“They arrested Don Lemon. This is horrifying. I don’t care what your political beliefs or leanings are, what journalism outlet you represent, this absolutely cannot stand,” she argued.
to
“LMFAO! Couldn’t happen to a more deserving faux ‘journalist’ who helped terrorize women and children. TIME TO PROSECUTE!” wrote Daugherty.
Megyn Kelly does ask us to consider a valid hypothetical:
“For those saying this is criminalizing journalism, journalists don’t get a pass when breaking the law just bc they have a mic,” submitted Kelly. “If I accompanied ppl storming an abortion clinic harassing/scaring/’traumatizing’ the crying women while saying ‘But I’m a reporter!’ I would absolutely have been charged under any Dem admin.”
There's more at the link and a lot of it is pretty ripe. January's not even over and we can be sure that it's going to be a year of dug-in heels, extreme narratives and a backdrop of fear.
Honest, I'm not going to turn LITD into a one-note Johnny, but this is a significant addendum to yesterday's post about the health - or lack thereof - of our society, as exemplified by the concentrations of folks getting shot at gatherings the purpose of which is ostensibly for people to enjoy themselves:
Hundreds of teenagers flooded into Downtown Chicago on Saturday night, smashing car windows, trying to get into Millennium Park, and prompting a major police response. At least one person in a car was attacked.
Shots were fired near the corner of Madison and Michigan, and FOX 32 Chicago decided that it was unsafe to keep our news crew on the scene.
Two teens were wounded by gunfire in the crowds in the first block of East Washington Street. A 16 and 17-year-old boy were taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in fair condition with gunshot wounds.
A woman whose car was smashed by people jumping on the windshield said her husband was beaten as he sat in the driver's seat. He's been taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
Police were escorting tourists and others back to their cars in the Millennium Park garage.
The crowd was trying to get into Millennium Park, but there are checkpoints around the perimeter and people under 21 are not allowed without an adult.
Video posted on social media shows people standing on top of a CTA bus and dancing. The CTA said that some service through the downtown area was disrupted on Saturday night because of police activity.
Chicago policesaid nine adults and six juveniles were arrested. Most were charged with reckless conduct. A 16-year-old boy was charged with unlawful use of a weapon, and two people were charged with possession of a stolen vehicle.
The incoming mayor took the opportunity of his obligatory statement to get all sociological:
"In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend," Johnson said in a statement. "It is unacceptable and has no place in our city. However, it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities."
Notice the "have been starved" passive voice. Some outside force made these kids do this. Is it up to someone else to take up the slack for these hooligans' lack of self-restraint?
At least the current mayor asked the right question: Where are their parents?
It's important that I don'r frame this in some kind of boneheaded hot-take way.
A quick conclusion would be easy to draw, and it wouldn't be entirely off the mark.
But let's be thorough about this. If our ultimate goal is a society with more heart, a culture that's not myopic, we need to consider every aspect of this.
I'm speaking of the role of guns in our assurance - as individuals, as families, as communities - that there is sufficient public order for us to feel basically safe.
Four recent news items:
Sunday evening, at a large shopping mall in Greenwood, Indiana, a contiguous suburb on the south side of Indianapolis, a shooter armed with a rifle and many rounds of ammunition fired into the food court, killing three and wounding several others. He was then shot by a young man who was carrying a concealed handgun, which is perfectly legal under Indiana law. The awkward element in this scenario is that the mall has a clearly stated no-weapons policy. But what was mall management supposed to say in response to what transpired? The obvious had to bee acknowledged:
A spokesperson with the mall issued a statement Monday morning. In part of the statement, they said they were grateful for the “heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.”
We grieve for the victims of yesterday’s horrific tragedy in Greenwood. Violence has no place in this or any other community. We are grateful for the strong response of the first responders, including the heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.
In Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter got an earful from a woman who, along with her kids, had come under fire from a shooter who was taken down by police snipers:
Did police abuse their power? Black Lives Matter organizers think so and organized a demonstration outside of the apartment building yesterday. They got a counter-demonstration in response — from the woman whose children came under Sundberg’s fire:
What started as a rally for a man shot and killed by Minneapolis Police quickly took a turn after the mother of two nearly hit by bullets while inside her apartment showed up to share her story on Saturday afternoon.
Arabella Yarbrough was cooking food for her children Wednesday night when she says Tekle Sundberg fired bullets into their home, nearly hitting them. Police responded and helped Yarbrough escape when according to police, Sundberg also fired at officers. That led to a six-hour standoff outside the building that lasted until MPD snipers killed the 20-year-old early the next morning.
“I literally had five minutes to live while he had six hours to choose life or death. The police stated they did not want to kill him,” Yarbrough told Fox 9.
She confronted activists at a protest for Sundberg and against police violence on Saturday. A Fox 9 news crew was at the scene.
Yarborough took offense at the protest, andmade sure everyone knew it. “This is not a George Floyd situation” she declared, telling protesters to go home. “This is not OK!”
Good question. Does BLM routinely protest intracommunity violence, or only law enforcement-related violence? I think we know the answer to that — and Yarbrough certainly knows it herself. That was an entirely rhetorical question.
And we know this by some of the responses Yarborough got that are clearly heard in this videos. Instead of acknowledging that Sundberg was a real and active threat to her and the other residents in the building, they scoffed at her protest. “You’re alive!” shouted one, while another shouted, “Shut up!” Yet another one scolded Yarbrough that “this is not the time or the place,” which is rather ironic considering the circumstances.
That last response - "this is not the time of place" - is particularly rich.
Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to mass shooting that left 21 people dead at a Uvalde elementary school but "systemic failures" created a chaotic scene that lasted more than an hour before the gunman was finally confronted and killed, according to a report from investigators released Sunday.
The nearly 80-page report, obtained by multiple media outlets, was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside a fourth-grade classroom .
The report — the most complete account yet of the hesitant and haphazard response to the May 24 massacre at at Robb Elementary School — was written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives and released to family members Sunday.
According to the Texas Tribune, which reviewed the report ahead of its scheduled release to the public later in the day, the overwhelming majority of responders at the school were federal and state law enforcement. That included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials, according to the Tribune.
Does the glaring point that a massive failure to establish security need to be elaborated on? It's screamingly obvious, is it not?
The police have made arrests in just 12% of crimes reported last year, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis. That’s the lowest level since at least 2001, the first year the data was made publicly available.
The overall arrest rate peaked at nearly 31% in 2005 and has dropped steadily.
The decline in arrests mirrors a drop in nearly every category of police officers’ activity tracked by the Chicago Police Department. The numbers of traffic stops, tickets and investigative stops— in which pedestrians are patted down or searched by officers on the street — all have plummeted. The number of investigative stops dropped by more than half between 2019 and last year, falling from 155,000 citywide to 69,000.
And fewer crimes overall are getting reported — by victims and by the police, who used to produce many crime reports themselves while patrolling their beats.
The slowdown amounts to a pullback by police officers as the city has experienced its most violent years in decades, a rise also seen in other major U.S. cities during the coronavirus pandemic and in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.
Rank-and-file police who patrol the streets and even top brass say officers are doing less.
Even just the suggestion that this was the case was once controversial. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel caused a minor scandal in 2014 when he told a gathering of big city police chiefs and Justice Department officials that cops had “gone fetal” in response to growing public scrutiny.
John Catanzara, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, even says officers aren’t as active as they once were.
Contributing factors include:
The pandemic.
Dramatic shifts in strategy from the top.
Increased scrutiny of the police.
Cops saying they increasingly feel that making an arrest isn’t worth risking their lives, their jobs or becoming a viral news villain.
There also was a plunge in the number of arrests are for so-called index crimes, which include homicide, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated battery.
Officers made arrests in fewer than 6% of those crime categories that were reported last year, the lowest level since at least 2001, the Sun-Times analysis of Chicago police data found. The trend has continued this year, according to figures through early June.
