Category: Crime

Violence Against Women Update

Posted on Comments

Derrick Lashun Hobbs was probably an honor student.

Not all murders of black people make national news. Despite their devotion to #BlackLivesMatter, CNN will never mention this crime:

DOUGLASVILLE, GA — A Douglasville man who authorities say murdered his mother and niece is in the Douglas County Jail as of Thursday afternoon.
Derrick Lashun Hobbs, 37, was arrested Sunday night after the bodies of Lawanda Barrows, 59, and Layla Hobbs, 4, were found in a burning vehicle behind a residence on Colquitt Street. Hobbs was charged with two counts of aggravated assault in connection with their deaths. He was denied bond.
The Douglas County Sentinel reported Hobbs is the only suspect in the case. No motive or other details were provided by police.
The Douglasville Police and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office are investigating the deaths.

Curiously, no media outlet reporting this story included a mugshot of the suspect. The only way I found a photo of Hobbs was from a Google search that turned up notice of his status as a sex offender, having been convicted of felony statutory rape in 2003. So he raped a minor when he was 20, and then murdered his own mother and niece last weekend — allegedly, I hasten to add. I wouldn’t want to libel someone who was probably an honor student, and might yet become a civil rights hero, if he somehow manages to get himself shot to death by a white cop.




 

‘It’s Table-Tossing Time’

Posted on Comments

 

The decision of the Fulton County District Attorney to charge Officer Garrett Rolfe with felony murder in the shooting of Rayshard Brooks has driven many conservatives to the point of despair. How could anyone looking at the facts of the case think this charge was appropriate?

As a native of Atlanta, this case has been emotionally disturbing to me. And as I’ve said, this incident was stupid from start to finish. Brooks was stupid to pass out drunk in the Wendy’s drive through, and the cops were stupid not to be prepared for him to resist arrest.

After watching all the videos, and learning that Officer Rolfe was a decorated member of the High Intensity Traffic Team (HITT), it occurred to me that, because he had arrested dozens of drunk drivers, this was more or less a routine event. Had any of his previous DUI busts tried to resist arrest? I don’t know, but Officer Rolfe is a tall, muscular man, and he had perhaps never encountered someone who fought him as desperately as Brooks did. Keep in mind, there were two cops holding him when Brooks started fighting, and yet they were unable to control him. What could inspire such ferocious violence?

Rayshard Brooks was on probation and faced going back to prison if he was charged with a DUI, DailyMail.com can reveal.
It was the fear of incarceration that likely caused Brooks to panic in the face of imminent arrest and caused him to make a break for it. . . .
The charges to which Brooks pleaded guilty and for which he was still on probation dated back to August 2014 when he was convicted on four counts – False Imprisonment, Simple Battery/Family, Battery Simple and Felony Cruelty/Cruelty to Children.
He was tried in Clayton County and sentenced to seven years on the first count, with one year in prison and six on probation and 12 months for each of the other three counts, sentences to be served concurrently.
His sentence was revised, and he was sent back to prison for 12 months in July 2016 when he violated the terms of his probation.
Brooks had not been in trouble since that year until last December when he went to Ohio without informing his probation officer and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
That warrant was revoked and the case dismissed when he returned to Georgia on January 6.

Have you ever been on probation? Once I got six months probation for driving on a suspended license and it was a bummer. You have to pay a monthly maintenance fee and meet with your probation officer. Talk about feeling like the man is keepin’ you down.

Most middle-class, college-educated people have never had that kind of involvement with the criminal justice system, and can’t relate to what it’s like, but I can. And because of my habit of high-speed driving, I also know the paranoia of a traffic stop when you’re not sure if there’s a warrant out for you because of a ticket you forgot to pay. So imagine what it was like for Rayshard Brooks being on probation for six years, and having just recently gotten past a hassle over a violation for traveling out of state without informing his probation officer.

