Category: Crime

‘The New Zeroeth Amendment’ and the Predictable Death of Dijon Kizzee

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If your life’s ambition is to die in a hail of police gunfire and become a martyr for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Dijon Kizzee is an admirable role model. The media’s role in the BLM movement is to create and sustain martyrdom myths by obscuring certain crucial facts involved in the deaths of the criminals they elevate to secular sainthood. Thus, in headlines, Dijon Kizzee becomes an “L.A. cyclist,” as if he was killed — murdered by police! — for the crime of riding a bicycle while black. Anyone disputing that false narrative is then condemned as a racist.

What you will not be told — what the CNN coverage will deliberately avoid telling you — is that Dijon Kizzee was a convicted felon who had been in and out of prison for years, that he was under a restraining order at the time of his death, and that he was carrying a stolen pistol when he encountered police who sought to question him.

Liberals are always telling us how we need “common sense” gun-control laws to “keep guns off the streets.” One such law is the prohibition of felons possessing firearms. Is there any Democrat who wishes to argue that it’s OK for convicted felons to carry loaded pistols? No, of course not. But whenever cops try to arrest felons for violating such laws, we are subjected to lectures about “systemic racism” when the criminal resists arrest and, predictably, dies in a hail of police gunfire.

Let’s start with the facts, which are buried deep in a Los Angeles Times feature profile of Saint Dijon of the Blessed Bicycle:

He was convicted for various crimes in L.A. and Kern counties over the last decade and served two terms in state prison totaling more than a year between 2016 and 2019, according to officials. The prison terms related to charges including evading or attempting to evade a peace officer while driving recklessly, as well as possession of a firearm by a felon or addict.

That’s the 14th paragraph of a 29-paragraph story. You see that Kizzee was well aware that it was illegal for him to possess firearms. If the cops caught him with a gun, he was going back to prison. So when he came in contact with the police on Aug. 31, Kizzee resisted arrest and was shot, police say, when he reached for the pistol.

We may surmise that the reason he was riding a bicycle Aug. 31 wasn’t because he was seeking the cardiovascular benefits of exercise, but rather because his history of reckless driving meant that he didn’t have a driver’s license. The media wish us to believe “systemic racism” caused Kizzee’s death; therefore, his criminal record is buried in the 14th paragraph of the L.A. Times story, and not even mentioned on CNN, which will never have a panel discussion about how cops are supposed to keep guns off the streets — a goal that liberals say they support — if “activists” organize a riot every time cops try to arrest anyone who isn’t white.

Steve Sailer described this last month during the Kenosha riots:

Egged on by Joe Biden and Wisconsin governor Tony Evers, a mob of Black Lives Matter rioters has been burning down Kenosha, Wis. They are angry over the latest police shooting of yet another black criminal who assumed he is racially entitled to resist arrest.
The new Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution reads “No Black man must submit to being arrested if He’s really not in the mood to be arrested.” . . .
One of the matters the cops may have wished to speak to [Jacob] Blake about was his open warrant for felony sexual assault. But in 2020, if he’s not interested, a Black man doesn’t have to discuss his warrant with nobody.
So, Blake fell to brawling with the police. Eventually he was tased, but without apparent effect. When he got up, a policeman pointed his gun at the 29-year-old security guard to encourage him to desist. But instead of complying, he strode around to the driver’s side of his vehicle, as the police shouted to him to “Drop the knife!” He opened the door and reached in, at which point the cop grabbing his shirt shot him seven times.

Sailer then makes reference to Blake’s 2015 charge of resisting arrest after he brandished a pistol in a Racine bar. The charges were dropped in that case, apparently because witnesses were uncooperative, but you see Sailer’s point about “the new Zeroeth Amendment.”

If someone like Blake cannot be arrested — he was violating a restraining order and terrorizing the woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her — then who, exactly, are police allowed to arrest? Are only white people subject to arrest in 21st-century America? You can talk all you want about the need for “criminal justice reform,” but the real goal of the BLM movement is to make it practically impossible to arrest anyone who is black, no matter what crimes they may have committed.