For the early years covered by the data, arrest rates are higher for killings, shootings and sexual assaults because detectives have had more time to solve those cases.
Still, arrests typically are made in the month or year that a crime was committed, law enforcement officials say. The data analyzed by the Sun-Times doesn’t show when an arrest took place — whether it was in the year a crime was committed or later on.
Cops admit pulling back
In 2019, as the overall arrest rate continued to fall,City Hall agreed to a federal consent decreeaimed at overhauling the police department following the killing by a police officer of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014 on the Southwest Side.
The department has since made reforms aimed at changing how officers do their jobs, including a stricter vehicle pursuit policy and a new foot pursuit policy.
Also, cops have been told to stop enforcing some low-level offenses, including the possession of small amounts of marijuana, which was legalized in Illinois as of the start of 2020.
But the number of arrests for possessing harder drugs, like heroin, also has fallen significantly. Those arrests peaked at 7,753 in 2001 but dropped last year to 929.
Current and former police officers — who agreed to speak on the condition they not be identified — say cops have been pulling back for other reasons.
A former commander says officers who regularly have had days off canceled are avoiding making some arrests because they don’t want to wind up in court during their time off.
A beat cop who patrols downtown says prosecutors’ high threshold for approving felony charges has made officers second-guess whether to engage “criminals with guns” — a sentiment the former commander echoes.
The beat cop says high-profile attacks on officers such as last August’s shooting in West Englewood that left Ella French dead and her partner Carlos Yanez critically wounded — “make us take a step back and think: Who really cares about us at that point?
“We can only support each other at the lowest ranks,” the officer says. “And if that means going out there and not doing anything, then that means going out there and not doing anything.”
Rank-and-file officers, sergeants and detectives also say they feel they have a target on their backs. They point to the consent decree, which requires the city to reform its policing policies after the Justice Department found officers engaged in civil rights violations.
Veteran cops say they used to go out of their way to make arrests when they saw suspicious activity but that they’re less likely to now for fear of getting into trouble and being fired or even arrested.
“In the past, I might see a guy with a gun in his waistband, and I’d jump out and chase him,” one decorated officer says. “No way I’d do that now.”
As I said at the outset, the obvious conclusion is that if we had more Elisjsha Dickens (the civilian at the Greenwood mall who took down the shooter there), we'd be safer, given the reality of the demoralized scaredy-cats we pay to protect us failing to do so.
But is that really a tidy package in which we can wrap this all up and move on to other topics?
I suggest that we need to look at the acceleration of the whole cycle of phenomenon-and-backlash that characterizes pretty much everything in our society anymore.
It's certainly been the case regarding gun rights, the defense of which in some quarters has turned into an ostentatious fetish.
And there's also the sociological reality that pretty much every case of either mass shootings in public spaces or gang warfare, with its all-too-frequent collateral casualties, has as a common element the rootlessness - often meaning fatherlessness - in which those inflicting death and injury have come of age.
A lot of people are dismissive of a causal connection between the products of popular culture - video games, music, movies - and the formation of rootless young men's characters and worldviews. Come on. Is it really possible that output so raw, so vulgar, so devoid of anything that seventy years ago was recognized as art, has no effect on those who steadily consume it?
To tie all this together, a lot of young males in our society have not signed onto that. Of course, neither have they become men, if we're going define that as a male person who understands what responsible stewardship of this powerful face that is his masculinity entails. We used to call those who did understand it gentlemen.
Rather, these young males, in their starvation for basic appreciation, decide that they're gonna go out and gets guns and make a statement, by God. The the-world-won't-soon-forget-me mindset does not motivate them to contributions to society's betterment, but rather desperado last stands that serve as nothing but testaments to their nihilism.
There are several layers to peel back in each of the racially charged police encounters in 2020 that each led to riots in the cities where they occurred.
Has enough time passed for us to concede that there was a pattern with regard to the individuals shot in those cases? That is, can we acknowledge certain facts about them without having the charge of racism lobbed at us?
George Floyd was full of meth and fentanyl and resisted arrest. Among the convictions on his criminal record was one for holding a loaded gun to the belly of a pregnant woman whose home he'd burglarized.