The mainstream media have ignored Brooks’ prior criminal history, and indeed have depicted him as a devoted family man, despite his record of domestic violence and cruelty to children. In other words, there is a narrative they’re promoting, and this narrative requires omission of the facts of Brooks’ criminal record. The same liberals who deplore “violence against women” are now eager to avoid any discussion of what Brooks did that resulted in his felony convictions, because they are determined to make this a story about racial injustice in which Brooks is an innocent victim. Never mind if he was also a wife-beater and child-abuser.

Daniel Horowitz argues that Officer Rolfe’s shooting of Brooks “was clear self-defense, and had the suspect been white, we would never have heard of it. The cop wouldn’t have been fired and rioters wouldn’t have burned down the Wendy’s”:

I’m seeing some commentators who clearly concede the self-defense point but lament that something so low-level, such as a drunk driver blocking the Wendy’s drive-through, could result in a death. Yes, it is tragic. This is what many cops have to deal with regularly. Many violent career criminals are often caught committing low-level crimes. Cops approach them as if they are innocuous, just as in this case, where clearly the cops treated him as just someone who had too much to drink. But there’s something interesting about violent criminals who barely serve time for past offenses: They are not deterred from acting violent again. Cops never know when someone is going to turn violent on them.

This is true, and it’s what is so wrong with the interpretation of the encounter made by the District Attorney, where he talked about Brooks being “jovial” while talking to the officers. Yes, we can see that on the video — Brooks was trying to talk his way out of a DUI bust that he knew could send him back to prison for violating his probation. His “jovial” demeanor was intended to convince police to let him go, and when that didn’t work? Had he planned to try to escape? Was his fight with the cops something that Brooks had been thinking of the whole time he was being “jovial” with the police? We will never know, because Brooks is not here to tell us, but the suddenness with which this situation went from being an ordinary DUI bust to become a life-or-death struggle was shocking.

Keep in mind that this is really all about politics. It is an election year. Democrats and the media are trying to “energize” black voters by inflaming racial animosity. There was no other reason to make George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks the most famous black men in America. Once you realize that the media is engaged in deliberate distortion, and once you realize the motive for this distortion, this can help you maintain emotional equilibrium among all the craziness.

Or, you could just explode in rage:

Steven Crowder’s rant expresses what a lot of Americans are feeling right now. America seems to have gone completely crazy, so crazy that Officer Rolfe’s stepmother got fired from her job.



 

Mayor Ted Discovers Law and Order

Posted on Comments

 

You know how obnoxious the anarchist scum in Portland must be when they managed to turn Mayor Ted Wheeler into Dirty Harry:

Portland protesters on Wednesday night followed in Seattle’s footsteps and attempted to build an autonomous zone in the city. That effort, however, was broken up by police.
Unlike Seattle, where protesters cordoned off multiple blocks around a police precinct evacuated during the protests, demonstrators in Portland barricaded off two blocks in front of what was said to be Mayor Ted Wheeler’s apartment building.
According to videos posted online, a group of protesters arrived at Wheeler’s NW 10th Avenue and Glisan Street apartment early in the evening where they set up tents, played music and blocked the streets.
Shortly before 11 p.m., the modest crowd swelled in size as a few hundred protesters arrived from the Multnomah County Justice Center, the epicenter of nightly protests against police brutality and racism for the past three weeks.

(Really? Is Portland — Multnomah County, which voted for Hillary in 2016 by more than a 4-to-1 margin — really such a swamp of racism that you need three weeks of protests against it?)

With live music, chants and laser pointers lighting up the largely dark apartment building, protesters set about erecting barricades on the blocks around the building. It was a considerably smaller area than the community built in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Seattle’s zone has drawn considerable ire from right wing media and President Trump, though reporters in the area have described it as a peaceful gathering.

(Notice how they had to bring Trump into this. Because reasons.)

At 11:30 p.m. Portland protesters had named their area the Patrick Kimmons Autonomous Zone, after a young Black man who Portland Police Sgt. Garry Britt and Officer Jeffery Livingston shot and killed in 2018.

