Americans, and those who follow America’s endless circus of police violence, woke up on April 21, 2021 to another police bodycam of the killing of a black teenager.
A white police officer, who was called to an altercation at a private home with foster care children, leapt out his car, as the video shows, screaming and shoots a 15-year-old girl 4 times.
He does this 3 seconds after leaving his car. He was yelling a warning over and over while drawing his gun. His warning was heard by no one nor was it intended to be. The person he shot, who looked to be carrying a paring knife, was the person who asked for police assistance.
As this child lie dead on the sidewalk, more police arrived, a crowd gathered, and police began changing the neo-Nazi theme, “Blue Lives Matter” to inflame the crowd.
The officer directly involved, yet unnamed, claims he fired to protect himself from attack. He is clearly lying and in doing so, this becomes another potential criminal act by police who are, to millions of Americans, an occupying force answerable only to corrupt local officials, if at all.
He was not being attacked and actually put himself close to a confrontation involving several teens for one reason, to get a clear shot at a child in order to kill her.
Distance is maintained by moving backward, not running forward. Weapons are only drawn at the last moment and are pointed at the ground, never at someone, until they are absolutely necessary.
Police are never to point a weapon at someone like in a cowboy movie. This is criminal behavior, not policing.
It is also intimidation and terrorism, not policing. Thus, it is done all the time.
The first responsibility is to restore order while protecting human life. Did the officer shoot a victim of a crime or a criminal? What is clear is this, he obviously did not care.
I served several years as a police officer and have some experience at similar situations. Police then had batons and were highly trained to use them. I could disable a teen with a knife in a second with a blow to the lower leg. That leg would break like a twig.
Thus, other less violent ways of dealing with the problem were sought first.
A police officer was never considered “in danger” unless directly confronted, at a distance, by an individual carrying a lethal weapon, who didn’t just ignore screamed demands to “drop the weapon” but overtly moved to attack.
Police are trained to maintain a distance of at least 20 feet or more to allow for a lowering of emotions. Running up to someone and shooting them “because they are too close” is quite likely murder.
Today it would be mace or pepper spray, and in this situation, I would have hit everyone around, and then if needed, a taser.
This was not a drug crazed psychotic with a machete, this was a child, albeit a large child, with a knife.
We are going to discuss several relevant areas here and if we are going to take the time, a collective effort, then we might as well be truthful where most never are.
First of all, let’s think January 6 and the attack on the US Capitol by an armed mob of “white folks,” of which over 400 are now facing felony charges and hundreds more are being sought. One person was shot by security forces there. Let us also note that 144 police were injured, some maimed, by a crowd of over 1000 armed with spears, swords, machetes, lead pipes, rebar, big game repellant and in numbers that overwhelmed police 40 to one.
By this standard, all of them would have been shot dozens of times with one exception, the rioters, mostly men, many former members of prison gangs or mental patients, were white.
We might also add, and “as such,” being white, their safety and security despite being actively involved in armed insurrection against the government of the United States, took precedent over even the safety of the officers themselves.
After all, are we supposed to ignore the glaring fact that the capitol police who allowed themselves to be beaten with lead pipes and smashed with riot shields were all armed with semi-automatic .40 caliber pistols?
Have we, just perhaps, gone well beyond a “double standard” based on race?
As for the white rioters, all were adults, many weighed up to 300 pounds and reports suppressed by the media indicate that most were also on methamphetamine, Adderall or other illegal controlled substances which was liberally supplied by militia leaders and political organizers.
Let us go back to Columbus, Ohio for a minute. What should police do in such less threatening circumstances, for which they are not just trained but supposedly prepared?
First of all, send more than one car or go back to riding two officers to a car. Why do that? Nearly every shooting incident has one theme, that the most important people in the world are police and that, when someone calls them, whatever happens next or whatever the situation is, we must protect terrified and panicked police from potential harm, no matter how irresponsible their actions.
You see, only “blue lives” matter.
This, of course, makes any situation they attend a problem because we have invited, in seeking police assistance, heavily armed people who are, by admission, deeply psychologically damaged, often highly radicalized racists, notably entitled and generally terrified.
Nobody ever drug tests police after these incidents as the “police union” protects its members at the cost of the security of the public. Are police on drugs? Of course, they are, not all but many.
Those who are not on drugs are often drunk on the job.
Let us take a second to talk about police. Hundreds of police kill themselves every year. When I was a police officer, my partner and good friend killed himself.
What are police like? We just do not know. If you are white and affluent, police are generally, but not always, extremely nice.
Are African Americans afraid of being stopped by police? Seemingly yes and many more than afraid, they are terrified. Reports we get daily, political leaders, athletes, doctors and nurses, even African American police, are brutalized during often totally unjustified traffic stops. These get reported. The “less famous” do not get reported.