Rayshard Brooks was cooperative with police until he realized that an arrest on his fateful night would squelch his probation and send him back to prison. For what?
Rayshard Brooks drove drunk, resisted arrest, assaulted two cops, stole a taser, used that taser on a cop, and has a long and extensive criminal history. He’s been charged with false imprisonment, battery on a family member, cruelty to children, theft, receiving stolen property, interference with custody, obstruction of an officer, and a handful of other misunderstandings.
Even Breanna Taylor was making poor decisions right up to her death. She was the caretaker for her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend's finances even up to that day.
Here's the pattern among these situations: these were people with long track records of unsavory behavior who were made martyrs and heroes by a sizable swath of the public by virtue of their having been shot by police.
Now, let us summarize Kyle Rittenhouse's role in the aftermath of Blake's shooting. He lived in Illinois, but decided, upon hearing about the Kenosha riot, to cross the state line, transporting an AR-15 he was too young to legally possess. He didn't have a driver's license. He violated Kenosha's public-safety curfew. He behaved like a yay-hoo and a hot dog. What he did was extremely foolish.
Rosenbaum was a convicted pedophile. A decade ago, a grand jury in Arizona indicted him on 11 counts of child molestation involving five boys ranging in age from 9 to 11. The charges included anal rape. He copped a plea and was convicted of two of the 11 counts. He suffered bipolar disorder. He attempted suicide. He was released from a mental institution hours before confronting Rittenhouse, threatening to kill Rittenhouse, and trying to take Rittenhouse's AR-15 rifle.
Huber was a serial domestic abuser. He pled guilty to strangulation, suffocation, and false imprisonment. He had been charged with disorderly conduct and use of a dangerous weapon. In the moments before Rittenhouse shot him, Huber clubbed Rittenhouse with a skateboard.
Whitlock goes on to point out the irony of the attempt to confer martyrdom on these characters:
Rosenbaum and Huber are the new O.J. Simpson. They are the stars of "White Is the New Black," a docu-series airing on CNN, MSNBC, and across all social media platforms illustrating the utter lunacy of a "racial justice" agenda built around irritating conservative white people.
That's the point of racial justice. Irritating white people.
We, black people, are so confused, so misled, so lacking in strategy, leadership, integrity, and substance that we've reduced black progress to trolling white people. We replaced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with "Black Twitter."
How does convicting Rittenhouse of murder for defending himself against the attack of psychotic criminals advance the cause of black people?
It doesn't. It's no different from the acquittal of O.J. Simpson. A handful of black comedians made money cracking O.J. jokes. Johnnie Cochran burnished his reputation as America's best trial lawyer. And black people got to giggle among themselves about how irate their co-workers were that O.J. walked.
But nothing changed for the betterment of black people. The biggest winners were the cable news channels. O.J. launched TV careers and networks. Fox News and MSNBC launched in the aftermath of the Simpson trial. Greta Van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera, Dan Abrams, David Gregory, Nancy Grace, Harvey Levin, Jeffrey Toobin, and Eliot Spitzer all rode the Trial of the Century to fame and fortune.
O.J. benefited the white people who were willing to go on TV and lie about what was happening inside the courtroom. The O.J. trial is the only trial I watched start to finish. Cochran and his dream team of attorneys destroyed the prosecution from voir dire to closing arguments. The TV experts pretended that prosecutors Marcia Clark and Chris Darden were holding their own.
The same thing is playing out in the Rittenhouse trial. Corporate media are pretending the prosecution is proving Rittenhouse is guilty of murder, and black people are foolishly anticipating a moment of frustrated-white-people satisfaction.
Black people are Charlie Brown kicking a football that white people keep pulling at the last second. The frustration of white people does not improve the lives of black people.
If we want to be taken seriously, we need a far more tangible goal. The current one is embarrassing and counterproductive. It makes black people look weak, illogical, and immoral. The current goal forces us to turn O.J. Simpson, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, Joseph Rosenbaum, and Anthony Huber into martyrs and heroes.