This is what happens when you elect Democrats. No one who actually wants to reduce crime would ever vote for Democrats, who rely on the votes of criminals — that’s why Mike Bloomberg is paying the fines of convicted felons in Florida — in order to win elections.




 

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Meet Canada’s Version of Deborah Frisch

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A lunatic foreigner who got herself deported:

Pascale Ferrier is a 53-year-old Canadian woman who was arrested in connection with a letter containing ricin that was sent to President Donald Trump last week, CBC reported. She was a computer programmer and had previously been arrested in Mission, Texas, while living in the United States. Authorities said additional, connected letters might have been sent to law enforcement in Texas.
Ferrier was arrested when she tried to cross into the United States from Canada near Buffalo, New York, according to the CBC. She is being held in custody in New York, and court records show charges have not been filed against her yet. . . .
An unnamed source familiar with the investigation told CNN that the letter had a substance with physical characteristics similar to ground castor beans, and the letter was mailed from Saint-Hubert, Quebec. On Monday, CBC reported that Royal Canadian Mounted Police were searching a condo on Montreal’s South Shore in Saint-Hubert. The Journal de Montreal reported that she had only lived at the residence for a few months.
Ferrier was carrying a gun when she was arrested, CNN reported. She was trying to cross the border from Fort Erie, Ontario, into Buffalo, New York, via the Peace Bridge when Customs and Border Protection agents took her into custody, NBC News reported. . . .
Ferrier had been living in Texas when she was deported to Canada last year. She was arrested in Mission, Texas, in March 2019 for carrying an unlicensed weapon and a fake driver’s license and resisting arrest, The New York Times reported.
Her arrest record from 2019 shows that she was arrested by the Mission Police Department on March 12, 2019, and released on May 18, 2019. KRGV confirmed the arrest, noting that the Hidalgo County District Attorney’s Office had filed a motion to dismiss the charges because it was her first offense and she had spent 20 days in jail. She was jailed for more than two months before she was released.
Officials learned that she had overstayed a 6-month visa and her arrest had violated the terms of her passport. She was deported back to Canada, The New York Times reported.

Ace shares this astute observation:

These people rank very low in the category of “Conforms to Gender Expectations.”
As I said earlier, leftism is a cult created to provide scapegoats and hate-objects for the mentally ill, the failures, the ugly and the unemployable and the unmarriagiable.

In case you don’t know who Deborah Frisch is, she is a former University of Oregon psychology professor who turned into an Internet stalker, and last time I checked was in a Colorado penitentiary. Dr. Frisch ranked rather low in “Conforms to Gender Expectations,” although not as low as this crazed gun-toting Canadian ricin-mailer.




 

‘Criminal Justice Reform’

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There wasn’t much left of the car after the high-speed chase ended in South Carolina, and not much left of the driver, either. Behind the wheel of a stolen Toyota Prius, Kamontie Gross, 19, led police on more than a 20-mile chase April 18, 2019, from Charlotte, North Carolina, after he and two accomplices committed an armed robbery. Police from Charlotte backed off the chase, letting a police helicopter track the stolen vehicle down I-77 to the border, where South Carolina state troopers took up the pursuit. At one point, troopers used a PIT maneuver to spin the car around, but it kept going until its fiery conclusion near Rock Hill.

 

You will probably not be surprised by this information:

According to Mecklenburg County Jail records, Gross had been arrested nine times since 2016. Four of those arrests included charges related stolen vehicles.
Jail records also show [Gross’s 17-year-old accomplice Aniya] Taylor had been arrested seven times since 2017. Her arrests also included several charges for Possession of a Stolen Vehicle, as well as Fleeing or Eluding Arrest with a Motor Vehicle.

