Ep. 157 - Another Innocent Man Gunned Down By Police
In the past I have been too dismissive towards those who raise concerns about unjust police shootings. I have realized that I was wrong and they are right. As a few recent cases demonstrate, there is a serious problem here. Too many innocent people have lost their lives at the hands of those sworn to protect and serve them. Why? That's the question I'll try to tackle on the show today. Date: 12-06-2018
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, there have been several very disturbing cases recently of innocent men being gunned down by police.
There is a legitimate problem here, I think, with how police deal with the public.
I didn't always believe that, but now I do, and I'll explain why today on The Matt Walsh Show.
So, I've been wrong about something.
Not the first time, won't be the last, but I have been wrong about something.
I have, in the past, been dismissive about the issue of unjust police shootings.
And I realized that I was wrong to be dismissive.
I've come to this realization over time, but the last few months have solidified it for me.
Especially, I think there is a problem here.
There is an issue.
In the past, I've basically taken the position that there's Not a real issue.
It's all just hysteria.
And I still maintain that there's a lot of hysteria mixed into this, clouding the picture.
But still, when you sift through that, there is definitely an issue.
There's a problem.
So, I was wrong.
Let's just start by looking at some recent episodes.
Most recently, from just last week, police were responding to a shooting at a mall in Alabama, and in the process, they killed an apparent innocent man, a mantic Fitzgerald Bradford, who, according to witnesses, was trying to direct shoppers to safety.
He was trying to help, and he got killed in the process.
And to make matters worse, they apparently shot him in the back.
Three times, according to an autopsy report.
Now, this was an independent autopsy.
The police did not admit this.
They have been not very forthcoming about this case.
But according to that autopsy, he was shot in the back three times.
An innocent man shot in the back three times.
He did have a gun.
He himself had a gun, but he was carrying it legally with a permit, so it's a bit reminiscent of the Philando Castile shooting.
It was another man legally carrying a gun, not trying to harm anybody, and yet was shot and killed by police.
Now, if you follow the trajectory here, It doesn't make the police look very good in this case.
So originally, they said that the suspect in the shooting had been killed.
And then a day later, they said, okay, actually, the guy that we killed probably was not the shooter.
And then a few days after that, they said, well, he wasn't the shooter, but he was brandishing a gun.
And then, in fact, in a statement issued by the police department, they said, we can say with certainty, Mr. Bradford brandished a gun.
But then later that same day, they clarified that the victim, Bradford, maybe didn't actually brandish a gun.
Maybe he just had a gun in his hand, which is not the same thing as brandishing one.
But, again, apparently he had the gun legally, and according to the family and witnesses, he was trying to help other shoppers.
So, there was also a similar case to this a month before.
So in early November, there was an armed security guard, Jamel Roberson, was killed by police after attempting to detain a shooter at a bar in Chicago.
He was doing his job and police killed him.
Now, There's a big problem here because how are we, as gun rights advocates, how are we supposed to make the case that a good guy with a gun can stop a crime if police are just going to show up and shoot the first person with a gun that they see when they arrive on the scene?
So these are cases that, as gun rights advocates, these are cases that we should be really paying attention to.
First of all, because innocent human life has been taken.
But also, there's an issue here with gun rights.
If police are killing legal gun owners, that's a huge issue.
And it does seem rather conspicuous that gun rights advocates, for the most part, say nothing about these cases.
Now, there are exceptions, but for the most part, gun rights advocates say nothing when police kill legal gun owners.
Now, the month before this, so we've got December, November, now this was back in, I think in October.
Maybe late September, a man named Botham Jean was in his own home, in his apartment in Dallas, when an off-duty cop came into his home and shot him to death.
Now, she has since been charged with murder.
She claims that she accidentally went to the wrong apartment, and she thought he was an intruder, and so she was barking commands at him, and he wasn't obeying the commands because, you know, God forbid you fail to obey the commands of an intruder who just came into your home, which she was the intruder in this case, and then she just killed him.
Now, these are cases from just the last three months.
And there are plenty of others from recent times that have been equally as egregious.
I mentioned Philando Castile.
Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old child with a fake gun, shot and killed by police.
Last year, there was Daniel Shaver in Arizona, an unarmed man, who was shot and killed by police while crawling on the ground, literally begging for his life.
