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June 14, 2020

Atlanta riot shows the left's downhill in slide in racializing police incidents

By Monica Showalter

As tragic as officer-involved shootings of anyone is, not all of them are worth burning down a Wendy's for. For radical activists and their enablers, this act is getting old fast.

The latest incident, in Atlanta, wrought a huge amount of turmoil:

Atlanta police units initially responded to a 911 call reporting a suspicious person at Wendy's around 10:30 p.m. Friday. Officers found a man asleep in his car, parked in the drive-thru lane and blocking customers, according to GBI.

They reportedly conducted a sobriety test, but when they attempted to arrest the man, identified as 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks, a struggle ensued.

Deputy Chief Timothy Peek, with the Atlanta Police Department, described officers' numerous attempts to deploy Tasers.

"Ultimately, when the officer used the Taser, it was ineffective for the suspect," Peek said. "It did not stop the aggression of the fight." 

Peek added preliminary information shows Brooks was able to take an officer's Taser from him and use it against the officers.

So in contrast to the George Floyd case, where the victim died pleading to breathe on video with a bad cop's knee on his neck for 8 minutes, we now have someone who was driving while intoxicated (hello, MADD), sleeping on the grounds of a fast food joint, grabbing an officer's taser while under arrest, and using the taser against police. And Wendy's is the bad guy? Police are the bad guys? This looks like the sort of nonsense that goes on at every fast food joint in inner cities every week. Transients and drug users are often found at these establishments because of the low-cost food and availability of public restrooms. Just read the Yelp! reviews of any inner-city McDonald's or In-N-Out burger, there will always be mentions of homeless as part of the user experience.

The Wendy's got burned to the ground by protestors - in this case a pudgy white woman with an accelerant apparently, as well as people who broke into the establishment and loaded up the dining room with flammable outdoor umbrellas. Presumably it was for being the site where the incident took place, and possibly the call to police which would have been done the name of defending their employees and customers from an intoxicated trespasser who wasn't there to do business.

Which is based on conditions on the ground. Back at corporate, all statements of wokedom did little to prevent such an event from happening:

Wendy's's next move, should there be one, will be to move the place away, laying off black workers. And should they choose to rebuild, if it's in a riot-prone area, will see it go up with ugly metal fireproof umbrellas, the better to prevent Antifa or whoever these arsonists were, from using them as tinder again for the next incident that involves an intoxicated person resisting arrest and an officer being forced to pull his gun.

But that's just one group of bad guys, another was the city government officials. Item one, they bowed to the mobs and fired the two police officers, who looked a heckuva lot less guilty of malfeasance than the cops in Minneapolis. After that, they forced the police chief to resign, either through pressure or else because she didn't want to deal with the demonization of cops. Were the cops really to blame? Rest assured there will be plenty of cops in Atlanta putting in for their pensions or quitting and going elsewhere given the lack of city government support for their keeping the city safe. They all know when someone doesn't have their back in their dirty and dangerous profession, and it's the poor of the inner cities, who will be now be dealing with can't-be-bothered cops taking no chances when they call in a crime. Crime rates will spike. And everyone knows this because it's alredy happened - in New York, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, to take just a few examples.

The one person they didn't blame was Rayshard Brooks, the victim, who apparently has never been responsible for his actions. And that's prompting a lot of questioning on Twitter and beyond as to what, if any, role the public plays, in being good citizens. Did this guy end up in a police encounter because he was black, or was it because of something he was doing?  For leftists, it was solely because he was black. And in claiming this, they infantilize him, dismissing the reality that his choices had a role in what eventually happened to him. Which is rather racist in the soft racism of low expectations. Most reasonable people can see that unless there is to be no policing at all, it also appears to have been a pretty predictable outcome. 

Which is just the point. The left's screams of 'racism' no matter what the circumstances is rapidly getting old. Can a city afford to lose a few buildings every time there's a police incident with two sides of the story. Can it afford to lose its police force to Going Galt? Given the consequences of the rush to judgment, the kowtowing to baying mobs, the woke statements and the demonization of police and any policing, the moral ground is starting to crumble. We've been through this hijacking of peaceful protests into orgies of destruction and looting with the George Floyd case already and can see that a lot of inner cities are going to now take decades to recover. Now we see it repeated with this far-muddier Atlanta incident. And we are likely to see it repeated on incidents of less and less moral merit - bank robbers, killers, rapists - the left will always blame the cops as the bad guy and the establishments will always be looted and burned.

The moral case is going downhill with this Atlanta incident. Yet they're going to that well again -- and again. And the public is rapidly getting tired of this - the signs are already out there. Most people are favorable to reforming some police practices and getting rid of bad cops early, as the Minneapolis case seemed to have called for. But stopping the police from any reasonable policing to keep the public safe, as seemed to have happened in Atlanta, is going to be another matter.

Image credit: Twitter screen shot

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