(Patrick Kimmons was a convicted dope dealer with ties to the Crips street gang, who got into a gunfight with rival hoodlums, then ran toward police with a pistol in his hand. But never mind . . .)

By 1 a.m., elaborate barricades had been erected. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, police moved into the area, declaring it an unlawful assembly. Portland Police estimated about 50 people were in the area when they dispersed the autonomous zone.

Wheeler goes out of his way to express his sympathy with the Antifa mob, but he doesn’t want them messing around in his neighborhood.




 

Democrats Celebrate Their Heritage

Posted on Comments

 

And by “their heritage,” of course, I mean, slavery:

Tuesday at USA Today there was a fascinating “fact check” article covering that idiotic spectacle put on by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and several other congressional Democrats last week in which they donned African kente cloth scarves and knelt on the floor of Emancipation Hall for some eight minutes and change in some sort of morbid tribute to George Floyd.
Because kente cloth, by the standard of this stupid moment in American history, is quite reminiscent of, and therefore pays homage to, the African slave trade. And therefore those wearing it also support the African slave trade . . .

Or so we must conclude, judging by contemporary standards. Many years ago, when I was first accused of “white supremacy” — !!! — my reaction was to wonder if words still have any meaning.

Whatever my Thought Crimes might have been, certainly I was not so foolish as to advocate, or even to imagine, resurrecting Jim Crow segregation or some other policy that might truly deserve to be called “white supremacy.” I have never endorsed any such policy, because it would be utter folly to do so. It is absurd to think that any sizeable percentage of Americans in the 21st century would support a return to segregation, or the disenfranchisement of racial minorities. For better or worse, we must live within the circumstances of political reality. Anyone who wants to go off into some kind of neo-Nazi fantasyland (“Wolves of Vinland”) is free to do so, but they are pursuing a delusion.

Because I am not a “white supremacist” in any meaningful sense of that phrase, I can laugh at my SPLC hate-list membership, and no intelligent person nowadays takes the SPLC seriously. They destroyed their own credibility by making such accusations so promiscuously and, while it is sometimes amusing to play this “gotcha” game against liberals, the whole point is to illustrate the absurdity of the game.

Refusing to kowtow to political correctness can get you in trouble, but the alternative — Pelosi and Schumer with their kente-cloth public ritual of self-abasement — requires a surrender of human dignity. I have nothing to say to any white person who imagines that such spectacles are the kind of help black people need, except seek psychiatric treatment.

Crazy people are dangerous, and progressive kooks are leading the Democratic Party down the road to perdition. There is no reason that the rest of us ought to follow them down that road, even if our refusal to join them means that we will be smeared as racists. It wasn’t me who hired Derek Chauvin as a cop. Minneapolis is more than 1,000 miles west of here, and I am not eligible to vote in Minnesota. So if the police hired by the Democrat-controlled government of Minneapolis engage in acts of racist brutality, certainly I cannot be blamed. The responsibility is not mine and, because no one in Minneapolis gives a damn about my opinion, I am not obligated to say anything about their problems. What I have said on the topic has mostly been about calling attention to certain facts that the liberal media don’t want us to notice.

At any rate, if the wearing of kente cloth is a celebration of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, what about old Beatles songs?

Did you know that Paul McCartney once wrote a song celebrating slavery? Well, neither did he. It took about half a century after “Penny Lane” was a hit for the Beatles before historians decided that this street in Liverpool was a legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Sir Paul wrote the song as a nostalgic ode to Penny Lane as the scene of childhood happiness “beneath the blue suburban skies.” The Liverpool-born musician could not have known, while composing the cheerful tune in the mid-1960s, that scholars would one day conclude Penny Lane was probably named in honor of James Penny, a local mariner who made his fortune in the slave trade in the 1700s. Historians have not been able to prove this as a certainty, but the mere possibility was enough to inspire vandals to deface a sign in Liverpool with graffiti: “RACIST Lane.”
History is a horror show for liberals, who only look to the past in search of grievances they can exploit in their remorseless quest for political power. The liberal has a quasi-religious faith in Progress, which means that yesterday — another McCartney song title — was self-evidently worse than today. The past was a bad time, according to liberals, who see nothing there but oppression. Your nostalgia for the pleasant memories of childhood is almost certainly racist, and probably also sexist and homophobic. . . .

