The DOJ is not charging the police officer involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake that sparked the Kenosha riots
Another high-profile case that was cynically exploited by the left is revealed to be what those of us who had looked closely into the facts at the time have long known it to be: a case in which the police’s actions were not out of line and not actionable under the law.
People who have forgotten some of the details might be forgiven, because there have been so many of these cases that follow the same sad and sorry pattern: the killing by police of a resistant and violent offender who happens to be black (it happens to white people too, but those cases don’t make the headlines). The rush to judgment of Democrat politicians and presidential candidates, as well as BLM and attorneys such as Ben Crump, is abominable and fans the flames of interracial rage. The riots in Kenosha were the result.
Here’s one of many posts I wrote about the situation, a little over a year ago. In the meantime, local authorities have declined to prosecute, and now the DOJ has done the same. That tells you how incredibly weak the case against the police was, because the present DOJ is not in the habit of caving to the right:
State prosecutors decided not to file charges against Sheskey earlier this year after video showed that Blake, who was wanted on a felony warrant, was armed with a knife.
The U.S. Department of Justice launched its own investigation days after the shooting. The agency announced Friday that a team of prosecutors from its Civil Rights Division and the U.S. attorney’s office in Milwaukee reviewed police reports, witness statements, dispatch logs and videos of the incident, and determined there wasn’t enough evidence to prove Sheskey used excessive force or violated Blake’s federal rights.
“Accordingly, the review of this incident has been closed without a federal prosecution,” the Justice Department said in a news release.
Not enough evidence? Like, no evidence? That of course hasn’t stopped Blake’s family members from saying the officer should have been prosecuted, but I don’t have too much of a beef with that because this is the family and their emotions are heavily involved. It’s the cynical and mendacious leftist race-baiting politicians I have a problem with, a big one.
The Blake shooting and the resultant accusations against police, as well as the riots, have served the left’s purpose. What difference does truth make? How many people are aware of the truth as opposed to the original lie? I would say a minority, and nearly all of them are probably on the right anyway. Most people probably have only a vague memory of the case at this point, but that memory merges into a whole host of similar cases in which the takeaway will be: black men are being hunted down and persecuted, and sometimes shot and killed with no excuse other than racism, by out-of-control police. That’s the narrative the left wants to promote, and they’ve been remarkably successful in that endeavor.
[NOTE: By the way, Blake was not killed, but he’s paralyzed from the waist down and had to have quite a bit of his lower digestive tract removed as well. This is sad, but it’s the direct consequence of his actions.]
Said it elsewhere: Crappy police work. He defeated seven cops in hand to hand combat and shook off a taser hit. After which they followed him around the car as if in a parade, with “control” meaning one cop had one hand on his tee shirt.
Daunte Wright would still be alive if he’d not beaten a male cop out of the to-be-cuffed position and gotten into a car in position to drive away. While being contested with by a cop??? Imagine yourself trying to keep somebody your size out of a car. Not that hard.
Ben Crump will not be deterred by these small details. He can smell a payday 100 miles away. Watch what happens now. Ferguson MO also had the DOJ trying but unable to make a case. That cop is still in hiding.
We are all living in a criminal universe right now. The law is powerless unless you are a parent at a school board meeting.
“Not enough evidence? Like, no evidence? That of course hasn’t stopped Blake’s family members from saying the officer should have been prosecuted, but I don’t have too much of a beef with that because this is the family and their emotions are heavily involved. It’s the cynical and mendacious leftist race-baiting politicians I have a problem with, a big one.” neo
The “cynical and mendacious leftist race-baiting politicians” would find little traction in cases like this, if much of the public wasn’t viewing events solely through their emotions and, if the schools and media hadn’t long fomented those emotions.
But regardless, the family calling for prosecution of the cop(s) doesn’t get a pass. They’re defending who they know to be a dangerous criminal and that, makes of them an enemy of civilization itself.
Demonstrating oneself to be an enemy of civilization has to result in serious consequence or the barbarians will surely bring down civilization. The tyranny of “might makes right” not only will follow, it is occurring.
That rationale applies to the left’s politicians, its propaganda mouthpieces in the media, to academics and ‘teachers’ and to the judges and lawyers enabling the uprooting of the rule of law.
Increasingly, we can add many doctors and police to those actively making war upon the Constitution.
Good outcome. Now it’s time to get Rittenhouse off the hook.
Richard Aubrey:
They’re not allowed to use batons any more. They’re not allowed anything resembling chokeholds. I’m not sure what they ARE allowed, except tasers (and I seem to recall that some places have banned them, as well). They also are well aware that they’re being filmed and that one slip-up will get them in trouble if they are perceived as rough-housing someone. Plus, if a person who is resisting is on drugs, he can become extremely strong depending on the drug.
I was looking to find out how big Blake was – a lot of these guys, such as Floyd and Brown, were exceptionally big – and I see here that he was six feet tall. Pretty big, although hardly overwhelmingly so. I also learned from that article that he’s starting to walk a bit.
Aside from personal emotions, the family wants the prosecution because Ben Crump wants it. The state has unlimited resources. The cop, as we have seen in the Chauvin case, does not. Convince a jury enough–hey, they’re prosecuting a cop! Must be something there! and you just need any charge to stick.
Once the criminal conviction is secured, a civil trial is a breeze because the evidence standard is far lower in civil trials. So any sort of criminal conviction means another 10 to 20 million contingency fee for lawyer Ben.
What LeClerc said.
