Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
No Fate: Ohio
Ohio need not go the way of Minnesota. Republicans and Trump voters, the forgotten Americans, have it in their power under Ohio’s state constitution to smash the Marxist BLM and Critical Race Theory lies. Fortune will favor the bold in Ohio who take up President Trump’s torch for the forgotten Americans of our inner cities. Someone must champion the African Americans who are being shoved back into dependency and constant physical danger by Democrats, with Congressional RepubliCAN’T complicity. John Hinderaker did us a valuable service by summarizing the latest encounter between police and a black criminal who expected to defy lawful interference in her life-threatening armed assault on two African American girls. However, his gloomy prognostication about “the latest anti-police fraud” need not come to pass:
We all know where this is going. The would-be murderer Ma’Khia Bryant will be lionized with fulsome tributes. Her relatives will become multi-millionaires. The intended victim may side with her would-be murderer; there is plenty of money to go around.
Already some liberals on Twitter have said that knife fights among teenage black girls are perfectly normal, even when only one of the combatants has a knife, and law enforcement should stay out of them. The endless corruption of race hustling will continue, and as always, poor blacks will be the ones who suffer the most as police forces across the country pull back lest they be accused of “racism” if they try to do their jobs.
Yet, the truth got out in the local and national media. See the Yahoo! News and Columbus Dispatch stories.
Yahoo! News did real reporting, giving us the depressingly familiar tragic background of a broken girl plugged into yet another foster home, where a decent woman tried to provide shelter and stability to girls without intact families. Fights were frequent, and this final argument between girls was over basic housekeeping.
Ma’Khia Bryant’s foster mother has revealed that the 16-year-old argued with two other teenagers about an unmade bed and a messy house shortly before being fatally shot by police.
Angela Moore told CNN on Thursday that two of her former foster children, both teenagers, came to her house in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday to celebrate her birthday, arriving while she was still at work.
Ms Moore said that the two former foster children told her that after the two teenagers arrived, Ma’Khia started squabbling with them about housework, including an unmade bed.
Congratulations to the Columbus Dispatch for reporting two long-term neighbors watched all the video, saw what happened on their street, and said the police did what they had to save another girl’s life.
[A neighbor, Donavon Brinson,] immediately thought about his security camera on his garage. He watched the footage. He saw the fight, saw the glint of the knife.
And while what happened is tragic, Brinson said, it all happened so fast that he didn’t see how the officer could have time to have done anything else.
He referenced the girl seen in both police body-camera footage and on his own camera footage who was wearing pink who was the second female engaged with Bryant in the scuffle. Brinson said he really thinks more people might have died had police not taken action.
“It was violent and all just happened so fast,” he said.
[ . . .]
Down the street, Ira Graham III was working from home. He works in registration at Ohio State University’s James Cancer Center and also is a photographer and videographer.
[ . . . ]
He said he heard the gunshots Tuesday afternoon. “I saw a bunch of cop cars coming down the street,” he said.
Graham went down to the house and saw officers performing CPR on Bryant. Graham said he later saw the video from the police body camera of Bryant’s actions.
“I believe in truth and facts. Video doesn’t lie,” he said. “She was in full attack mode.”
Bryant “was literally aiming a knife at this young lady,” Graham said of the female in pink. “She needed to be stopped at that point. That young lady’s life was at stake.”
The Ohio authorities did not come out in full BLM/CRT cry. Far from it. Because the officers actually used their body cameras correctly, and because a neighbor’s security camera was working and pointing in the correct direction, officials were able to boldly release the complete available video record within hours of the fatal encounter. The video evidence looks bad for the Democrats’ race-dividing agenda, and it has not been held back until mobs could be summoned. Columbus top law enforcement officials spoke with calm reason:
Columbus Public Safety Director Ned Pettus Jr. said the community should not “rush to judgment” in the aftermath of the “tragedy.”
“I understand the outrage and emotion around this incident. A teenage girl is dead and she’s dead at the hands of a police officer. Under any circumstances, that is a horrendous tragedy. But the video shows there is more to this. It requires us to pause, take a close look at the sequence of events, and though it is not easy, wait for the facts.”
Columbus interim Police Chief Michael Woods said he cannot comment on this specific incident, but said that police officers are trained to use deadly force to stop a deadly assault on an officer or third party from happening.
“When officers are faced with someone employing deadly force, deadly force can be the response the officer gives,” Woods said Wednesday.