You can read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

We Found Another Joe Biden Voter

Posted on Comments

 

Say hello to Rashid Brimmage, 31, a resident of New York City where, in 2016, Hillary Clinton got 87% of the vote. Manhattan is represented in Congress by three Democrats: Jerry Nadler, Carolyn Maloney, and Adriano Espaillat. Rashid Brimmage is typical of the kind of New Yorkers who elected Chuck Schumer to the Senate, which is to say, he is a criminal pervert:

The frequent offender has now been arrested 103 times since 2005 for petty crimes and sex offenses, sources said.
The creep was convicted of sexual misconduct in 2012, then arrested for two sex offenses in 2014, police sources said.
In May of that year, he was busted for exposing and fondling himself on an East Harlem street, the sources said.
Just months later, in July, he was arrested for grabbing a woman’s behind at a Third Avenue deli.
In 2017, he failed to notify authorities that he changed his address and had to register as a sex offender, state records show. . . .
He was arrested Feb. 17 for a misdemeanor assault and harassment charge for an incident that happened in The Bronx a week earlier, according to records. He was released without bail in the case.
He was busted in the borough again March 5 and slapped with trespassing summons, according to court records.
And most recently, he was arrested March 9 in Manhattan and hit with criminal possession of a controlled substance, assault and attempted assault charges.

You might expect that such a vicious criminal would be permanently locked up in prison, but remember this is New York, where they don’t lock up criminals, because criminals elect Democrats. Last week, Rashid Brimmage punched a 92-year-old woman in the head:

The 92-year-old woman who was shoved into a fire hydrant in a random attack on a Manhattan street last week told The Post Tuesday that the ambush has taken a psychological toll on her — and she now fears walking alone in her neighborhood.
“Mostly I’m shaken. My head still hurts where it was bleeding, where I hit the hydrant — or where he hit me, I don’t know,” elderly victim Geraldine said in an exclusive phone interview, asking that her last name be withheld for safety reasons.
“Mainly it’s psychological — just the fear of going out on the street,” she added.
Geraldine, a Bronx native who has lived in Manhattan for more than 50 years, said she was on her way to Duane Reade when 31-year-old Rashid Brimmage allegedly shoved her to the ground near Third Avenue and East 16th Street Gramercy Park last Friday afternoon.
Geraldine hit her head on a fire hydrant and started bleeding, she said. A passerby saw the assault, called 911 and an ambulance rushed her to nearby Beth Israel Hospital, she said.
The former teacher said her physical wounds were relatively minor and have since healed — but the mental toll has been much more severe.
“This damned guy put me in a state where I’m fearful to walk the streets alone. So my super’s trying to find somebody who will walk me to a park nearby or to the supermarket, that kind of thing. So that’s the problem,” she said.
Cops busted Brimmage for the caper Tuesday after investigators released footage of the attack.
Brimmage was busted by cops Tuesday and charged with assault after investigators recognized him from video footage of the attack, authorities said.

 

This is what you’re voting for when you elect Democrats. The recent riots were really just Joe Biden campaign rallies, Democratic voters getting together to do what Democrats do — vandalism, looting, arson, assault, etc. That’s why Rashid Brimmage was out on the streets, instead of behind bars, where he belongs, because Democrats support pro-criminal policies. Don’t worry about Rashid. He won’t be in jail long. They need him out in time to vote for Joe Biden in November.