A guy in Oregon hs used the situation to gin up and legitimize black fragility over this:
A Black Lives Matter clown from Portland, Oregon — Greg McKelvey — tweeted yesterday that employers should give their black employees a day or two off from work after the Rittenhouse verdict… regardless of the verdict. McKelvey says it's going to be hard for us to work and it isn't fair for our employers to expect us to.
The deaths of a white pedophile and a white domestic abuser have shaken black people to the point that we need time off work to recover? McKelvey is insane. He suffers racial dysphoria. He's half black and half white, born to a black dad and a white mom. He's married to a white woman. His children look whiter than Mike Pence in the dead of winter.
McKelvey is the worst kind of half-white liberal. He absolutely loves the white fruit, but his blue-check public persona is based on pretending to hate the white tree that produced it.
Let's return for a moment to this matter of a pattern. As we all know, each of the 2020 situations resulted in block after block of the cities involved (as well as other cities) going up in flames.
Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild.
When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots. It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.
Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn’t run. It sat and sat.
Now it could be that the piece was just bad. I’ve sent in bad ones before, and I’ll do it again. A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.
There were a variety of reasons given—space, timing, tweaks here or there.
Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”
If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.
To summarize:
Kenosha burned as an expression of rage over a guy with a domestic-abuse warrant resisting arrest and getting shot as a result.
Kyle Rittenhouse was an overheated yay-hoo who shouldn't have been anywhere near Kenosha.
He was rightly found innocent of charges of murder in the shootings of Rosenbaum and Huber.
What he would be wise to do is to go home, keep a very low profile and quietly rebuild his life.
But it doesn't look like that's the route he's going to take. He's scheduled to appear on Tucker Carlson's television program Monday night.
This is why post-America can't have nice things. Something happens that lends itself to an identity-politics angle, which is immediately exploited by hustlers, there's a reaction to that, and everyone hardens his or her position based on an incomplete presentation of facts.
So the pipe bombs have been found and presumably dismantled. The gallows that had been hastily erected on Capitol grounds is likewise presumably gone by now. A fistfight between two Democrat House members and one Republican was averted on the floor of that chamber once Congress returned after the National Guard had secured the Capitol. Some of the idiot Republicans who'd intended to object to the Arizona and/or Pennsylvania Electoral College results had changes of heart after the, shall we say, interruption.
But this wasn't a hiccup-type incident, after which basic order will once again prevail and the nation's citizens will turn their eyes to productive and unity-conducive activities. Lasting damage has been a feature of the post-American landscape for some time, but yesterday afternoon gave us a look at an entirely new level.
The head of the executive branch egged on his cult followers with a fiery speech harping yet again on the theme of a stolen election. He exhorted them to march up to Capitol Hill. His subsequent tweets - what a lame way for the chief executive of the world's most powerful nation to address what was going on - finally culminated in a call for his slavish devotees to go home, but not before he, yet again, spoke of a stolen election.
Did he anticipate that they would take their actions as far as they did? Do you really doubt it?
He was surely radiating glee at the thought of the Constitutional obligation of the legislative branch to count electoral votes being interrupted by force.
It's being reported that Mike Pence is red-hot angry with Trump for his midday speech and his recent antics in general. That's good, Mike, you just stew in your anger for a while. Let it steer your thoughts back to May 2016, when you, while sitting in the governor's mansion in Indianapolis, made your Faustian bargain. Let it steer your thoughts back to that state dinner in Washington at which Marilyn Coats kept sending you looks intended to say, "How do you sleep at night being part of this?" You got it. It burned deep into your soul. But you stayed the course and now here you are.
It's a pickle, isn't it? We have two weeks to go. Not enough time for a Senate trial if impeachment is initiated. The 25th Amendment would surely ratchet up the ugliness. We now have proof that Trumpism can be as savage as Antifa-style leftism.
But he does need to go, yet this morning.
The damage done to the Capitol building's offices and hallways, doors and windows serves as a kind of metaphor for the damage done to our institutions and our national character by giving this charlatan the time of day.