It’s nice that the Cop caught a break. Rittenhouse is the big thing here. If he’s railroaded, it’ll be one giant step closer to finding out if the chatter is All Hat and No Cattle.
Neo. That’s what it looks like. Not even judo or wrestling. If you forbid the intermediate steps, you move to fatal pretty quickly.
There was some footage a year and some back. Two cops trying to get a guy out of a car. Yelled, grabbed, yelled, ordered, reached, ordered, tried to grab ,dragged. Went on for fifteen minutes. The guy got a few seconds to retrieve a pistol from under the seat, killed one cop, injured the other.
The suspect may have been reaching for a gun. He was carrying a scalpel… knife, with targets far out of his weight class in the immediate, not probable, not plausible vicinity. This was not by any stretch of the imagination a novel act of “heroism” in the modern meaning.
Ace put up an interesting video showing just how quickly a guy with a knife can stab you.
My take on Rittenhouse is that he’s completely innocent. There is no “Order” in a riot. Without order, there cannot be any “Law” except the law of survival. The authorities have the power to prevent riots, and at one time, they did. States still have “riot acts,” and they need to start enforcing them. The blood of the guys Rittenhouse killed are on the government’s hands.
On the Open Thread today, Art Deco posted a link to the latest post by Jonathan Turley, which discussed recent events concerning Eric Zorn, who was a journalist “cancelled” for counseling against jumping to conclusions in the Adam Toledo case last year.
Turley linked Zorn’s substack, and there were actually two posts there which discuss the situation. On the Open Thread, I excerpted quite a bit from the one linked by Turley, and noted that it applied directly to this topic, and the prior post was also relevant.
Here are the posts in chronological order, and Turley’s at the end for completeness. They should be read in full (scroll down through Zorn’s entries to the “main feature” of his “compendium” posts).
https://ericzorn.substack.com/p/panelist-interrupted
https://ericzorn.substack.com/p/moving-on-not-quite-yet
(this one also mentions the Rittenhouse case further down; he believes it’s a slam-dunk self-defense, but allows that you can’t predict jury verdicts anymore)
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/10/09/chicago-journalist-cancels-appearance-with-blistering-response-to-depauls-student-editors-and-faculty-advisor/#more-179303
Bottom line(s) from Zorn:
First post:
Second post:
Turley:
PS None of the things that Zorn experienced have inclined him away from his progressive ideology, as evident in the compendia of his posts. Sad. I wonder if Turley will ever reach a Walk Away point?
Hmm…let’s give this a bit of time.
There will be many, many demagogues furious with this decision. They have unfettered access to Twitter. In addition the Garland family’s ROI on CRT publications could suffer. And Slo’ Joe’s tanking administration is always looking for another racially charged distraction.
Evidence? Please! The pain and sadness felt by Blake, his family and the wider ‘community’ is more than sufficient evidence. ‘Lived experience’ don’t you know?
Given all of the above, a swift reversal on this decision is not unlikely.
PPS After reading most of Zorn’s commentary on his substack blog (he apparently retired from the Chicago Tribune recently and only has 4 posts up so far), he spouts most of the background Democrat talking points, and seems to believe them.
Despite the shellacking the Left gave him for being sane and reasonable, he doesn’t have any inclination to ask himself, “What else are they getting wrong?”
Gell-Manning Amnesia to the max.
Changers, such as Neo and others we’ve heard from, don’t seem to have that affliction – they can see that if someone lies to them regarding things they know something about, then that someone is quite possibly lying regarding things they don’t know about as well.
I wonder if that’s some kind of innate personality trait: either you have it or you don’t.
A couple of questions I’ve never found answers for on the Jacob Blake incident.
Whose car was he trying to get into? He had previously been accused of trying to steal a rental car from the woman who called the police. Was this a rental car? If so, who rented it? The Woman who called the police to report that he was violating the order of protection? Was it legally his car? Did it belong to one of his other “girlfriends”?
The other related question. Whose children were in that car. I have never seen any mention of Blake being married. Were these really his children? On what basis? Any paternity suits? Were they the children of one of his Baby Mommas?
I haven’t read every report about the case, so I might have missed this information. Or maybe, the only way this info would have been made public would have been during the police trial that is not going to happen.
It will come to another Civil War. Evil is not re-educated; it remains evil. Otherwise we pretend the ratshit part of our population gets to write its own rules. It stands there, lying proudly and unabashedly, like McCauliffe denying there is CRT in Virginia schools.
There is some hope the war will be successfully concluded, with Leftists losing, though it will not begin in my lifetime.
To succeed against the Left will not take education; it will take bullets. Note the large # of uniformed US military who have refused covid vaccines. There is our backbone. Note also what’s happening to the Seattle police force. Its numbers have fallen so far that now all officers are on call for 911 calls all the time.
@Richard A., e.g. on “Imagine yourself trying to keep somebody your size out of a car. Not that hard.”
Yeah, Sheskey is lucky that they found a knife on Blake, otherwise he’d likely have been charged.
Were Sheskey not able to claim, that he feared that the knife would be used vs. e.g. car occupants, the state could argue that Sheskey (and his fellow officers there) ought to have tried to tackle Blake, before shooting the latter before he got into the car.
@fast+richard
The car belonged to the woman who called the police. He had stolen her keys and taken the child who was in the car which is what she reported to the police. She was his “girlfriend” and also the one who had a protective order placed on him for sexual assault earlier. The child in the car was hers and he was supposedly the father.
Also in one of the videos it is clear that when he rounded the front of the car he had a knife called a ‘karambit’ in his left hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jacob_Blake