And that's not an exaggeration.
It's on video.
You can watch it.
He was on the ground, crawling, begging for his life, and they shot and killed him.
Now, you can look at these kinds of cases, as I have done in the past, and say, well, these are isolated.
These are isolated cases.
Sure.
And you could say, most cops aren't killing innocent people.
Sure.
The statistics show that this is a non-issue, really.
Well, hold on with that.
Because, first of all, I would submit that three innocent men gunned down by cops in three months is enough of an issue already.
But actually, this is an issue that's hard to quantify with statistics.
There was a study done a few years ago that found that the government has been undercounting the number of civilians killed by cops.
So the numbers and figures are unreliable, and we are left then to look at individual cases.
We are left with the anecdotal stuff.
And I think there's enough of that to show that we have a problem.
The other thing is that the underlying issue is not one that can really be quantified by statistics and by studies and so forth.
The underlying issue has to do with the way that police approach and deal with interactions with the public.
The question is whether or not police, not all but some, a significant number, maybe, tended to take an adversarial, aggressive, Assume everyone is a criminal kind of approach when dealing with the public.
That's the problem.
And you can't just look at statistics and say, yep, or say, yeah, or no.
It's an issue that goes deeper than statistics will show.
But here's the problem.
Both sides of this issue have muddied the waters.
Both sides have made huge mistakes in how they approach this discussion.
So those who are critics of police, those who insist that there is a problem with unjust killings, they often make, I think, two big mistakes.
First of all, hyperbole.
They will speak as though there's a nationwide epidemic of rogue cops just prowling the streets, gunning down innocent people.
And that kind of exaggeration just is not helpful.
The second mistake is they always make it racial.
I'm not saying that race plays no role in any of this.
All of the cases I mentioned at the start involved black men, save for one, Daniel Shaver was white, but all the rest were black.
So I'm not going to completely dismiss the racial element of this.
I don't think we can do that.
But I do think that racism is too quickly assumed.
And I think that the focus on race causes us to miss the bigger picture.
There probably are racist cops out there, just like there are racist people in every profession.
But when we boil this all down to a racial issue, I think it takes everything off track and we miss the point, I think.
So those are mistakes.
But then on the other side, The defenders of the police, they also make some huge mistakes, and these are mistakes that I myself have made for a long time with respect to this problem.
Number one, they rely too much on statistics.
They look at some study or survey and they say, look, this hardly ever happens, so it's not a problem.
But as I said, the figures are unreliable because we're relying on the government to provide them.
We're relying on the government to tell on itself, essentially.
And so that's a bit precarious.
Also, even if these situations are statistically rare, they still happen, and they happen too much.
And so they have to be dealt with.
If an innocent man is laying dead in the street after being gunned down by a trigger-happy cop, it doesn't do much good to assure his family and the community that this is a rare occurrence.
So what?
We still have a dead, innocent person here, and we need to figure out why and how this happened, and there needs to be justice.
The other mistake that I think the defenders of the police make is just in being much too eager to excuse police kind of reflexively.
And they'll excuse police with, I think, really insufficient rationales.
They'll say, oh, it's a mistake, you know, people make mistakes.
Yeah, but this mistake involves the direct killing of an innocent person.
So, calling it a mistake doesn't cut it.
It would be a mistake if I was driving recklessly one night and I accidentally plowed into a pedestrian and killed him.
But I'm not going to escape justice by calling it a mistake.
Now, the fact that it's a mistake is going to weigh into the sentencing and everything, and it would be worse if I did it on purpose.
But mistakes that result in the death of innocent people These are more than just mere mistakes, right?
They'll also say, well, cops have stressful jobs, you know, so they have stressful jobs and so these things happen.
Yeah, they do have stressful jobs, but what's your point?
This is a job that they signed up for.
It's a job they are paid to do.
If they aren't prepared for the stress, they should get another job.
If they can't handle the stress without killing people, they should get another job.
Nobody forced you to be a cop.
Nobody drafted you into law enforcement.
You sign up, you apply, you volunteer, and we as citizens who pay your salary and are expected to respect and listen to you, Should be able to expect, in return, that you'll do your job without killing or otherwise abusing innocent people.
That shouldn't be too much to ask.
