The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Kevin Pudlik, Victim of Injustice?

Posted on | March 11, 2021 | Comments Off on Kevin Pudlik, Victim of Injustice?

On May 31, 2019, there was a shooting in Michigan. Three days later, police spotted an SUV reported to be connected to that shooting. Inside the vehicle were driver Christopher Lee Cavin, 29, and passenger Kevin Pudlik, 41. Police gave chase and eventually — after three separate PIT (pursuit intervention technique) maneuvers — the SUV was cornered by cop cars on the southwest side of Detroit near I-75. Despite being surrounded by armed police, Cavin still refused to surrender, and instead tried to run over one of the police. All the cops opened fire, wounding Cavin twice, and killing his passenger Pudlik.

 

Police found two loaded handguns in the SUV, one of which was traced to the May 31 shooting. There was also cocaine and MDMA in the vehicle.

It turns out that Pudlik was a paraplegic, having become paralyzed some years earlier. Although the news article doesn’t say how Pudlik became paralyzed, this doesn’t mean he was incapable of being the triggerman in the shooting that led to the fatal police chase. Cavin was charged with second-degree murder because his actions led to the death of his criminal accomplice and, yes, Pudlik was a convicted felon, having served prison time for illegally purchasing a gun in 2012. We don’t have a complete record of Pudlik’s criminal career, but if it was illegal for him to purchase a firearm, it seems an obvious inference that he had previous convictions that made him prohibited to possess weapons.

Now, the reader may ask, why am I telling you about this incident that happened more than two years ago? Because of my habitual curiosity, when led me to do a Google search on Pudlik’s name in an effort to learn more about the incident. See, “Pudlik” is a sufficiently rare surname that I figured that searching for that would turn up every news article related to this chase. Guess where I found it? On a page entitled “In Memoriam” on the website DefundThePolice-dot-org.

That’s right: In their effort to smear police as perpetrators of “injustice,” this tax-exempt anti-police organization apparently decided that they would list the names of every person killed by police, regardless of the circumstances involved. The obvious intent of including the names of as many “victims” as they could find was to create the appearance that police are routinely killing innocent people. We have encountered this phenomenon before. As I explained in January (“Manufacturing an Atrocity Narrative: How BLM Distorts the Reality of Crime”), another such list of “state-sanctioned killing of Black people” included Najee Rechelle McGilbray, who died when she rammed her car into a tree while attempting to elude police on snow-covered roads in December 2017.

McGilbray was a victim of nothing but her own poor judgment and bad driving, and I am similarly averse to conferring the status of “victim” on Kevin Pudlik. When an encounter between police and criminals ends in the death of a criminal, this may not be the ideal outcome, but it is certainly not what most people would consider an “injustice.”

George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose.

Tucker Carlson had some thoughts about “justice” in that case:

 




 

Category: Crime

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