It is more than a little rich that the family, whose neglect or disfunction threw Ma’Khia Bryant into the arms of the state and the foster system, now wants a payday off the taxpayers who paid the welfare and enforcement costs of all their nonsense over the years. It is essential that Ohio push back hard, very hard.
“Someone has to be held accountable,” [a cousin Deja] Torrence told Insider. “The family just doesn’t want this to be another senseless killing that goes under the rug and gets overlooked.”
Torrence didn’t specify who the family wanted to take legal action against or when it planned to take those steps. But she said her cousin was failed by the foster system, which had custody of her at the time of her death.
The left may have panicked or overreached on this one. Prominent leftists have actually floated the line that knife fights among kids are normal and police have no business interfering with lethal force. Yet the clear video evidence is that this was no knife fight. It was a one-sided armed assault on two unarmed girls, both of whom reasonably feared for their lives. The unarmed victim still standing as police intervened was backed against a car, with no clear avenue of escape, presuming she had a real shot at outrunning the knife-wielding girl rather than having her slash or sink the knife in the unarmed girl’s back. Everybody knows this.
Something else was bleeding when that cop in Columbus shot Byrant, quite likely saving a life, and the Chauvin jury in Minnesota was finding that former police officer guilty in the death of George Floyd.
What was bleeding was the central narrative of the left, pushed in angry, often violent protests in big cities, that cops are trained to be militant, that they target minorities, that they should be unarmed and defunded.
And in their panic, the left built another fantasy: that cops should allow kids to settle arguments with knives.
Indeed, a 13-year-old Cincinnati, Ohio girl was stabbed to death by a former friend, another 13-year-old girl, shortly before this nationally publicized event. No BLM millionaire Marxist spoke Nyaira Givens’ name, Joker James doesn’t give a free throw about Nyaira’s death or her mother’s pain. Shamefully, Governor DeWine, a creature of the GOPe, couldn’t be bothered about any black child’s death that the left isn’t using. Nyaira Givens’ killer is allegedly an “A student,” whatever that means in her urban school.
As Pooja Salvi of MEA WorldWide wrote:
In some shocking news, Nyaira Givens, 13, was stabbed in the neck on Monday, April 19, 2021, in Cincinnati’s Winton Hills neighborhood by another 13-year-old girl, who appeared in court for the first time on April 21, 2021. But unlike the Ma’Khia Bryant incident, no police officers were available for help on the scene to stop Givens from being stabbed or bleeding to death in the arms of her father.
[ . . . ]
Documents obtained by the Cincinnati Enquirer said, “During a verbal dispute, (the teen) pulled out a pocket knife and cut the victim on the right side of her neck causing her death.” Although she was immediately rushed to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Givens reportedly succumbed to her injuries.
It is time for Ohio leaders to lead, to do something for real. Establish security by overwhelming the local extensions of the transnational criminal terror enterprises with massive and sustained legal force, from state police to Ohio’s organized militia, their Army National Guard. Cut out the rotten red feds as much as possible to maintain operational security. There can be no higher budget priority in a state. Period. Defund any and everything else if you must, to meet state budget-balancing requirements.
At the same time, loudly build a case for state and federal civil rights lawsuits against federal officials who deprive poor black Ohio residents of equal protection by colluding with criminals and their enablers to keep neighborhoods under gangs’ reign of terror. Build a legal strategy to target public officials who have continued to pursue policies that demonstrably, with decades of data, deprive certain groups of citizens of their rights to “bodily integrity.” Happily, Ohio is in the Sixth Circuit, and two decisions out of Michigan about lead in the water were allowed to stand when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Flint water cases in January 2020. These cases expanded the grounds on which government officials can be sued, expanding the concept of a right to “bodily integrity” under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. How especially serendipitous that the Sixth Circuit is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio!
Consider this recent reflection on another young man, Adam Toledo, dying on the street in a confrontation with a police officer in Chicago:
[T]he current criminal justice system also plays a role in Chicago’s toxic gang culture. How does a system that continuously releases known gang members and other repeat offenders back into their communities—despite long arrest records and serious criminal convictions involving firearms and violent crimes—improve the prospects of children in Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods, such as Austin, West Garfield Park, Englewood, and Humboldt Park? It doesn’t.
Consider, as well, Glenn Reynolds’ telling of the real class divide in “the riots the lefty elite keeps cheering” [emphasis added]:
In Brooklyn Center, where the destruction was visible firsthand, respondents (nearly all black men of various ages) overwhelmingly opposed rioting.
