In Louisiana and Wisconsin, police shot two black men.  The man in Louisiana died; the one in Wisconsin is still alive.  Naturally, the Black Lives Matter crowd is on the march again.  However, when one looks at the videos, both shootings are more nuanced than the instant, knee-jerk protests would suggest.

On Friday, police in Lafayette, Louisiana shot and killed Trayford Pellerin.  Pellerin was black, so community activists are already on the move, marching through Lafeyette and bringing with them the threat of imminent violence.  The ACLU has described the shooting as a "horrific and deadly incident of police violence against a Black person," and it's joined with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Marxist shakedown organization, to demand an investigation.

Ben Crump, who's always described as a "civil rights lawyer" but who, instead, behaves remarkably like an opportunistic race-hustler, has already signed on to represent the family.  Pellerin is being described as the usual loving, family-oriented choir boy.  That's an accurate description only if the family means he had constant, serious run-ins with the law:

Pellerin was arrested multiple times, and some of those cases were dismissed, court records show. But he also served time in a state prison for felony drug and firearm possession.

Pellerin was sentenced in 2014 to five years at Richwood Correctional Center for possessing a firearm as a felon and violating his probation on a cocaine possession charge that he pleaded no contest to in 2012, court records show.

A state judge recommended drug treatment for him in 2014, although it's not clear if he received it, court records show.

Stripping away the rhetoric, the video of the shooting shows that police almost certainly had probable cause to shoot Pellerin when they did.  The narrative is that Pellerin was walking away from the police when he was shot.

The reality is that Pellerin was carrying a knife, refused to respond to officer orders that he put the knife down and lie down on the ground, didn't stop even when police tasered him, and then tried to enter a gas station, putting everyone in there at risk.  Even the women videotaping the scene taking place before them noticed that Pellerin was carrying a knife, ignoring police orders, and not responding to tasering (content warning):

The same dynamic played out in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  The police shot, although they did not kill, Jacob Blake, a black man, and the inevitable protests are already beginning — so much so that Kenosha has already had to declare a state of emergency.  The video shows that a man involved in a domestic dispute was refusing to follow police orders and did not respond to being tasered.  When he reached into the car, where he could easily have had a gun, the police had to make a split-second decision about whether to take the risk that the man would pull a gun out of the car and go on a shooting spree:

This just happend in Kenosha, WI. рџ’”#BlackLivesMatter. pic.twitter.com/QLW7Vxtdzm

— chrizi (@nolimitchrizi) August 23, 2020

As a reminder, the videos below show how quickly a murderously inclined person who appears unarmed can arm himself and shoot people, including police:

The best way for people to avoid being the victim of a deadly shooting is for them to listen when police tell them to drop their weapons and lie down.  Those who don't are committing suicide by cop — and those who take to the streets are creating civil unrest in service to a lie.

Images: Active Shooter Training, Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, by U.S. Marines, public domain.