And we have every right to demand it.
And then the other excuse is, well, cops are in life-threatening situations.
They have to protect themselves.
They can't take any chances.
That's the... I've heard that phrase used many times.
They can't take any chances.
They can't?
No, I think they can take chances, and they should.
Their first instinct and responsibility should be to protect innocent civilian life, not their own.
Now, I'm not saying they shouldn't protect themselves, but if they're going to err on the side of protecting themselves or protecting the innocent, they should go with the latter.
Because that's their job, isn't it?
If that's not their job, then what are we doing?
Why do we have police?
If their first job is just to protect themselves, even if it means killing someone and erring on the side of, well, look, you know, I mean, you gotta err on the side of just killing an innocent person if that's what makes you safer, then what's the point?
Firemen have dangerous jobs.
And they have to protect themselves, too, as they're doing their jobs, and we can't expect them to, you know, put themselves in situations that are You know, in dangerous situations without being able to protect themselves.
But, if a fireman arrives at the scene of a fire, and there's a child trapped inside a burning building, and he could feasibly rescue the child, but he's too scared, so he lets the kid die instead, we would have every right to be outraged at him.
And yeah, he could say, it's a dangerous job!
I don't see you out here fighting fires!
Well, true.
But you signed up for it.
That's not my job, it's your job.
That's the job that you signed up to do.
If your first priority is always going to be self-preservation, why did you take this job?
That's the question.
On a selfish level, it makes a lot of sense that someone's first priority is going to be self-preservation.
Many of us operate that way.
But if that's how you operate, why are you in that job?
And that's the problem.
We seem to accept this idea that a cop's first priority should always be to preserve his own life, even if it means possibly taking an innocent life.
But that just seems really backwards to me.
I thought protect and serve meant protect and serve the innocent, the public, not protect myself.
So if you look at the Tamir Rice case, for instance.
Okay, the child was a kid who had a toy gun.
And you could say, well, the cops didn't know it was a toy.
The cops could have been real.
And a bullet fired from a real gun, even if it's fired by a 12-year-old, is going to be just as lethal, potentially, as a bullet fired by an adult.
So they didn't know, and they were being cautious.
OK, but they knew that it was a child they were dealing with.
They had to know that it could have been a toy gun.
They know that toy guns exist, right?
And they know that this is a young boy, and young boys play with toy guns.
I mean, they know all of that, I assume, right?
So then there's a calculation.
The calculation is, do I pause for a few moments to assess the situation, in case this child really is not a threat, or do I shoot and kill him just in case, so that he doesn't hurt me?
I think we should expect police officers to value innocent life a little more than that.
We should expect them to stick their necks out a little bit more than the cop who shot a child with a toy was
apparently willing to do.
So where does this come from?
We're going to be back in a minute.
What leads to these situations where the innocent are being gunned down by those who are sworn to protect and serve them?
I think there are several factors.
Number one, as I've already said, there seems to have been a philosophical shift in the way that we see law enforcement.
We don't see cops as servants of the public anymore, and I think many cops don't see themselves that way anymore.
Instead, they are simply enforcers, right?
Law enforcement.
They're enforcers.
And as enforcers, their first priority is enforcement over protection of the innocent, and certainly over service to the innocent.
Now, this is not how every cop approaches the job.
Not at all.
But there has been this general philosophical shift, I think.
The second factor, there was a study done recently showing that something like 20% of all police officers are always or nearly always angry and frustrated on the job.
Now, they have plenty of reasons to be.
Cops deal much of the time with the dregs of humanity.
Cops deal with drug addicts and domestic abusers and gang members and so on.
And I imagine that can make them jaded.
That can be frustrating.
I'll never forget what a cop said to me once while we were waiting at traffic court so that he could testify about a ticket that he'd given me, a well-deserved ticket.
I was going like 25 miles over the limit.
But as we were waiting there, he said to me, he said, you know, it's hard.
It's hard because the only time I interact with normal, decent people in this job is when I'm pulling them over to give them tickets.
The rest of the time, it's domestic violence and drug-related stuff.
And that's always stuck out to me.
And it shows the psychological toll that the job can take on a police officer.
So they have reason to be angry and bitter and frustrated.
I would be if I did their job.