[ . . . ]
On the streets of Washington, on the other hand, support for riots among the capital’s bourgeoisie was almost universal. One young woman said that “if change needs to be made, and it’s not getting done in the traditional avenues, then rioting is a good option.”
[ . . . ]
But this is mostly a class divide. The women interviewed in DC share the up-talk and vocal fry that characterize well-off, college-educated young women today. They aren’t people who run or depend on small businesses that can be ruined by one night of destruction; they aren’t people whose wages might suffer from business closures following mass violence. They speak in the most abstract of tones.
We saw this in the 1960s with the rise of “radical chic,”[*] in which (as the writer Tom Wolfe memorably noted), tony Upper-East-Side types shared cocktails with Black Panthers. Many of the most violent New Left revolutionaries of the 1960s and ’70s were the privileged children of wealthy parents. And even today, there’s a lot of voyeurism among those encouraging violence.
If the Sixth Circuit is shocked at government officials causing a localized environmental catastrophe, they need to be invited to be just as sensitive, just as enlightened, and just as provoked to judicial wrath about the institutionalized slaughter of black lives in the city with these judges claim to meet to mete out justice. The Ohio Attorney General, a directly elected Republican, needs to put together a class action lawsuit yesterday, starting with these headlines from three major Ohio cities:
Cincinnati homicides: A year’s worth of killings in just nine months
“The spirit of our city is being paralyzed,” [New Beginnings Church Of The Living God Pastor Ennis] Tait said. “The uptick in homicides is primarily in the African American community which makes it easy for the city to defer.”
Of those fatally shot in the city this year, 92.3% have been Black. West End, Avondale, Over-the-Rhine, Westwood and Winton Hills account for nearly 40% of the shootings in the city this year.
‘It’s like war numbers’: Cleveland endures worst homicide rate in recent history in 2020
The spike in killings puzzled city leaders and experts alike. Cleveland police attributed the spike in deaths to increased gang violence, drug activity and the coronavirus pandemic. Experts say the pandemic’s effect intensified already existing issues in the poorest big city in America.
[ . . . ]
“It was the perfect storm for criminals in this town,” Polensek said. “They don’t believe they’re going to get arrested, and if they do, they believe they’re going to be released from jail. The police are more reluctant than ever before to engage them. You have gang-bangers going at it, more retribution, more drugs, more turf wars and more guns than ever before. It’s easier to get a gun than a car.”
According to Cleveland police statistics, of the homicides recorded as of Dec. 20, 87 percent of the victims were Black.
Over 75% of 2020 homicide victims in Columbus were Black, police share in a report:
Of the 127 people who died, 96 of them were Black and 84 of them were Black men. In comparison, 25 homicide victims were white, 20 of them white men.
[ . . . ]
Columbus Police also shared details on the homicide suspects. Of the 79 identified, 65 are Black with 59 being Black men, and nine are white with eight being white men.
Of the cases police say were solved, 56 had a Black victim and a Black suspect, two had a Black victim and a white suspect, seven had a white victim and a Black suspect and six had a white victim and a white suspect.
Whose job is this? The state legislature is the first branch, as at the federal level, and showed more responsiveness than Governor Mike DeWine, who appears to be a conventional Republican, peddling big plans to grab guns all nice and legal, with questionable claims of respecting “due process” for people targeted by relatives, neighbors, or government officials with claims of safety fears. Just look at DeWine’s Twitter header and avatar, fully muzzled as he wants you. The legislature slapped DeWine down, rejecting his big-government power grab and instead setting in law every law-abiding resident’s right to defend themselves effectively, without risking their lives trying to retreat in order to avoid prosecution. Ohio now has a stand-your-ground law. If the Ohio legislature can stand up on behalf of the right to self-defense, they can stand up for the rest of the Ohio Constitution. Consider the following:
Article I: Bill of Rights
Inalienable rights.
§1 All men are, by nature, free and independent, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and seeking and obtaining happiness and safety. (1851)
In 1851, Buckeyes incorporated parts of the Declaration of Independence into their state bill or rights. So, this is the foundational law, not just nice words that might be persuasive.
Bearing arms; standing armies; military power.
§4 The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security; but standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and shall not be kept up; and the military shall be in strict subordination to the civil power. (1851)
Article XVIII: Municipal Corporations
Classification of cities and villages.
§1 Municipal corporations are hereby classified into cities and villages. All such corporations having a population of five thousand or over shall be cities; all others shall be villages. The method of transition from one class to the other shall be regulated by law. (1912)
Municipal powers of local self-government.