 

How Much Did Her Life Matter?

Posted on Comments

 

Tessa Majors made the mistake of attending Barnard College.

If your child ever expresses an interest in attending Barnard College, you probably should have them committed to a psychiatric institution, because you’d have to be crazy to go to Barnard, one of the worst colleges in America. The cost of attendance is $75,524 a year, including room and board, and also including the opportunity to be murdered.

That’s what happened to Tessa Majors. The 18-year-old, whose father is an English professor at James Madison University, was near the end of her first semester at Barnard in December 2019 when she made the mistake of going for a walk in a park near the college campus:

The teens charged with killing Barnard College freshman Tessa Majors targeted her as she walked alone down a set of stairs in a crime-ridden Harlem park, one of them told detectives in a video recording played in court [Dec. 20].
Zyairr Davis, 13, admitted that he was walking behind pals Rashaun Weaver and Luchiano Lewis, both 14, when they approached her on Dec. 11, the recording made the next day showed.
Davis said he “couldn’t hear too good what they said to her,” but thought that Weaver “was trying to get her phone.”
“She was probably refusing to give it to them, so they got mad at her,” he said.
Davis’ vivid blow-by-blow of the fatal violence included how, “I think Luchi grabbed her, like this” as he crossed his own arms.
“She’s trying to run away. She’s screaming,” he recalled to cops in the 26th Precinct stationhouse.
“The only thing I remember is her yelling for help.”
Davis added, “That’s when Rashaun stabbed her.”
“It ain’t look like poking. It was like — slash.”
Davis also described the suddenness and ferocity of the attack on Majors, 18, a musician and aspiring journalist from Charlottesville, Virginia.
“I didn’t see him take the knife out, but I see all the feathers coming out of her coat,” he said.

Don’t send your kids to Barnard, because it’s in New York City, where you can’t take a walk in the park without being knifed to death.

Guess how much time Zyairr Davis will serve?

A teenager involved in the fatal stabbing of Barnard student Tessa Majors in New York last December was sentenced to 18 months in the custody of the Administration for Children’s Services on Monday.
The now-14-year-old boy, whom CNN is not naming because he was not charged as an adult, has been in custody since December and pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery earlier this month.
He will serve a minimum of six months in a limited secure facility, according to the New York Law Department, which is handling the case. After that, ACS has the discretion to release him and monitor his progress in the community, and his placement may be extended until he turns 18, the department said. . . .
At his plea hearing, the teen told the court he went into Morningside Park with two friends, Rashaun Weaver and Lucci Lewis, intending to rob someone.
“After that, we saw Tessa Majors walking on the stairs inside the park. Rashaun went up to her and said something to her and Tessa yelled for help. Rashaun used the knife that I had handed to him to stab Tessa and I saw feathers coming out of her coat,” he said. . . .
In their impact statement, Majors’ parents said the teen “has shown a complete lack of remorse or contrition” for his role in their daughter’s death. The family also noted that the statement from Legal Aid avoided using the word “murder” and instead referred to Tessa’s death as “tragic.”
“Reading this description of events, some might wonder if perhaps Tess Majors was involved in an accident,” the statement read. “Tess Majors did not die in an accident. Tess Majors was murdered, plain and simple, and no amount of semantic gymnastics changes that fact.”

But it’s New York City. Your daughter’s life doesn’t matter there. Just more violence against women feminists won’t notice, for some reason.




 

After They Kill All the Cops, What Then?

Posted on Comments

“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
— The Dark Knight, 2008

One of the weirdest things about dealing with sociopaths is what it teaches you about human nature. If you are a decent person, you admire traits like honesty and kindness, and strive to uphold such values in your own life. Your interaction with the sociopath is shocking — emotionally disorienting — because the sociopath’s value system is the exact opposite. The sociopath takes perverse pride in his ability to deceive others, and gets a perverse thrill from sadistic cruelty. In the sociopath’s upside-down worldview, law-abiding decent people are chumps underserving of respect, who exist only to be swindled or otherwise exploited, and there is no one the sociopath hates more than those who, by the exercise of lawful authority, have the power to hold him accountable for his wrongdoing.