But on the other side, it's kind of scary to think that 20% of the cops you come across wearing guns and badges and exercising an enormous amount of authority over you are angry and frustrated from the get-go.
That's a frightening proposition, considering how much power and authority they have.
In fact, basically, when you're confronted by a police officer, in that moment, they basically have complete and total power over you.
That's not the way it's supposed to be, it's not the way it should be, but that's the way it is.
In practice, that's the way it is.
Because they've got the gun, they've got the badge, and that's all.
And if you don't listen to them, they can kill you.
That's the way it goes.
So it is, given the way that power dynamic works, it's frightening to think that so many of them are almost always, according to this survey, frustrated and angry.
Now that leaves a lot of cops who are not always frustrated and angry or are rarely frustrated and angry, but there's still a large number who are.
And it's a self-perpetuating thing, right?
Cops deal with a lot of just scumbags, frankly, and so that can make some of them bitter and resentful.
But then when they're engaging with non-scumbags, with just normal people, you know, a normal person who happened to be speeding and they got pulled over, doesn't make you a scumbag, right?
Just a normal person.
But then they take that baggage into their interactions with non-scumbags.
And then so then those non scumbags are, their perception of the police is going to be shaped by these interactions.
And so now they're going to have a certain hostility towards the police because of these negative interactions.
I can say that, you know, the number, I don't know how many times I've been pulled.
I've been driving for whatever, 17 years or something.
And maybe I've been pulled over six times, six or seven times.
And most of that, not even speeding.
I think, you know, I had a brake light out recently.
And of those interactions, a couple of them were really nice.
The police officer was really nice and friendly.
But then a couple of them, the police officer was just a jerk to me for no reason.
Going into the interaction, he was just a jerk.
There was no reason for it.
I was being completely respectful.
I wasn't arguing, nothing like that.
I just was doing as I was told, and he was a jerk.
I don't hold that against them.
I don't let that paint my impression of police officers in general.
But I think the point is, if you're just a regular civilian, and you've had several interactions with police, and they're being jerks to you for no reason, that could make you resentful.
So police officers are resentful based on their interactions, the public is resentful based on theirs, and it's just a cycle, and it leads to Bad places.
Third factor here, and this circles back to the first point, with the philosophical shift.
But I think we have an exaggerated idea of the kinds of power a cop is supposed to have.
And conservatives, who are usually big fans of limited government and all of that, all of a sudden, they lose that conviction when it comes to the police.
The skepticism, the desire for accountability, the caution that conservatives usually have when it comes to the government, when it comes to state power, suddenly that vanishes with respect to police.
To the point where some conservatives will even insist that it isn't our place to criticize.
But it is.
These are agents of the state.
These are public employees, public servants.
We have every right and every responsibility to hold them accountable.
And I think part of this very authoritarian view that some people have about the cops, and that some cops have about themselves, is the idea that if you disobey an order from a police officer, or if you fail to follow it exactly as instructed, that alone is reason enough to kill you.
I go back to the Daniel Shaver case.
He was clearly no threat.
Clearly trying to follow the orders that were being barked at him, but the orders were confusing and they were coming at rapid-fire speed, and Shaver was obviously overwhelmed and terrified.
When you've got people pointing guns at you, that can be frightening, and it can make you a little bit jumpy, and it can be difficult to follow instructions in that situation.
So, as he was crawling on the ground, crying, begging for his life, He moved his hand slightly just to lift up his shorts.
You can see in the video that his shorts are falling down.
And so he reached just to pick them up.
It's a normal instinct that people have.
When your pants are falling down, you pick them up.
And that's when they killed him.
Now, when I talk about that case at the time that it happened, some police defenders said, well, he shouldn't have moved his arm.
That's what happens when you disobey the police.
Really?
So police are what?
Kings?
They're like these demigods who can execute you on the spot if you dare disobey them?
That really appears to be the attitude that some people have when it comes to the police.
And the attitude that some police have.
And that's not what a police officer is supposed to be.
That is not how policing is supposed to work.
A man should be able to pull up his pants and protect his dignity without being shot in the chest, okay?
I really feel like that shouldn't be a controversial statement.
And you could say, well, he's moving his arm, maybe he's reaching for a gun.