§3 Municipalities shall have authority to exercise all powers of local self-government and to adopt and enforce within their limits such local police, sanitary and other similar regulations, as are not in conflict with general laws. (1912)
1912 marked a wave of Progressive Era changes to the Ohio constitution. Here you had the middle class demanding more power and accountability at the local level. Without a knowledge of Ohio case law, I can only note that the simple sense of Article XVIII, section 3, seems to be that state-wide, or “general” laws trump any local regulations. So the Republicans are without excuse. They have a state constitution that seems to command their attention to all Ohioans “inalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and seeking and obtaining happiness and safety.” The 1912 amendments did not remove or diminish Article I, section 1. Even the grants of power to local governments still acknowledge that generally applicable laws govern over any local elite or majority’s contrary desires.
The legislature should hold hearings about the criticality of security for small businesses, including food stores, to operate in poor communities. Layout the effects of constant threats and violence on children’s ability to learn. Link security and jobs, both employment levels and income. Then prioritize state dollars to dramatically break the cycle of urban violence. At the same time, hold hearings on failures and successes in K-12 education, aiming at reforming state education law to produce citizens in every neighborhood with basic, functional literacy, numeracy, and a positive knowledge of the U.S. and Ohio constitutions.
Other states with Republican majorities should do the same at the same time. This may be key to winning Pennsylvania back on any state-wide races, adding new urban poor votes and local black leaders in the Philadelphia area turned against the corrupt, really institutionally racist Democrats. Local and state-level activists who aspire to the U.S. Congress and Senate.
* Tom Wolfe, 1970, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York Magazine.
Published in Domestic Policy
Let Ohio start the back fire.
Great post; a couple of points:
I’m still, more or less, in Governor DeWine’s corner (largely because he’s not Gretchen Whitmer). Yes, a few of his utterances have given me some heartburn (such as those that you’ve illustrated) but, so far, the legislature has kept him in line. I don’t believe he’s a lost cause – yet.
I wouldn’t go overboard on extending any congratulations to the Columbus Dispatch as they have completely forfeited their previous role as the State’s newspaper (as they were when John F. Wolfe was still alive). In the last few weeks, their editorial page has contained opinions advocating for the abolishment of police and praising the virtues of socialism. Daily, we get drivel in the hard news section such as, “A bid to boost faith in democracy – Biden’s bold moves show his awareness of history”. (retch)
Again; great post. Ohio isn’t heaven but we’re a lot better off than a lot of states.
So, you are replacing Wisconsin as “above average?”
When it comes to being above average, we’re above average.
Better than California, New York…Of course, I realize that I’m not setting the bar very high.
Any time I hear that sanity prevails, even in small amounts, I’m grateful.
If I was saddled with a name like Ma’Khia I’d be in a constant murderous rage, too.
I am so old I can remember Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King– real heroes, real martyrs.
We can measure our decline by the official selection of hero-victims: Rodney King, an intoxicated reckless driver, then the start of BLM with Trayvon Martin pummeling a man who shot him in self-defense, then to Jacob Blake, a vile woman-beater who flashed a knife at cops to Ma’Khia Bryant who was actually using a knife on someone before getting shot.
I am not sure how to label the Y-axis but the trajectory is not good.
In between, of course, is the sainted George Floyd who pissed his life away and took lots of people and communities down with him. And of course, there’s Mike Brown, the assault machine. And let’s not forget other riot-worthy martyrs: Milwaukee’s own Sylville Smith who lost a running gun battle with a black cop and the freakish accidental death of Freddy Gray in Baltimore.
It is not enough to rationalize and endorse the stupidity festivals sparked by these new kinds of martyrs, we must also conform to a bizarre calculus in which we must (a) despair of African-American academic achievement or even normative behavior; (b) take no notice of the ongoing black-on black urban slaughter; (c) Look for new, arcane ways to manufacture guilt and (d) not notice that denigrating black ability and responsibility while obsessing about pervasive and largely imaginary white power is about as racist as it gets. Don those ruby slippers of woke guilt while people, neighborhoods, cities, and a country are dying and consider yourself a morally superior being for doing so.
@cacrabtree Never forget the dispatch’s memorable (and insipid) Trump-is-a-dictator editorial.
I saw on this morning’s news that the mayor of Columbus, a pudgy little coward by the name of Andrew Ginther, has called for a DOJ investigation of the shooting.
Sometimes, I think there must be a factory somewhere that produces idiots like this specifically for mayor positions (Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, New York, etc.).