 

Between them, these two teenagers had 16 arrests, and while I couldn’t find the name of the third suspect, who survived the crash, we can imagine that this person had his or her own string of arrests. Why weren’t these criminals already behind bars? What is going on in our criminal justice system, when repeat offenders are being turned loose to wreak havoc on our streets, endangering public safety? The media amplify complaints from activists who say “mass incarceration” is the problem, but it seems to me the problem is rather the opposite. Authorities appear reluctant to lock up young criminals; grand theft auto used to be considered a serious crime, but now it’s just a videogame title, I guess.

A TV reporter interviewed Kamontie Gross’s mother:

Channel 9’s Tina Terry spoke with the mother of the man behind the wheel, who said she waited for hours at the hospital before learning that her oldest child had died in the crash.
“It’s so hard to lose a child. It’s so hard, it’s so hard,” Chaquia Gross said.
The crash killed her son Ka’Montie Gross, who was behind the wheel, an unnamed passenger, and seriously injured a second passenger.
Chaquia said she has no idea where her son was going or why any of this happened, but she said her friend messaged her about the crash shortly after it happened.
“I was like ‘Is he OK?’ They said ‘He’s gone’ and I’m like ‘What,'” Chaquia said. “She said ‘I can’t, I can’t let you see him, if you did you wouldn’t recognize him.”
Chaquia said her son had a big heart that cared for others, but he never extended that same care to himself.
“He’d tell you don’t walk across the street cause a car coming, he’d walk,” Chaquia said. “If you were down, he would pick you right back up. We might clash, but I love him to death. I’m gonna miss him.”

Oh, he “had a big heart,” when he wasn’t stealing cars, perhaps. The reader will probably not be surprised to learn that, according to jail records, Chaquia Gross was arrested on charges of breaking and entering a motor vehicle and larceny about six weeks before her son’s death. According to records, Chaquia Gross was born in June 1984 and her son Kamontie was born in June 1999, before his mother’s 15th birthday.

Go ahead and blame “systemic racism” for this.




 

Jake Gardner’s Life Mattered

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This is very sad news:

The surreal and sordid ordeal involving a white Omaha bar owner and a young Black Omaha man ended Sunday with a staggering development.
Jake Gardner — awaiting arrest after a grand jury in Omaha indicted him last week — shot himself outside a medical clinic in suburban Portland, Oregon, two law enforcement officials told The World-Herald. Police in Hillsboro, Oregon, found the 38-year-old former Marine dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound about 12:20 p.m.
Gardner’s attorneys, Stu Dornan and Tom Monaghan, said Gardner shot himself on the day he had said he would surrender in connection with manslaughter and three other felony charges stemming from the May 30 confrontation that led to the death of 22-year-old James Scurlock.

I discussed Gardner’s case here.




 

3 Killed by Louisville Gunman Wearing ‘Justice for Breonna Taylor’ T-Shirt

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Cassandra Fairbanks reports at Gateway Pundit:

A black male walked into a Louisville bar owned by a retired police officer and shot three random people at point blank range on Friday night — while wearing a Justice for Breonna Taylor shirt.
The suspect was smiling from ear to ear as he was arrested for the shooting at Bungalow Joe’s Bar and Grill.

National media are ignoring the evidence of racial motive in this apparent terrorist attack. Bar owner Joe Bishop is quoted by WDRB-TV:

According to Bishop, it was a normal Friday night at Bungalow Joe’s when a man walked up to the restaurant and shot three customers, all men, who were sitting in the patio area at point-blank range.
“Nobody had ever seen this guy before,” Bishop said, referring to the shooter. “It was a totally random act.”
The men did not exchange words “at any point in time” before the shooting, according to Bishop.
“Social media is full of people saying this happened and that happened and wanted to get political with it; there was nothing political about what happened,” he added.

We shall see what further evidence of motive police are able to develop, but there are photos of the shooter in handcuffs wearing that T-shirt, which would seem to be sufficient evidence. Don’t expect CNN to send any camera crews to Louisville to cover this story.