One of the most frightening aspects of “The Return of the Riot Ideology,” as I’ve called it, is the widespread demonization of police. Beyond the deliberate incitement of anti-white racial animosity — a very dangerous game, with a huge potential for an ugly backlash — you see a lot of young white radicals whose attitude is like the Joker, a purely destructive nihilism. How do young people develop such an antisocial worldview? What inspires this disrespect for authority, the desire to march around shouting angry slogans, defacing buildings with graffiti, smashing windows, destroying monuments? What sort of culture are these people immersed in as children, that they grow up thinking it’s cool to celebrate chaos and ugliness? What kind of future do they imagine in a godless world without courtesy, without law, without social order? Because that is where their anti-police rhetoric must inevitably lead.

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”
— Romans 13:1-2 (KJV)

If Paul could say this to the early Christians, living under the yoke of Roman tyranny, how much more does it apply to us, living as we are under a democratic form of government? Rulers “beareth not the sword in vain,” as Paul said, and any self-professed Christian who has not properly understood this doctrine needs to shut their mouth until they have learned it. As I have pointed out before, my son enlisted in the Army in 2013, when Barack Obama was Commander-in-Chief, and he re-enlisten in October 2016, when every pundit and pollster was certain that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. My son swore an oath to uphold “the powers that be,” and his opinion as to the policy and politics of these powers was not solicited. Police are in the same sort of position, and those who encourage disrespect for law enforcement are encouraging lawlessness, whether they admit this or not. That the “mostly peaceful” protests lead to rioting, looting and arson is not surprising to anyone wise enough to understand this. Bad causes attract bad people, and there are few causes worse than the anti-police mentality that demonizes all cops by the tactics of atrocity propaganda. The Wendy’s in Atlanta was apparently set on fire by a white woman, and what did she intend to achieve by this “mostly peaceful” act of arson?

 

Destroying a business is an act from which no one benefits. At least the mob looting Walmart gain something of value by their crimes, but what does someone gain by burning down Wendy’s? Nothing.

Arson and vandalism are purely destructive. Smashing a window, defacing a public building with graffiti, tearing down a statue — these are expressions of a destructive spirit, and anyone who defends this by saying “it’s only property” is displaying their own ignorance. It took many hours of labor to construct what the vandal defaces or destroys. What is the value of our lives, except the product of our labor? The progress of civilization — our ability to live above the level of abject poverty — becomes impossible if we are unable to protect the accumulated value of our labor. Property rights are human rights, in this sense, because no one will have any rights worth mentioning if we descend into savagery.

Consider the case of the “liberated” Seattle neighborhood that has become the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). During some kind of indoctrination session in CHAZ this weekend, one of the commissars invoked the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

The French Revolution was wrong from the beginning, as any reader of Burke should know, and it ended in the dictatorship of Napoleon. What do we suppose will result from the revolution that the commissars of CHAZ seek to incite? Did I mention they have an armed warlord?

What are they protesting against in CHAZ? What is their grievance? Can it be that Seattle, one of the most ultra-progressive cities on the continent, is guilty of racism and police brutality? If anyone has made such a claim, I missed it. There was no logical reason why the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis should inspire an armed revolutionary junta to take over a Seattle neighborhood 1,600 miles away.

When behavior cannot be explained by logic and apparent facts, we must assume that there is some hidden motive involved. There must be a reason for the takeover in CHAZ and, it is self-evidentl that their intentions are not peaceful. What they want is dead cops, and they will continue their deliberate provocations until they get what they want.