Ohio is good (not fantastic) on the guns issue. Fantastic requires constitutional carry, which we do not have. Yet. The Ohio Supreme Court long ago acknowledged a right to “stand your ground” in one’s workplace and in one’s car as a matter of Ohio’s common law. The legislature, upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court, has prevented cities from adopting onerous gun–control ordinances by preempting the field.
Michael Dewine is weak on guns, but I am thankful that the legislature holds him in check. Otherwise, I think he is done a pretty good job as governor in the pandemic. he has received plaudits in that regard from both Democrats and Republicans. I do not agree with everything. I see where he had to bend a little to keep the frightened masses happy (Public indoor mask mandates and a now-expired 10 PM to 6 AM curfew instead of continued lockdowns).
Leftist city governments make me glad that I do not live in the boundaries of a big city in Ohio, but I am in a suburb of the City of Columbus.
Yup, I remember it. As I recall, there have been at least two announcements in the last couple of years from the editor (Alan Miller), stating that the editorial pages were being “revamped” but in each instance the content has gone even further left. At times, I get the feeling that he is just marking time; waiting to retire and get out.
I miss the days of staid, competent mayors such as Tom Moody, Buck Rinehart and Greg Lashutka. Although Columbus is still, by and large, a fairly livable city (and I say this as a resident of a rural area), I believe that things started going downhill during Michael Coleman’s reign.
So, Columbus citizens from the neighborhood need to immediately, publicly, back or run one of their own members as a challenger in this year’s municipal election. The recall provisions of the city and state bar recall because this is already an election year, if I read them correctly. So, the proper answer is crush this coward and any city council member that does not come out and denounce him now.
Gov. DeWine must denounce the mayor and the state AG must promise to investigate any federal “investigators” for using the color of law to subvert the Constitution and federal law, while building a factual record contradicting any leftist Swamp narrative.
AND. DeWine and the state AG need to stand together and announce a state level investigation of city leadership’s apparent failure to engender safe neighborhoods and schools. They need to denounce the bigoted idea that knife attacks by young teenage girls are normal, rather than radically unacceptable and requiring urgent city and state action.
This would seem to follow from the state constitution.
@cliffordbrown, I’m getting the feeling that the Governor and AG are keeping their heads down for the present, hoping that things cool down a bit. However, the Columbus Dispatch appears to be doing its dead level best to keep stirring the pot. Yesterday’s headline was “Why Does It Keep Happening?” “Experts discuss why city has so many police shootings”. (Duh, if you keep acting like a fool, your chances of getting shot increase dramatically.)
Of course, these “experts” consisted of people such as “activist” Kiara Yakita, the founder of the “Black Liberation Movement Central Ohio”. As of now, these “activists” appear to have the bigger megaphone in the alternate universes that exist in Columbus.
As @oldbathos pointed out above, the deceased Ma’Khia Bryant has already been promoted to sainthood. Sample comments from her funeral:
“Ma’Kia Bryant was described as smart and funny, a butterfly. And someone who left a mark in a short time.”
“This little girl has touched and shaken the world…And she made a difference.”
“This is a baby that is before us, and we ought to be mindful today that she should have been thinking about SATs or prom.”
Ohio’s version of Al Sharpton, Rep. Joyce Beatty, rushed back to Columbus to bleat: “To say goodby to your child this way…I am humbled to help ask to pay tribute to this beautiful child and butterfly…” (Butterflies were released outside following the funeral; nice touch.)
“Ma’Khia had ideas, goals…She spoke what was on her mind…She had a loving kindness of her spirit and personality. She was a sweet girl who had a strong future ahead.”
Of course, mixed in with these “tributes” were the usual denunciations of the police. The truth, that this was a thug with a knife, an individual who would have been going to prison for either murder or manslaughter if she had been successful, was completely lost on this crowd.
Is there any wonder why Columbus is split between two different realities? It will take strong leaders to overcome this; leaders who are not afraid to call B.S. on situations such as Ma’Khia Bryant’s death. As of now, I don’t see those leaders.
Sounds like the cute-little-boy photos of Michael Brown, not the 6′ 4″, 292-lb, 18-year-old adult who was attacking a cop and trying to take his gun.
DeWine barely won by 50.3% of the vote in 2018. He has no announced serious primary challenger so far. He must be pushed hard now on this issue as an acid test.
Not to mention that video of him attacking the convenience store clerk. I mean, he was just a prince of a fellow. I wish someone would have introduced Michael and Ma’Khia; they were a perfect match…
That’s not a very high bar. You could have said, at least he’s not a Democrat. But again, not a high bar.