A young man becomes violent, ignores police instructions to stop and winds up shot….and it is the police\’s fault.
It\’s Michael Brown all over again.
Excerpted from an article posted on the CBS News-Dallas web site (more on this article further on):
Taylor was shot and killed by Officer Brad Miller early Friday morning inside an Arlington car dealership that Taylor, a sophomore football player at Angelo State University, had broken into.
Newly released security camera footage recorded before police arrived at the car dealership shows Taylor kicking in a car windshield, jumping up and down on cars, and then driving his SUV through a glass wall into the lobby of the dealership.
It was inside the dealership that Arlington police say officers first spotted Taylor and ordered him to the ground.
“As officers stood outside the building, they may verbal contact with Mr. Taylor through the glass wall – instructing him to lie on the ground,” said Police Chief Will Johnson. “Mr. Taylor was not compliant.”
The police chief said two of his officers, a veteran officer and rookie Officer Brad Miller, made contact with Taylor in another showroom. There an “altercation” occurred between the two officers and the unarmed teenagers occurred.
Police said Miller fired four shots killing Taylor.
The other officer fired his Taser. Although, according to the police chief, investigators have not determined if he did so before Miller fired his gun or even if the Taser struck Taylor.
Miller was placed on administrative leave after the shooting.
Let\’s think about this.
The officer has come in on a young man who has just engaged in a significant destruction of property, who has driven his vehicle through a plate glass window, who clearly did not care if police came (or he would have made some kind of run for it) and who refused police instructions to get down, instead engaging in an “altercation” – which has not yet been defined, but may have been recorded on surveillance tape.
Yet if you read the CBS article, its first two paragraphs – the set-up to the story – are entirely sympathetic to….Christian Taylor:
Christian Taylor was shot and killed in Arlington, Texas, by a rookie cop two days before the anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, an unarmed, black 18-year-old whose death galvanized the “Black Lives Matter” movement and sparked protests that at times turned violent.
Taylor, 19, was apparently influenced by both Brown\’s death and the movement, as was evidenced in his Twitter feed.
What a sweet young man! Shot down in the prime of his youth by that cop. Just like Michael Brown, the “unarmed black 18 year old” (the fact that he was 6\’4″, 292 lb., high on pot, and had just robbed a store and physically attacked the owner? Unmentioned. All you\’re supposed to think about is that he was unarmed – which, of course, the police officer could not have known).
Why, Taylor didn\’t mean anything by it. He was just “influenced by Brown\’s death and the movement” – which, as anyone can readily understand, is a perfectly good excuse to destroy car after car at an auto dealership, drive through its plate glass window, and fight with the cops when they came. How could a reasonable person expect anything different?
So now, in the era of Michael Brown, instead of the police authorities saying that, while an investigation will take place and we will abide by its results wherever they lead, let\’s not lose sight of the fact that this was a violent thug who was resisting the police, we\’re hearing only that actions are being taken against the police officer.
How dare he feel endangered by an athletic 19 year old on a destruction spree who refuses instructions to get down?
Personally, I wouldn\’t be a cop today if they doubled the salary and tripled the benefits.
And I pity every decent Black family in largely Black neighborhoods, for the fact that cops – 100% justifiably – will back off aggressively protecting those families for fear of exactly this kind of outcome occurring.