UPDATE: The Louisville Courier-Journal reports that Friday’s four homicides — the three at Bungalow Joe’s and a fourth unrelated shooting — bring the city’s murder total to a record high:

The four deaths overnight brought this year’s criminal homicide count to 121, according to a Courier Journal review of LMPD data. The Courier Journal reached out to the Louisville Metro Police Department to confirm that total, but an LMPD spokesperson didn’t respond
Louisville’s previous record for murders was reported in 2016, when LMPD investigated 117 homicides.
“This is a tragic milestone,” Mayor Greg Fischer said in a statement. “We have lost far too many people to this senseless violence, and I grieve with those directly impacted — the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters of those killed — and those indirectly impacted — the community as a whole, which also has suffered great loss.”

But the only death that matters to the national media is Breonna Taylor.




 

Boston Serial Rapist Faces Life in Prison; His Sister Endorsed Kamala Harris

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His sister is a local Democrat politician:

A 39-year-old Cumberland, Rhode Island, man who has been accused of posing as a rideshare driver in order to target women at Boston bars has been indicted on charges including rape and kidnapping, officials said Wednesday.
Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins has called the suspect, Alvin Campbell, a serial rapist. Campbell was indicted Tuesday on two counts of kidnapping, two counts of aggravated rape, five counts of rape, two counts of indecent assault and battery, one count of assault with intent to rape and eight counts of filming an unsuspecting person in the nude. The indictment moves Campbell’s case to Suffolk Superior Court.
The charges reflect assaults against seven women between 2017 and 2019. Campbell was previously indicted in March for an attack on an eighth woman that occurred in 2019, Rollins’ office said in a statement.
Campbell will be arraigned on the indictments at a later date. Additionally, Campbell is charged as a habitual offender based on prior convictions for violent acts and firearm offenses, the statement said. The habitual offender indictment opens Campbell to the potential of life in prison if found guilty.
Campbell posed as a rideshare driver in connection with six of the indicted offenses, the district attorney’s office said, trying to target women near bars. In two incidents, the victims believed Campbell was a bouncer.
Most of the assaults happened in Campbell’s vehicle, Rollins’ office said. Campbell is accused of assaulting two women at their apartment after driving them to the residence.
“He is charged with filming each of the victims, who were unconscious, in a state of undress,” the statement said. “In five of the assaults, he allegedly filmed the victims as he raped them.”
Campbell is the brother of Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell.
Rollins’ office previously said that Campbell last worked for Uber in 2016. When his vehicle was seized in the first case, “it was festooned with Uber stickers and logos.”

Andrea Campbell’s father went to prison, her twin brother died in jail, and now her other brother is facing a life sentence for serial rape. Andrea Campbell, who has “long been a champion of law enforcement reform and accountability,” last year endorsed Kamala Harris for president.




 

When Do Black Lives Matter, and Why?

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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:

 

It took four days for the medical examiner to identify the charred remains of the five teenagers killed in this crash, using dental records. But immediately after the crash, Cortavion Murphy’s mother told local media she knew that her son was driving the Dodge:

Jamila McFerrin, Murphy’s mother, said she is still in shock.
“That’s my child, my first born,” McFerrin said. “We were just laughing, talking and taking pictures at 10:30 last night. To get called saying he was in his accident. I just thought it was an accident.”
“Losing my child is tough, but knowing he was the driver and responsible for other children in the car is tough as well,” McFerrin said.