I don't know if the Republican Party can be salvaged or not. It is encouraging to see some principled voices speaking out. But I do know that conservatism needs to squarely look at how so many of its adherents ever came to think that this unfit buffoon could somehow embody their hopes for the kind of nation they'd always envisioned.
I wish it did not have to go as far as it has for the colossal mistake of giving the time of day to Donald Trump to become apparent to most of us.
Unlike the situations concerning George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Jacob Blake and Daniel Prude, the deceased wasn't loaded on hard drugs and/or drunk, wasn't resisting arrest, and was in the company of her boyfriend, neither of whom had criminal histories.
It turns out she wasn't shot in her sleep in bed. She and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, heard the knock on the apartment door - that's right, the cops knocked - and they both got out of bed and Walker drew his gun and fired, apparently thinking it was intruders. But a police officer is trained to return fire when shot, as Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly was. In the ensuing return fire, Taylor died in the hallway.
And there's more to the profile of Taylor than just that she was an EMT with no record.
You see, there was an ex-boyfriend who was still in the picture. His name is Jamarcus Glover, and he's currently on the lam. He skipped a court appearance on some drug charges in July and there's a warrant for his arrest.
(Why did this new boyfriend not object to Taylor still be in close contact with Glover? Wouldn't most guys insist on a clean break?)
Why did police go to Taylor's apartment in relation to the Glover warrant? Well, you see
An excerpt from the leaked report showed that on Feb. 14, 2020, Glover's car was towed for a parking violation. According to the report, Glover tried to file a complaint against the officer and gave Taylor's phone number as his own. Six days later, detectives from the Place Based Investigation team verified through a database that Glover was using Taylor's home address -- 3003 Springfield Drive -- as well. The PBI squad was the group of detectives assigned to investigate Glover.
Then, on Feb. 24, the report further verified the link between Taylor's home and Glover.
“Detectives received Jamarcus Glover’s bank records from Chase Bank,” the leaked report stated. “On these bank statements, Jamarcus Glover used 3003 Springfield Drive #4, Louisville, KY 40214 as his mailing address.”
For them no longer being an item, Taylor sure let Glover use her car a lot:
The leaked report stated that on Jan. 2, the PBI team saw Glover pull up to 2424 Elliott Avenue, a suspected drug house, in Taylor's car. The team was conducting surveillance on the home which was described as a "trap house," meaning drug deals allegedly took place there. The report included pictures of Taylor's car at the scene.
Then, the next day, the report revealed transcriptions of recorded jailhouse conversations between Glover and Taylor in which they talk about Adrian Walker, another suspect in the case, and the third person named in the Taylor warrant.
"You talk to Doug (Adrian Walker?)" Glover asked Taylor.
"Yeah, I did," Taylor responded. "He said he was already back at the trap."
In another conversation between the two just two hours later, Glover thanked Taylor for checking on him.
"When you're around I stress more ... ," she is quoted as saying. "I just always be worried about you ... not like you and b****, but just period with the police, like all kind of s***."
In separate phone calls on Jan. 3, the conversations ended with each telling the other that they loved each other, the documents stated. Also, from January 2016 to January 2020, Glover called Taylor 26 times from jail. Another inmate called her seven times during that period.
She loved Glover in January. By March she already had a new bedmate.
Glover was still coming to Taylor's apartment in January. A lot. To pick up packages.
According to the new information, once LMPD's tech team installed a GPS tracker on Glover's red Dodge Charger, the device indicated six trips to the 3003 Springfield Drive address in January 2020. LMPD's surveillance efforts also produced pictures of Taylor at 2424 Elliott. The report included never-before-seen images of Glover picking up packages at 3003 Springfield.
Taylor was handling Glover's finances in March.
The documents also included copious amounts of transcriptions of recorded jailhouse phone calls made by Glover, several of which were made to the mother of his child. On April 24, Glover told the woman, whom WAVE 3 News has chosen not to identify, that officers “took my car ... They got that bank statement out the armrest, boom it got Bre’s address on there.”
