The Other McCain

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Manufacturing an Atrocity Narrative: How BLM Distorts the Reality of Crime

Posted on | January 26, 2021 | Comments Off on Manufacturing an Atrocity Narrative: How BLM Distorts the Reality of Crime

That is a police mugshot of Najee Rechelle McGilbray. She was 18 years old in December 2014 when she was charged with Fleeing or Eluding Police Officer, 3rd Degree, in Battle Creek, Michigan. This offense is a Class E felony, which carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. However, after being sentenced in April 2015, Najee McGilbray served less than a year behind bars, and was released in December 2015.

Why am I telling you about this? Well, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve gotten into the habit of watching police dashcam and bodycam videos on YouTube as a way of relaxing and forgetting about all the political craziness that would otherwise drive me out of my mind. Monday night, I watched a video of a December 2017 police chase that ended in a crash:

 

That was in Battle Creek, Michigan, and the driver being pursued by the cop was none other than — you guessed it — Najee McGilbray:

Police from two departments are continuing their investigation in Sunday’s fatal police pursuit.
Najee R. McGilbray, 22, of Battle Creek died when she lost control of her car on Golden Avenue near Raymond Road in Emmett Township as she was fleeing from Battle Creek police.
“At first look it appears everything was according to policy and procedure,” Battle Creek Police Chief Jim Blocker said Monday.
McGilbray died at the scene of the 3:34 a.m. crash, according to Lt. Ken Cunningham of the Emmett Township Department of Public Safety. He said the woman’s 2008 Saturn Vue left the south side of Golden Avenue at the top of a hill and crest of a curve and struck two trees. One of the trees fell on the wrecked car.
Blocker said Officer Gregory Gammons was parked near Capital Avenue Southwest and Christy Road on the south side of the city when the SUV passed his position and was traveling northbound on Capital Avenue.
He began to pursue the car and reported it was back and forth in the lane, crossing the center line and the fog line on the right side of the roadway. Gammons activated his lights and siren and the car stopped near Golden Avenue but before Gammons could leave his patrol car the driver turned on the right turn signal and fled again on Golden Avenue, Blocker said.
The car failed to stop at the intersections of Riverside Drive and after crossing into Emmett Township also failed to stop at 6 ½ Mile Road and Beadle Lake Road before traveling east in the westbound lanes of a portion of Golden, which is divided.
Gammons reported speeds of 80 to 90 miles per hour.
“She was way ahead and advancing on him,” Blocker said, after reviewing a video from Gammons’ patrol car. He estimated the officer was as much as a half mile behind the SUV and said no other vehicles were involved in the pursuit.
Gammons was reporting road and traffic conditions.
“It fits with our policy,” Blocker said. “We ask officers about the environment and road conditions and if it was congested and are you putting people at risk. The conditions were right that the chase was safe. There was no call to terminate the chase.”
Gammons was the first at the scene of the crash and found a small fire under the hood which he extinguished and then was unable to find a pulse on McGilbray.
He called for Lifecare Ambulance and Emmett Township Public Safety Officers.
Cunningham said portions of the fallen tree had to be cut before emergency responders could open the car, which was destroyed in the crash.
Investigators are awaiting results of an autopsy and trying to determine if the car was equipped with a Crash Data Recorder which may have recorded the speed of the vehicle just before the crash.
Police said McGilbray had a suspended license.

What the police did not say was that McGilbray had a prior record for the exact same crime — fleeing/eluding — three years earlier.

Go watch that video again. It’s 3:30 in the morning, and it seems fair to guess that McGilbray had been out partying somewhere. Given how she was weaving all over the road, she was probably drunk. With a prior record and a suspended license, she was almost certainly driving under the influence when Officer Gammons turned on his blue lights.

This is a very common scenario in police pursuits. I’ve watched dozens of them on YouTube in the past couple of months and, based on this extensive research, I know that there is a certain predictability in the answer to the obvious question, “Why do they run?” Having a suspended license is one common answer. Most of the time, the fleeing driver is, like McGilbray, someone with a prior criminal record who fears that being busted for a traffic offense will violate their probation and send them back to prison. In many cases, the police pursuit involves someone driving a stolen car, or someone with drugs and/or guns in the car. In other cases, the driver is wanted on an active arrest warrant.

My point is, fleeing/eluding is not usually about a mere traffic violation. Almost always, there is some more serious underlying crime involved, and guess who knows this? Cops, that’s who.

There are patterns to criminal behavior, and an experienced cop knows that if he blue-lights somebody and they take off, he’s probably dealing with somebody who’s already got criminal record. That’s why, if you watch enough of these videos, you become accustomed to the “felony stop” procedure when the chase finally comes to an end. The officer who initiates the pursuit will call for back-up, and usually there are at least three or four squad cars on the scene at the end of the pursuit. All the cops exit their vehicles with guns drawn, and the command is shouted at the suspect: “Show me your hands!” It’s a tense moment, because the police have reason to suspect they may be dealing with an armed felon.