Well, I think it should have been really, you know, you look at the video, it should be really obvious to anyone that he didn't have a gun.
But even if he did, okay?
And it also should be really obvious to anyone that he is trying to follow the orders.
He's crying and crawling and doing what they tell him.
So, that all should be obvious to anyone.
And it should be obvious to police.
They're the ones who are paid to be in these situations.
They should be able to make those assessments.
But what I'm saying is, even if he was reaching for a gun, let's say even if he was, There were three guys with guns pointed directly at him.
He was crawling on the ground.
Even if he did grab a gun, they would have enough time.
By the time they actually see him grab the gun, there is enough time for them to then open fire.
I know you could say, well, it's a split second thing.
It's not literally a split second though.
Like it takes, unless you are, unless you're John Wayne or something, it takes you more than a second to go from here to grab the gun to pull it.
I know it's not a couple minutes.
It's a short amount.
It's a few seconds.
But what I'm saying is that police officers should value life enough that they're willing just to wait for a second and without assuming, without jumping to this conclusion, and then killing someone just in case.
Because that's what this is.
They, let's be clear about what they, they killed him just in case.
Like, he probably didn't have a gun, but maybe he was, and just in case, let's kill him to be safe.
That's... I submit again, that is not how the police should operate.
Let's kill them just in case.
That is a shoot first, ask questions later kind of thing.
Let's shoot him first, and then go see.
Oh, he didn't have a gun.
Well, oops!
No, it's not an oops.
That's an innocent man that you just killed.
He's dead now.
He's got a family.
He's dead.
He's gone.
It's a life that's gone.
This is not an oops.
This is not a my bad.
Yeah, if they had waited one more second, they would have put themselves in a little bit more of harm's way, but I think that that's their responsibility.
And it's not even that much of harm's way, because there are three of them standing over him with guns already drawn.
So it's just, to wait one more second before pulling that trigger, yeah, it increases the threat to them by some, but not by that much.
But the trade-off is, in increasing the threat to themselves by just a little bit, They get to preserve the life of an innocent person.
And I think that's a trade-off that they should make.
And again, if you're not willing to make that trade, then what are you doing in that job?
It doesn't do any good to say, well, it's easy for you to say, Matt.
Yeah, it is easy for me to say.
I didn't sign up for that job.
You did.
It's really easy.
Let's take a surgeon in a trauma ward.
Surgeons in trauma wards have very stressful jobs.
Probably one of the most stressful jobs you could have on earth is that job.
And they make mistakes.
And these are life and death situations.
But if a surgeon engages in blatant medical malpractice, and kills a person in the process, we are going to criticize them, and we're going to be outraged, and we're going to expect accountability.
And it doesn't do any good for the surgeon to say, well, I don't see you doing this job.
This is a difficult job.
You try being a surgeon.
Yeah, you're right.
I'm not doing it.
I'm not getting paid for it.
I didn't sign up for it.
You did.
You took on that responsibility, and so it's on you.
It's not on the rest of us.
It's on the person who does the job.
If I hire a plumber to come to my house, and he screws up the job really badly, and then he can't say, well, I didn't see you fixing it.
I hired you to do it.
This is your job.
So yes, yes, you're a better plumber than me, but you're not good enough, right?
So I think this is just, it is an issue.
And on both sides, I think we need to reassess the way that we look at this.
And I also think, the last thing I'll say is, you know, I think that we should, and this is something I'm working on as well, but we should make an attempt, when you've got a whole bunch of people, a whole group of people saying something, taking a position on something, and insisting that there's a problem with something, I think that the intelligent and the right and the intelligent thing to do is to just stop and at least listen to what they're saying.
So there are a whole lot of people in this country, especially people in the black community, but not just them, who are saying, look, there's a problem with the way that police operate and the way that we approach policing, and there's an issue here.
And so I think no matter where you stand on it, we have to at least stop and listen to what they're saying and the points that they're raising.
Especially when they're talking about their own experiences.
And they're saying, look, here are my experiences with cops.
We have to stop and at least listen.
And I think once you do that, you discover that, yeah, there is a problem.
It might not be racism, it might not be a problem as widespread as the way that it's painted by some people, but there is at least an issue that's worth looking at.
Alright, we'll leave it there.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
Godspeed.
I'm Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show.
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