defense of their lives, the sergeants drew their service weapons as the suspect pulled the weapon” out, the police statement said. Two sergeants shot and hit the man three times. He was declared dead at San Francisco General Hospital shortly before 8 p.m.
Police later learned that the man had an air gun, or a replica gun, they said.
The facts of the case certainly appear to support the police’s actions. The beef Moran and other critics have is that when the races of victims in shooting incidents are reversed, the facts no longer seem to matter. As Moran explains:
Suicide by cop? Very possible in this case, especially given the suspect’s behavior earlier in the day. What’s missing are the howls of outrage from the anti-cop activists, who should change their hashtag campaign from #blacklivesmatter to #onlyblacklivesmatter. If the victim had been black, Oakland would be on fire at this point.
But it’s apparently OK to shoot down a white man, even if he’s trying to commit suicide.
Is anyone else getting sick of the rank hypocrisy from these people?
Moran concludes that the man shot in San Francisco was the “wrong color” for the activists’ agenda. And there are many examples of such hypocrisy. For instance, the 2014 self-defense shooting of black robbery suspect Michael Brown by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson dominated national news and sparked the violent anti-police protests common since that time, and the fact that evidence shows conclusively the 6´4˝, 292-pound Brown attacked the officer and tried to take his gun has done nothing to deter his defenders. In fact, the media readily reported the “hands up, don’t shoot” claim that Brown was shot after surrendering — even after it became completely untenable. Yet the case of 20-year-old Dillon Taylor, a white Utah man shot to death by a non-white Salt Lake City police officer August 11, caused nary a national-media ripple; this is despite its tying in well to the Brown case, having occurred a mere two days later.
The media was similarly silent after the killing of white Iraq military veteran James Whitehead by off-duty black police officer Robert Arnold in Texas in 2011. According to reports, Whitehead used a racial slur during a verbal altercation but didn’t attack Arnold, who shot the veteran while the latter was sitting in his truck preparing to leave the scene. Arnold was fired from his Orange Police Department for the killing and for “other violent past incidents” but was never charged.
It was the same media-crickets story with the killing of white teen Gil Collar by a black officer at the University of South Alabama in 2012. And in all three cases, the men shot dead were “unarmed,” just as the media emphasized Mike Brown was — over and over again. As Al.com’s Brendan Kirby put it, “White officer shoots unarmed black teenager and it becomes months-long fodder for the national media. Black officer shoots unarmed white teenager and it becomes nothing more than a local story.”
But we don’t have to rely on just anecdotal evidence. As black pundit Larry Elder pointed out just last month, “In 2012, according to the CDC, 140 blacks were killed by police. That same year 386 whites were killed by police. Over the 13-year period from 1999 to 2011, the CDC reports that 2,151 whites were killed by cops — and 1,130 blacks were killed by cops.” Furthermore, Elder reports that “in the last several decades the numbers of blacks killed by cops are down nearly 75 percent” and then asks, “So what’s driving this notion that there is now an ‘epidemic’ of white cops shooting blacks…?” He then provides the answer:
This white-cop-out-to-get-black-civilian narrative advances the interest of many. The media loves what Tom Wolfe called the “Great White Defendant” — a bad white guy everybody can agree to dislike. For the Democrats, it furthers their assertion that race remains a major problem in America, that Republicans/tea partiers/black conservatives are out to get them, and you must vote for us. For “activists” like the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and local wannabes, it gives them continued relevance.
Of course, this phenomenon isn’t restricted to police-civilian incidents. Just consider the shooting of that unarmed 17-year-old by that grown man bent on thwarting crime; with one being white and the other being black, it certainly was prime material for national news.
Except it didn’t make any.
This is because I’m not, as most would assume, talking about the 2012 shooting of black Florida teen Trayvon Martin by community watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic man the media universally described as white. Rather, I refer to the 2009 shooting of white teen Chris Cervini by black homeowner Roderick Scott in Greece, New York. And the cases shared similarities: They both involved interracial encounters, both teens were 17 years old, and both shooters were acquitted by juries. But then there are the differences. Zimmerman had been beaten by Martin to the point of looking like something the cat dragged in, whereas Scott — a large, muscular martial artist who has competed in fighting competitions — admits that Cervini never laid a hand on him. And then there was that other difference:
While the media made the Zimmerman case the story of the year, the Scott incident was sent to news-cycle Siberia.
The effect of this slanted coverage is to make people believe there’s an epidemic of white-on-black violence, driven by bigotry. This makes blacks and others angry, foments racial unrest, and risks pushing the United States into a race war.
The reality is that black-on-white crime is far more prevalent than the reverse, and 93 percent of all black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. As Larry Elder put it, “We are being manipulated.”
