Ferguson Lesson: Do What The Cop Says
I’ll never forget the sense of betrayal I felt when, in 1992, America watched the beating of Rodney King, a black man, by four Los Angeles policemen night after night on mainstream media news about the L.A. riots, and then weeks later we learned we were being fed only a fraction of the video clip — a clip, when viewed in total, that showed King (a huge man) rampaging like a wild elephant through the four officers as they tried to subdue and arrest him.
The liberal media’s obvious mission? To portray the police as brutal racists, and King as a “victim.”
This was all brought to mind again in recent days with the media coverage of the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the ensuing riots by some Ferguson locals that were augmented by many out-of-town agitators, including Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
Let’s review the chronology of what we know: Based on that, I predict this scenario or one close to it is what will come out of the grand jury being convened as I write.
Video taken in a neighborhood convenience store shows Brown stealing cigars. While exiting the store, he is accosted by the diminutive store clerk, whom he shoves into a display rack, stalks him back up the aisle in an intimidating move, as if warning him not to call police, then he exits the store.
Later, Brown and his friend are walking down the middle of the street when Officer Darren Wilson accosts them in his police car, ordering them to get off the street and onto the sidewalk. They blow him off and keep walking. Around this time, Wilson hears on his radio about the robbery of the store, and notes the description of the perpetrator fits Michael Brown. He again drives his car up alongside Brown, stops his car and, as he exits, Brown “bum rushes” (charges forward with his body), pushing the car door into him. Somehow, at this point, they end up in the patrol car and Brown goes for the officer’s gun. A shot is fired and, in the struggle, Brown punches him in the face.
Brown exits the vehicle and walks away. Wilson draws his pistol and orders Brown to “freeze.” Brown turns back toward the officer and moves toward him, ignoring Wilson’s orders. At this point, Brown charges — all 6 feet 4 inches, 290 pounds of him — toward Wilson, still ignoring orders to “freeze.” At this point, Wilson starts firing at him. The official autopsy shows four bullets entered the front of Brown’s body as he charged the officer. The last two entered his head, the trajectory indicating Brown had to be leaning forward, most likely as he was going down from the first four bullets and the momentum of his charge.
At some point, either after Officer Wilson ordered Brown to leave the middle of the street or after the altercation in the patrol car, Brown taunted Wilson about his “inability” to enforce his orders.
So, if we take all the factual knowledge of Michael Brown from video clips and a preponderance of eyewitness accounts thus far, as well as Wilson’s facial injury, we can see Brown uses his size and thuggish manner to intimidate those around him, and then he actually physically assaults Officer Wilson.
The moral of this story? Parents, grandparents, uncles and aunties, teach your kids to show respect to police (for all the obvious reasons), even if it rubs the wrong way. Obey the orders of law-enforcement officers, even if they don’t happen to make sense to you at the time.
Obey first, and then argue.
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