My wife reported something to me this morning, which occurred yesterday.
She took our older daughter to the dentist for an appointment. A black man came into the lobby and complained about paying his bill. My wife described him as big and towering, and he was talking to a fairly small white woman behind the counter.
All of a sudden, he fell down and claimed that the white woman working the counter at the dentist’s office had hit him. He took out his cell phone to film himself and sort of rolled around on the floor.
My wife witnessed this event, and his claim was absolute nonsense. A blatant lie, apparently in an attempt to get out of paying a dental bill.
This event is interesting in itself, but my reason for posting it relates to the current anti-cop rhetoric. As an example, one comment here at Ricochet at another post stated: “The officer Chauvin (fits, doesn’t it?) had police brutality complaints from those of all races.”
Now I doubt that the person making this comment knows the details of even a single complaint against Ofc. Chauvin. I doubt that the person making this comment knows whether the allegations were credible or not. Apparently, it does not matter.
People lie. They do this all of the time. I would expect that people interacting with police lie more often, in an effort to evade responsibility for an offense that led to the interaction.
Moreover, reports of police wrongdoing are usually filtered to us through the media. If you don’t understand, by now, that the media has a hateful and anti-cop agenda (among other bad agendas), and that the media regularly lies and misleads and distorts the truth so selective editing, you haven’t been paying attention. At least in my opinion.
I have a bias in favor of the police. I do not think that it is an irrational bias, actually. I’ve known some cops, and they’re generally fine people doing a difficult job. They have little or no incentive to oppress anyone. They just try to enforce the law and keep us reasonably safe. I know that there can be exceptions. They have to put up with unbelievable behavior, I think.
None of this seems like rocket science to me. So I have difficulty understanding why so many people, including many of my Ricochet compatriots, seem willing and even eager to believe unlikely tales of police misconduct, generally made by people who are criminal suspects, and generally reported by a media system that is unreliable at best, and actively misleading at worst (probably tilting toward actively misleading most of the time).
I find it very frustrating that I cannot rely on news accounts. The Tony Timpa story is yet another one. The Buffalo story looks like another. I just saw one out of Jacksonville, I think, in which I followed the link to a video of a white man claiming that he was mistreated by police (including being tased) for no reason. As usual, the video showed only tiny snippets of the event, but even on that part, you can see the guy forcibly resisting arrest — and then it cuts to an interview of him, in which he claims that he did not.
Skepticism regarding accusations of police misconduct seems like the proper response.
Published in General
I live by the simple rule that everything I see is meant to provoke and not inform.
That is certainly true as it relates to the Professional Media.
I got scammed by a black woman years ago with the help of a white woman. I was heading home from work, stopped at the corner of a busy one way, watching traffic in order to turn. As I pulled out, all of a sudden there was a little (maybe 10/12) yr old boy on a bike in the side of my car. He fell backward rolling and screaming. I was horrified. His older brother (I assume) was there also. I jumped out, left my door open with purse, cell phone, and said we need to call the police. Suddenly a white woman came running up and was all excited telling the boy his mother was going to be mad, not to call the police. I followed them behind one of the buildings, left my car running, purse and phone inside, and as I caught up to them, another woman came running up and said she was my witness. She made us exchange names, addresses, phone numbers, then they all left. I went back to my car, it was ok, nothing gone. Pulled over and called my husband pretty shaken. He called the police, and they told him not to give them money, go home and make a report the next day. The next day at lunch, I went to the wrong precint, so had to go the following day. The woman had already made a hit and run report on me. The cop said she had my number, name, where I worked, etc. and told me to hold onto that paper with her name. I called the witness, who said she was a social worker who had been on welfare, she said the boy threw the bike into the side of the car when I took off, and it was a scam. So the next day, the mom of the boy, called me at work and asked it the police had seen me. She wanted money. I pretty much said no. It did go away, but I was worried. I guess the police were on there way to my workplace when I was at the station, and so they dropped it at that point. Thank goodness for a person that saw it and knew what to do. My witness was hispanic by the way. I don’t think it was so much about race, as about getting money. She said those kids were waiting for someone like me not paying attention. I was really upset that I might have hurt that boy, been careless, and was truly distraught. I’m also pretty favorably biased toward the police. I’ve had some as customers, and so have my husband and children. They are just trying to do their job most days.
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We have had our Business door broken down by thugs numerous times, and the police have always responded promptly. For all those businesses that were destroyed, those cops don’t like it either. Many of them know those owners, have been out patrolling day after day. They are part of a community. The police know probably more about a community than a mayor or governor, they have to work among them every day.
When the little boy got away from his grandpa (who took a nap and the toddler knew how to open doors) and ended up in our back yard, the responding officer called the off duty cop who usually patrolled and he knew right where he came from.
That’s not true. City passes laws that are oppressive and then judge the cops based on metrics for revenue generated and stops generated and so on. Workers in a system always respond to the incentives/metrics by which they are evaluated. Unfortunately, it is hard to design a system with metrics based on “total customer satisfaction”.Â