Anyway, after watching video of this police chase in Battle Creek, I did a Google search and located the information about Najee McGilbray’s prior incident of felony fleeing/eluding. There also was a story about McGilbray’s family reacting to her death:

Battle Creek police said Najee’s death could have been avoided if she’d just stopped for the officer. The McGilbray family also has questions.
[Her mother] said, “It’s really hindsight and it’s too late to say ‘would of, should of, could of,’ but I don’t know it just seems like it was all unnecessary. To me, there was a better way to handle it. I feel like she was scared.”

Oh, “there was a better way to handle it”? Like what? When your daughter took off at 90 mph, weaving all over the road at 3:30 in the morning, what do you think the cop should have done?

This absurd belief that there must be “a better way to handle it” any time police are involved in an unfortunate incident is just a way for people to excuse the criminal conduct that caused the incident. The officer in this case did nothing wrong, and yet the family of the fleeing felon try to absolve her of responsibility by implying that the cop somehow mishandled the situation. This attitude is unrealistic and impractical. Sometimes bad things happen for no reason, but if you go through life with the belief that you are never responsible for your own behavior, bad things are likely to happen to you, and you are the reason.

Well, I was Googling for more information about Najee McGilbray when I found her name on a list of victims of “police killing”:

The structural nature of this state-sanctioned killing of Black people is underscored by the refusal of official sources to even collect and publish this information.
Since the year 2000 nearly 5,000 identified Black men, women and children have been killed in fatal encounters with police across the United States. . . .
Fatal Encounters, a volunteer-maintained national database of people killed during interactions with police, documents at least 4,896 Black people killed since 2000. . . . For too long the facts have been hidden and the names of those killed have been silenced. Even the publicly created databases are incomplete, the numbers of Black lives stolen is still greater than the names that have been collected. . . .
We stand against the racialized economic violence that disproportionately impacts Black and Brown communities resulting in eviction, homelessness, systematic discrimination, educational exclusion and severe health disparities. We call for an end to police murder of Black people and the removal of police from the public schools.

There follows a list of names including Najee McGilbray who, by the abracadabra of radical rhetoric, is transformed into a martyr.

This is a perfect example of how the Atrocity Narrative operates: Create a category, add numbers, cite the most egregious cases, and pretend that you have documented a pervasive social problem.

The level of cynicism involved in this propaganda is astonishing. I never would have known that this dubious list of victims of “state-sanctioned killing” existed, had I not been doing background research on a person whose name was included on the list. But when Black Lives Matter activists start chanting “Say Their Names,” I suppose, Najee McGilbray’s name is one of those. You have seen the video yourself, dear reader — was she a victim of racist “state-sanctioned killing”?

Was this just a coincidence? Or is it the case, as I suspect, that a great many of the names on this list of “fatal encounters” are people whose criminal behavior was the direct cause of their deaths?

OK, so I just grabbed a name off the list — Corey Antonio Boykin Jr. — and Googled: Boykin was armed, and was the suspect in a robbery in which the victim was pistol-whipped and bounded and gagged with duct tape. The police bodycam video is too shaky to offer much insight beyond that, but it wasn’t like Boykin was an innocent lamb.

So I grabbed another name off the list — Deztanee Cobb — and Googled it, and discovered that this was someone involved in an incident that I’d written about just a few months ago:

Cortavion Tyriques Shemerlee Murphy was 15 years old and behind the wheel of a stolen Dodge Charger traveling about 115 mph when he crashed into a tree, killing himself and four passengers, all minors.
The crash that killed Murphy and his passengers — two 15-year-old boys, Jaquarius Hegler and Marshawn Williams, and two girls, Elexus Hillsman, 16,and Deztanee Cobb, 17 — happened around 12:45 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 2, 2017. Shortly before the crash, the Dodge Charger had blown past a police car in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The cop had at first tried to pursue the Dodge, but gave up, telling the dispatcher: “Yeah, I’m going to have to terminate it. It’s well over 100 mph.” The officer continued traveling east on Main Street at normal speed and, about a mile later, came across the site of the flaming wreckage.

How are racist police to blame for that one? Never mind. My point is that, if you start researching every name on that list, you’d find a lot of cases that don’t look anything like “state-sanctioned killing.” You ram a stolen car into a tree at 115 mph, don’t blame “systemic racism” for your death.

Do you see the distortion involved in BLM propaganda? There are certainly cases when trigger-happy cops shoot the wrong person, and we can examine the extent to which racial prejudice might be involved, on a case-by-case basis. But BLM activists are wildly exaggerating the number of such incidents in order to justify their “activism,” which is funded by tax-exempt foundations and which (not coincidentally) is part of campaign efforts by Democrats to “energize” black voters at election time.




 

Category: Crime

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