Asians, Hispanics and other “people of color” report the same thing, even when the police are themselves African American or Hispanic.
Let us return, again, to Columbus, Ohio. The incident depicted in the blurry bodycam has some lessons. To start with, by nature, police bodycams are poor quality and are purposefully designed as such.
A good comparison would be a webcam such as the Logitech BRIO. The Logitech costs less but considering the housing and battery, costs are similar. However, frame rates, resolution, sound quality and motion capture rates are higher, many times higher, on the Logitech. We do not want to begin comparing to a GoPro or iPhone.
This is why we get such poor bodycam footage and those who film the killings with their phones get so much better image quality. Even then, when images hit YouTube or are shown on the media, a 4k image suddenly is degraded to 360. We see this over and over and it is done for a reason, to obscure evidence and disinform the public. YouTube was created to draw in media and give control to Google Corporations clients, which include intelligence agencies through their Jigsaw and Idea Groups subsidiaries headed by former Bush White House operative Jared Cohen.
If you do not think intelligence agencies working with Google Corporation are active in disinformation programs inside the US (and other nations) through manipulation of media and broad and incessant censorship, you are not paying attention.
Before moving on, we are going to touch on a key American issue, that of white supremacists, who they are and why they do what they do. There is such a vast resurgence of white racism in the US, that this is an important issue.
Were police always racist? Probably yes, and probably “very much yes.”
But who are the others? The roots of most of the organizations that backed Trump’s “Stop the Steal” hoax are prisons. African Americans make up most of America’s vast prison population, millions are imprisoned in the US.
Yes, African Americans have a much higher crime rate than “whites.” It is not just poverty, there are cultural issues as well.
Similarly, among the white population, crime rates are high in poor rural communities and in “transitional” areas that are urban and mixed race. Are there cultural issues here as well? That answer would be “yes.”
Could one generalize and say that crime represents lack of opportunity? That answer would be “yes” and quite probably not an oversimplification.
What we are saying is that “whites” who end up in prison, and American prisons are the most dangerous on earth, are forced to radicalize and band together to survive.
This has led to the breeding ground of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and criminal militias that have now aligned themselves, out of convenience, with the religious right.
It has also led to these militias and gangs to be used as tools of political and social destabilization much as ISIS and al Qaeda have been used around the world to foment regime change.
There is even some evidence that those who back the militia movement in the US with black funding also back ISIS and al Qaeda. This is not conjecture and is certainly not conspiracy theory as sources within America’s intelligence community assure.
With so many Americans going in and out of prison, the highest prison population per-capita in the world, former prisoners have become a major factor and, in fact, “cultural influencers.”
So, where we only had “Gangsta Rappers” on one side, we now have a white equivalent as well, and one of significant size.
What is stranger still is the relationship these former prison gangs have, when they organize in poor rural areas, with local police. They work hand in hand. Truth is, in many cases they worked hand in hand before one set of criminals, not wearing badges, went to prison. The criminals with badges do not go to prison that often.
What are we saying here? We are saying that many rural police organizations are entirely corrupt, working hand in hand with local drug dealers but, on a larger scale, with international drug cartels and their political operatives that hold power throughout the United States.
What we saw in Chicago in the 1920s with Al Capone has not just survived but flourished across America. Tens of millions of Americans regularly use illegal drugs other than marijuana and millions of those are addicts, primarily of methamphetamine or opiates.
Trafficking at this scale has always involved international cartels, whether the French Connection or the CIA’s alleged crack cocaine operation that former Los Angeles police detective Mike Ruppert reported on during the 1990s.
What is certain is that the money generated in the massive effort goes everywhere, to national political candidates, to local officials and to police.
Conclusion
Here is a hard question; is today’s American society and culture somehow engineered by the media to promote racial strife and drug use in order to promote an economy controlled by world organized crime?
Let us also be honest. American politics have one underlying theme, racism. After 1969, the Republican Party, the GOP, was formulated to maintain minority control of America on the part of banking interests by exploiting and even promoting racism.
Terms like “family values” are part of cryptic subtext to radicalize susceptible populations like the gullible Christian Evangelists, into mixing the evil cocktail of “Jesus and racism” that defines American culture today.
We promised some hard questions. What would a normal 15-year-old girl be doing in a knife fight in front of her home?
Where is this a “cultural norm” in a dispute one might contend is over an online insult or boyfriend issue?
What we clearly see is a violent subculture, this one within the African American community. Are there others? Are there street gangs, motorcycle gangs, supremacist militias and other groups prone toward what we broadly term as “anti-social behavior?”
A better question might be how much money is made promoting these dangerous alternative lifestyles and the drug culture that surrounds them.
How much money is spent promoting “law and order” at the hands of police, some of whom are equally steeped in not just a violent but criminal subculture themselves?
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