No one’s life or property is safe within CHAZ. The mayor has likened it to a “block party,” and most conservative commentators have treated CHAZ as a joke, but there are people inside that “autonomous zone” are who are not joking about their revolutionary goals. How many serious “antifascist” revolutionaries are there in CHAZ? Perhaps fewer than a dozen, but the revolutionary core is attracting into its orbit many reckless and impulsive young people, the makings of a violent mob, and sooner or later, this mob will commit an atrocity that requires a police response. And then the situation will turn into urban guerrilla warfare.

That’s how I expect events to unfold, anyway. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe what’s going on in Seattle is just a clown show, a ridiculous carnival being staged with the permission of the city’s liberal mayor, who has calculated that she will suffer no political damage from letting these animal run wild over a few city blocks for a couple of months. But CHAZ is an expression of the demonic spirit of lawlessness unleashed upon our nation by those sociopaths who “just want to watch the world burn.”





 

‘Suicide by Cop’: Why Did They Burn Down Wendy’s Over This Bulls**t?

Posted on Comments

 

The Rayshard Brooks Memorial Bonfire:

An Atlanta Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks, 27, was fatally shot by police Friday night was set on fire.
The restaurant caught fire Saturday after protesters broke windows at the restaurant and threw fireworks inside.Cortez Stafford, a spokesman for Atlanta fire, said the blaze grew because it wasn’t safe to get to the area near the restaurant when the fire began. He estimated there were 1,000 protesters near the Wendy’s. . . .
In addition to the Wendy’s fire, protesters walked on to the highway [Interstate 75/85, known locally as the Downtown Connector] earlier in the evening, stopping traffic. Troopers warned them that they were violating the law. The demonstrators locked arms.“You have three minutes to disperse,” a trooper said. Organizers encouraged people to leave, but not many did. Some demonstrators were arrested on the interstate before one lane on the highway reopened shortly after 10 p.m.Protesters continued on to the Atlanta Police Department’s Zone 3 precinct on Cherokee Avenue where they chanted.

“Cherokee Avenue”? Isn’t that cultural appropriation? Has Elizabeth Warren denounced this yet? But never mind  that now . . .

When I wrote about the death of Rayshard Brooks yesterday, I was angry that this had happened in my hometown. Why was it, I asked, that the Atlanta Police Department could not have at least one black officer on the scene of this arrest in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood? And by “overwhelmingly black,” I mean like Mogadishu, it’s so black. You can ask anybody from the Atlanta area about that neighborhood. As I said, I don’t believe in hiring quotas, but it seems like to me that Atlanta, a city with a 51% black population, should have enough black officers on patrol that if two officers answer a 911 call to the vicinity of University Avenue and Pryor Road, at least one of those cops would be black. Especially in the wake of two weeks of racial “unrest” (which is what Professional Journalists call riots, looting and arson), you would think police might be sufficiently concerned about perceptions that this could have been avoided. Yet everything about this situation was stupid.

How drunk was Rayshard Brooks? So drunk he passed out behind the wheel of his car in the Wendy’s drive-through line. Stupid.

It was a little after 10:30 p.m. when police got the 911 call. The first officer responding was Devin Bronsan. About 20 minutes later, at 10:55, Officer Garrett Rolfe arrives. Rolfe is a seven-year veteran of the APD, and is a decorated member of the High Intensity Traffic Team (HITT) Unit, which “works to reduce the number of traffic related injuries and deaths in the City of Atlanta, especially involving impaired drivers.” Rolfe received an award from Mothers Against Drunk Driving for making more than 50 DUI arrests in one year. So this was not Rolfe’s first time at the rodeo; he is a specialist at drunk-driving prevention.

APD made public bodycam video from both officers. You can see from the videos that both officers were entirely courteous and professional in their interaction with Brooks, who tries to tell them an apparent lie, that someone dropped him off at the Wendy’s, where he had left his car. Brooks claims he doesn’t even remember being asleep behind the wheel. Rolfe explains “everything’s on camera,” but Brooks doesn’t acknowledge that he has been caught in a lie. Stupid.

