What The Left Tells Us About the Left. Part Four Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/what-the-left-tells-us-about-the-left-part-four/
Police Killing of the Unarmed
Following George Floyd’s death, the Left went ballistic that the Washington Post of all places had found that unarmed black suspects were not necessarily killed in percentages higher than the percentages of blacks among the some 11 million who were arrested each year.
The distinguished Harvard University economist Roland Fryer (an African American) looked at police shootings in Houston and did not find that racial bias was a major factor in the use of deadly force.
The point, then, is that there is little data to suggest that white officers are systematically and inordinately lethally shooting unarmed black suspects. (Note that shortly after his research was published, Fryer was conveniently charged with sexual harassment—resulting mostly from off-color jokes—at Harvard and was put on leave by the university, and had his brilliant career essentially aborted if not destroyed.)
Videos changed the country forever on May 25, 2020. The smart phone clips appeared with a white Minnesota police officer with his knee on the neck of a black arrested suspect who later died. Autopsies (more than one) followed that variously suggested that either drugs or the deliberate use of the officer’s knee to obstruct Floyd’s breathing or both mostly caused Floyd’s death.
The major facts were mostly not in dispute: George Floyd, a career felon, who had been charged, convicted, and incarcerated for prior felonies, including a home-invasion robbery, during which he put a loaded pistol to the stomach of a pregnant woman, was arrested on reports he was attempting to pass counterfeit U.S. currency.
Officers at the scene determined correctly that he was “high” on a number of drugs. And given his size and mental state, all the officers on the scene had difficulty subduing Floyd, who himself seemed not just confused but also physically impaired. He continually resisted arrest, in part perhaps because of the effects of the potent illegal drugs he had recently consumed.
When Officer Chauvin put his knee upon Floyd’s neck, an act again videoed by numerous bystanders, and when the officer did not react to Floyd’s clear pleas that he could not breath, Floyd fell into a comatose condition, an ambulance was called, and he likely died en route to the hospital. The expression of disdain on the face of Officer Chauvin while subduing Floyd became emblematic of a supposed war on unarmed, innocent black men by out-of-control white law enforcement, despite the lack of data to support such a blanket charge. In other words, Chauvin’s smirk, if it was that, was all we needed to know about his own guilt.
So, no matter. The rest is history. What followed were 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, and killing whose 35-40 deaths, 1,500 injured law enforcement officers, $2 billion in damages, and 14,000 arrests dwarfed the violence on January 6. One could argue that May 25 and its sequelae changed the 2020 election and would redefine everything from college admissions to TV commercials.
Most who were arrested that summer were never formally charged and then were later released. And as Ball recorded, the rioting as the election neared was modulated by the Left’s contacts with BLM and Antifa to wax when useful against Trump, and to wane when seen as deleterious to Biden.
The torching of a police precinct and a federal courthouse exceeded the violence at the Capitol. But the iconic event of January 6th was the lethal shooting of 14-year military veteran and unarmed protestor Ashli Babbitt by U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd. The latter was exonerated in a later investigation on grounds that he could not see whether she was armed.
Byrd testified that he believed that Babbitt, by climbing through a broken door window into the Capitol, posed a lethal danger to government personnel inside. Yet the latter were protected by several police officers more heavily armed than Byrd and who were in the vicinity and who did not apparently see Babbitt as an existential threat. (Byrd’s reasoning is as valid or as ridiculous an excuse as saying Chauvin could not determine whether Floyd was really in distress, but felt his continued resistance posed a serious threat to his officers.)
Byrd, it should be noted, in 2019 was cited for leaving a loaded Glock automatic pistol (a model that has no safety) in a Capitol restroom. And when pressed on it, he remarked that he “will be treated differently” apparently because of his own rank as a lieutenant. That fact was as little reported as frequently were Babbitt’s past affairs splashed over the papers.
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