Who was Cortavion’s father? Nothing I could find online gave any hint about that, but a bit of research shows that his mother was only 16 when she gave birth to him. Apparently, however, Cortavion and his mother were living with a man named Leonard Stafford. That information involves the story of how Cortavion got hold of the car:

According to the reports, police believe the driver waited until his parents were in bed to put a license plate that was not registered on the Charger before leaving home. . . .
Then-Undersheriff Paul Matyas said in a report he was approached by Leonard Stafford at the scene of the crash. Stafford told Matyas that “I just got that car. It didn’t have plates on it and it didn’t have insurance on it and I told him not to drive it, he must’ve taken the keys.”
The teen’s name Stafford was talking about was redacted.
The vehicle had been reported stolen out of Detroit in May 2016, according to Michigan State Police.
Officers contacted Stafford again Sept. 16 at his house in Kalamazoo.
“He said that he had not really bought the vehicle, that he had been doing work on the vehicle and the person he was doing the work for had not paid for his services,” KCSO Det. Sgt. Jim VanZile wrote in a report. VanZile wrote that Stafford told him a Detroit man brought him the car to work on in May 2017.
“He worked on the transmission and the engine of the vehicle and (the man) did not pay him for all of the work he had completed,” VanZile wrote.
Stafford told police the man was “one of those drug boys” from Detroit who sells drugs in Kalamazoo.
Stafford also told police he had put a plate on the vehicle from another car he was working on and had never insured the vehicle. He denied ever letting the teen drive the vehicle, and said he left the keys in the car the night it was taken. He said he did not know the vehicle was stolen out of Detroit in May 2016.

So, if we may connect the dots here, Cortavion’s mother’s boyfriend was doing repairs on this car that was stolen in Detroit, and which had been brought to him by a known drug dealer. The mother’s boyfriend denied knowing the car was stolen, and also denied giving the teenager permission to drive the car, although the keys were conveniently left in it.

You may be wondering why I am telling the story of this 2017 car accident. It’s because, unless you live in Michigan, you almost certainly never heard of the death of these five black teenagers. Why? Because there was no “systemic racism.” The story offered no political advantage to Democrats, and therefore the national media ignored it.

See, this is what I’ve figured out: “Black Lives Matter,” as the slogan of a political movement, is a wicked lie. Black lives only “matter” to these activists when a black person is killed by a white cop, a death that can be leveraged (a) to whip up a frenzy of anti-police anger, (b) to incite a generalized hatred of white people within the black community, and thus (c) to “energize” black voters to help elect Democrats.

As a statistical proposition, what #BlackLivesMatter claims about police and racism is easily disproven. Anyone who has followed the work of Heather Mac Donald (author of The War on Cops) knows that the actual number of unarmed black people killed by police is a tiny decimal point fraction in comparison to the number of black people killed by black criminals. But because black-on-black violence can’t be leveraged to support radical rhetoric about “systemic racism” (and thus to help elect more Democrats), the national media ignore the bloody death toll of black-on-black crime. The result of this one-sided media bias is a wildly distorted public perception of crime and race in America.

Whenever I write up a story like this, my intent is to balance the false perception created by the national media’s warped coverage, which feeds a myth of white racism as the one-size-fits-all explanation for every problem affecting black people in America. Racism obviously had nothing to do with the death of Cortavion Murphy and his passengers — and that’s why nobody outside of Michigan ever heard of this story. Five black teenagers killed and not a peep from CNN or the New York Times.




 

Liberals Outraged by Million-Dollar Bail for Lancaster #BlackLivesMatter Rioters

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Actually wrote up an item for The American Spectator yesterday in which I quoted Pennsylvania’s Democratic lieutenant governor:

The $1 million bail quickly came under fire from Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and a local advocacy group, with Fetterman calling it “blatantly unconstitutional” and an infringement on the protesters’ Eighth Amendment right against excessive bail….
“It’s self-evidently unconstitutional,” Fetterman said. “Whatever the merit of the underlying charges, what is absolutely indefensible is a million dollar bail for those charges.” …
City police did not request the bail amount, said Lt. Bill Hickey, the public information officer for the bureau. The District Attorney’s office did not provide any input regarding bail, spokesperson Brett Hambright said in an email.
The protesters are charged with several felony offenses, which are considered in the judge’s equation when deciding bail, as well as the input of police.
“The crimes that these defendants are facing include serious felony offenses,” Hickey said in an email. “This is not a new or unheard of practice and falls within the rules of criminal procedure.”