 

While I’m not a lawyer, I believe the legal term for the condition Brooks was in would be “three sheets to the wind.” He was drunk as the proverbial skunk, high as the proverbial kite. Excrement-faced.

Brooks: “I’m not causing any problems.”
Officer Rolfe: “Well, we’ve got to make sure that you’re safe to operate a vehicle. Now, do you know where you are?”
Brooks: “Yeah, absolutely. I’m in Forest Park, Old Dixie Highway.”

The Wendy’s in Forest Park — the address is 131 Main Drive, but it’s right next to Old Dixie Highway, east of the airport — is 8 miles south of the University Avenue location in Atlanta, which is in Fulton County.

Forest Park is in Clayton County. In other words, Brooks was so drunk, he didn’t even know what county he was in.

Rolfe asks Brooks how much he’s had to drink, and he claims to have had only one margarita, which is an obvious lie, unless there’s a bar where margaritas are served in a half-gallon bucket. The cop has Brooks do a field sobriety test, then there is an extended conversation in which Brooks tries to talk his way out of it, and by “talk,” I mean, lie. Brooks keeps trying to claim that he wasn’t actually driving, etc., and finally Rolfe asks him to take a preliminary breath test. It is now 11:22 p.m., about 40 minutes after the first cop arrived on the scene, which means Brooks has had a chance to sober up a little bit. Generally speaking, each regular-size drink of alcohol (a 12-ounce beer, a 6-ounce glass of wine, 1.5 ounces of whiskey) will raise your blood-alcohol content (BAC) by 0.02%, so that you would need about four beers to reach the legal limit of .08% BAC. Your body can metabolize alcohol at a rate of about one drink an hour, however, so that if you spent three hours in a bar and had six drinks during that time, your BAC might still be below .08%.

 

One margarita, my ass.

If I’m reading that correctly, Brooks was over .10% BAC — closer to .11% — and given that it had been about an hour since he passed out in his car, I’m guessing he was closer to .14% when he pulled into the Wendy’s parking lot. Drunk as the proverbial skunk, I say, and remember that Officer Rolfe had gotten an award for his work to reduce the number of accidents “involving impaired drivers.” No way could he let Brooks go, and so after another minute of conversation — giving Brooks an opportunity to continue lying about how many drinks he had — Officer Rolfe says, “All right, I think you’ve had too much to drink to be driving. Put your hands behind your back for me.”

Officer Rolfe begins to put the handcuffs on Brooks, at which point, Brooks begins fighting. The struggle between him and the two officers continues a little more than 30 seconds, during which Brooks takes away Officer Rolfe’s taser, and is in turn tasered by Officer Bronsan. Brooks breaks free, and takes off running, pursued by Officer Bronsan with the taser. When Brooks turns to point the taser at Office Bronsan, he is shot by Officer Rolfe. This situation became violent so suddenly that less than 45 seconds elapsed between Officer Rolfe saying “I think you’ve had too much to drink” and him firing the fatal shots.

It happened without warning. Brooks was not the least bit belligerent or confrontational in his interactions with the cops, during the roughly 50 minutes that elapsed between the first officer arriving on the scene and the moment they tried to handcuff him. Brooks seemed to think that he could talk his way out of an arrest, but there was no hint that he was planning to attack the officers if they tried to arrest him.

What was Rayshard Brooks thinking? How did he expect this to end? Wasn’t this very close to a “suicide by cop” situation?

An attorney for the dead man’s relatives had a lot to say about “civil rights,” but nobody has a right to drive drunk — so drunk you don’t even know where you’re at — nor does anyone have the right to turn a DUI arrest into an assault on police. Obviously, the decision to shoot a fleeing suspect was wrong, except that Brooks had armed himself with Officer Rolfe’s stolen taser and then aimed it at Officer Brosnan.

Stupid. It was all so stupid, from start to finish. And that’s why they burned down Wendy’s — because Stupid Lives Matter.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!