The Littleton shooting
In Detroit, a 20-year-old black man was killed by police. His name was Hakim Littleton.
Black Lives Matter, the organization dedicated to publicizing and protesting all deaths of black people at the hands of police (particularly white police), sprung into action with predictable results:
…[A]round 300 converged at the site of the shooting on Detroit’s west side, yelling at police and chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Defund DPD!’
Several members of the crowd threw bottles, bricks and other projectiles at officers, who deployed tear gas and made eight arrests.
Many of the protesters were carrying signs and chanting ‘we want badge numbers,’ and ‘killer cops get out of town.’
Sound familiar? But something was different. The police chief James Craig (who happens to be black, by the way) immediately released a video of the incident, and it revealed that Littleton had actually fired at a police officer from about three feet away, aiming at the officer’s head. He missed, and the officer gave chase, as several other officers fired on Littleton and felled him, causing his death.
Craig said he released the video hours after the incident to quell ‘a false narrative’ that the shooting was unjustified. The ‘erroneous information that was put out has incited violence,’ he said.
I don’t have a full text of Craig’s remarks, but I wonder whether he named who put out that “erroneous information” (better known in the past as a lie).
The incident began with the investigation of a fatal shooting days earlier at a party. Police came to arrest another man, Darnell Sylvester (apparently a friend of Littleton’s), who was wanted on an outstanding drug arrest and who was also a suspect in that earlier shooting. Sylvester followed police instructions and was being taken into custody when Littleton (who was not being arrested) decided to act quite differently.
This entire incident highlights many things. One is that if a person cooperates, no problem. The second is that some people with guns aren’t good shots. The third is that police work is very very dangerous and difficult. The fourth is that BLM and other such groups are in the business of firing up cop-hatred without any interest in learning facts first. The fifth is that videocams can sometimes help tell the truth. The sixth is the political use of a story: will this one fade, or will Littleton enter the pantheon of BLM’s martyrs?
Just a reminder….
From:
https://nypost.com/2020/06/16/blues-not-black-to-the-left-goodwin/
Key graf:
‘Hawk Newsome, chairman of Black Lives Matter New York…then [said]: “When black people become police officers, they are no longer black. They are blue.” ‘
Meanwhile, the MSM are ignoring the murder of a young mother (only 24) in Indianapolis who was (according to her surviving boyfriend and to members of her family) brutally murdered recently after an altercation in which she uttered the unspeakable words “All Lives Matter” to a group of armed BLM activists. The progressive media’s only interest in covering events is to inculcate a thoroughly false narrative into the minds of gullible Americans.
Gangbangers are lousy shots, they are spray and spray shooters. For every person murdered 15 or more are wounded in an extremity. And, most of those murdered were not the intended target.
I forget which city it was the other day where a cookout by blacks in a city park was interrupted by 5 blacks with guns jumping out of an SUV and blazing away at the gathering. No motive was reported by the gathering. An infant was killed by a bullet into the abdomen. Amazing there were not more casualties.
This past weekend there were 100 shootings in Chicago.
According to my daughter who lives in one of the Grosse Pointe suburbs of Detroit and has a best friend, not just a friend who is an upper middle class black woman with a son the same age as my daughter’s. What my daughter has relayed to me is that Trump has been building a lot of support among black people in Detroit because, at least up until the virus, they were seeing jobs coming back, more concern than some people have felt in decades.
When things went to crap in Minneapolis and folks started to get rowdy in Detroit James Craig went out into the streets and spoke to the people and encourage them to take care of their city. My daughter told me that there were black women in front of a Starbucks who stopped two white college age women who were going to break the windows and paint on the front and they told the intruders that this was their Starbucks in their neighborhood and they were not going to allow people to come in and destroy their neighborhood and they ran the women off. I am under the impression that after Detroit went through the 1960’s riots a lot of the people don’t want to see it happen again.
We are going to see a lot of last ditch desperate liberal, left wing action between now and November because the unthinkable has a chance to be unthinkable once more and I hope it is not just wishful thinking on my part that
Trump has a chance to win and actually help people instead of using them and paying them off for their votes. Detroit might be a harbinger of a realistic way to help build communities with calm leadership like the Chief of Police James Craig.
OldTexan:
I have wondered why Detroit is relatively quiet compared to some other cities, and it occurred to me that they were devastated in ’68 and perhaps people do not want it to happen again.
Old Texan Neo. WRT Detroit
In the Sixties, I was a glazier and did a lot of windows in the Detroit area. We did a ton of FHA reposed homes. Vacancies attract window breakers. It was possible we’d make our daily billing maximum without moving the truck if there were a couple of homes next to each other.
Much the FHA word was in Detroit’s inner city. And,very frequently, as we opened the truck and got our stuff set up, somebody would come up and introduce himself as the “block captain”. Not sure of the totality of his responsibilities, but trying to keep the block up and improving, increment by tough increment was probably it. I’m sure it was informal and generally agreed upon as to which lucky guy got the plum job.
He would ask if the home we were working on was going to be inhabited soon. We were always given the ones that had been sold as a priority, and the others as and when in order to keep the weather out and so forth.
Getting a vacant home inhabited was important to those folks.
I was impressed by the effort it took to make one tiny step forward in those
circumstances. Have you ever lived where there was a block captain?..
A hell of a lot of my best work went up in smoke in 67. Kills me to think of all those people had done burned by ….not sure my vocabulary is up to it…from some other neighborhood just for grits and shins. Those poor people. All that effort swimming upstream….. Shot to hell.
I expect they remember it, too.
Good. And proves the point that we should be wary of anyone who exercises liberal license to indulge diversity, entertain warlock judgments, and protest in witch trials.
BLM is just a Marxist cult, like Jim Jones temple. Jim Jones was a communist and he had a large following too.
By happenstance I was in Detroit when the riots started in 1967. A wild situation utterly devoid of any direction (unknown). Just senseless violence that destroyed life and property in black neighborhoods.. deja vu.
Humanity and America cannot fix their problems when they are unaware of these problems or when they think these problems will go away if they drink enough alcohol and eat enough popcorn butter.
This is the Darkness coming to the surface, and being dealt with by the group conscious. It is fated so to speak. You cannot keep ignoring the American slaughter in inner cities by saying “it is just Leftists”.
I have wondered why Detroit is relatively quiet compared to some other cities, and it occurred to me that they were devastated in ’68 and perhaps people do not want it to happen again.
As I said before, Detroit shifted to a private security model some time ago. They don’t arrest people but do provide protection, overwatch, investigation. These private security is doing much of the job of DPD, and it allows DPD to focus on the more violent crimes and to withdraw to their bases.
Law and Order is required for civilization.
But police following orders is also needed for tyranny.
Maybe a lot more very local private security would be a bit better. But the reality is that any police force will make some mistakes with criminals.
The real racist problem in the USA is that so many of the criminals are blacks. Freedom allows criminal people to be criminal. The choice to be a criminal is an individual moral failing.
If 1 in 10 black men choose to be a criminal, there will be far more black criminals than if only 1 in 100 (like whites?) or 1 in 1000 (like Asians? or Jews?)
The differences in individual choice is what needs to be discussed more. The tribal / social group fetishists hate discussing individuals. But all justice is individual justice, not group justice.