What I did not expect was that liberals everywhere — who have lately been trying to avoid the suspicion that they’re pro-riot, because that might not be good for Joe Biden’s campaign — would join in the outrage over this. Guess which rioter is getting the most media sympathy?

The father of Kathryn Patterson, 20, an undergraduate student at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, said she was acting as a medic, as she has at other protests in the recent past.
Chip Patterson called Kathryn Patterson’s $1 million bail, set by a magisterial district justice, “obscene.”
“Everything that I know so far, which is not a lot, indicates that Kat is not guilty of those charges. But then again, we’ll have to wait and see,” said Chip Patterson, who lives in Mercersburg, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Lancaster.
He said he has not been able to reach his daughter since her arrest.
“I cannot tell you how long this night has been,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “I think regardless of what these people did or didn’t do, the bail amount is just outrageous and clearly against the Eighth Amendment,” which addresses bail.

Unless I am mistaken, this is the same Chip Patterson who is the head of the English department at prestigious Mercersburg Academy. Perhaps it’s not considered scandalous among the faculty there for a kid to grow up to become a Marxist revolutionary, but Ms. Patterson’s dad seems rather eager to avoid that implication of his daughter’s arrest. Oh, she was merely acting in a humanitarian role as a “medic” to tend the wounds of injured protesters — the Florence Nightingale of Antifa, as it were.

Meanwhile, the president of Franklin & Marshall College, Barbara Altmann, issued a statement via her Instagram page:

Dear Students:
Our community is hurting. We are all processing and trying to contextualize the death of Ricardo Mun?oz in Lancaster city this past weekend. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of this investigation, we all mourn the loss of the life of Mr. Mun?oz. For many, this is a reminder of the deeply challenged relationship between BIPOC and law enforcement. We are shaken as a campus and city. We find ourselves asking questions and trying to understand the moment. These are questions we all should grapple with.
On a community-level, we are also processing the impact that the past few nights of activism have had on a member of our own family. As you are likely aware, F&M student Kat Patterson was arrested Sunday night at the protests. We have read the allegations against her, as reported in the LNP. We stand by our students’ constitutional right to protest. And affirm a presumption of innocence. Senior staff has been in close contact with the family and will continue to do so as we focus on her well-being. Thank you, students, for creating a GoFundMe page to assist Kat and her family; many of us in our community will be contributing.
F&M’s senior staff will continue to work with students, faculty and professional staff, on campus and studying remotely, to support and encourage programs, courses and workshops on these social justice issues. We recognize that many are feeling unsafe, including within our own community. This must change. We encourage everyone to be part of this effort and support one another. We have all been heartened by the persistent and dedicated activism demonstrated by our community, especially by you — our students. Thank you for that. Together, we know we will persevere to a better tomorrow.

Let us assume that the Lancaster police had reasons to arrest Ms. Patterson and charge her with multiple felonies. While I suppose it is possible that this was a case of mistaken identity or something, isn’t it more likely that the cops have video evidence of which “mostly peaceful protesters” engaged in felonious acts of vandalism and arson? We cannot rule out the possibility that the cops just started grabbing whatever anarchist scumbags they could catch, more or less randomly, and that thus the Florence Nightingale of Antifa was mistakenly arrested. But this is 2020, and even in a small town like Lancaster, cops have access to digital surveillance technology that would enable them to prove which particular scumbags committed which specific crimes. Therefore, if cops arrested Ms. Patterson, chances are pretty good they can prove she was doing more than handing out bandaids to injured protesters.

However, we must “affirm the presumption of innocence,” as Barbara Altmann says, which I suppose also should be extended to Ms. Patterson’s personal life, no matter what our common-sense hunch might be. For some reason, commenters yesterday kept suggesting that Ms. Patterson is a fan of British television programs, IYKWIMAITYD.