In transcribed conversations from the morning of March 13, hours after Taylor was killed, Glover told the woman that Taylor had $8,000 of his money.
“Bre got down like $15 (grand), she had the $8 (grand) I gave her the other day and she picked up another $6 (grand),” he said, according to the documents.
Then, a moment later, he told the woman that "Bre been handling all my money, she been handling my money ... She been handling s*** for me and cuz, it ain't just me."
And later, "I can walk in that house (Bre's) and go directly to whatever it is no problem with it," Glover said, according to the documents.
So the Kentucky Attorney General announced that the police involved in the gunfire exchange at Taylor's apartment would not be charged with anything, and, once again, a major American city erupts in civil unrest, including the shooting of two police officers.
The whole situation makes for one less false narrative for the identity-politics militants to use to insist that we have yet another round of "difficult conversations" about "systemic racism."
She was up to her eyeballs in trouble over drugs and violence, just like the four men - who happened to be black- whose shooting have led to a summer of societal breakdown.
Yesterday, at Knowledge Is Good, former state and federal prosecutor George Parry filled in the timeline by which the prosecutors there became privy to the toxicology report showing that Floyd was OD-ing at the time of his run-in with police. Upshot: That document didn't come to light until after charges had been filed against Chauvin et al:
These charges were based on the autopsy performed by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office and a private “re-autopsy” performed at the request of the Floyd family’s attorney. Based on those procedures, the medical examiner issued a revised autopsy report stating that Floyd had died of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression.” In short, Floyd’s death was allegedly caused by the manner in which the police had restrained him.
But the police defendants were charged before the medical examiner had received the report of Floyd’s toxicology screen by NMS Labs of Horsham, Pennsylvania.
Then, on May 31, 2020, NMS Labs forwarded Floyd’s toxicology report to the Hennepin County Medical Examiners’ Office.
And that’s when the proverbial fecal matter hit the fan.
At 7:30 p.m. on May 31, 2020, prosecutors “met” online with Dr. Andrew Baker, Chief Medical Examiner of Hennepin County, to discuss Floyd’s toxicology report. Take a look at this recently released June 1, 2020, memorandum by Assistant County Attorney Amy Sweasy of that discussion.
So there they were, staring at the just-received and damning toxicology report that blew to smithereens the whole prosecution theory that the police had killed Floyd. To their undoubted dismay, Dr. Baker, the chief medical examiner, had to concede that at 11 ng/mL, Floyd had “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances.” He also conceded that the fentanyl overdose “can cause pulmonary edema,” a frothy fluid build-up in the lungs that was evidenced by the finding at autopsy that Floyd’s lungs weighed two to three times normal weight.
This is consistent with Officer Kueng’s observation at the scene that Floyd was foaming at the mouth and, as found at autopsy, that his lungs were “diffusely congested and edematous.”
In other words, like a drowned man, Floyd’s lungs were filled with fluid. And that was the obvious and inescapable reason why Floyd kept shouting over and over again that he couldn’t breathe even when he was upright and mobile.
The memorandum ends with Dr. Baker’s devastating conclusion that “if Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he [Dr. Baker] would conclude that it was an overdose death.”
Translation: this toxicology report drives a stake through the heart of our murder case. How do we justify criminally charging these police officers and explain away our colossal screw-up?
It is quite telling that this explosively exculpatory June 1 memorandum was not released by the prosecution until August 25, 2020. All of which prompts these questions:
First, why did the prosecution wait three months to release this memorandum?
Second, if the prosecution had released this information in a timely fashion, would that have helped to quell the anti-police outrage that has fueled the nationwide orgy of rioting and looting?
Third, in light of Floyd’s toxicology results and the medical examiner’s assessment that Floyd’s fentanyl overdose caused him to essentially drown in his own bodily fluid, why haven’t the charges against all of the police defendants been dropped?
Think about it. This nation has been subjected to three months of its cities being torched and looted in response to an inaccurate narrative.
the police dispatcher said a woman had called police saying “her boyfriend was present and was not supposed to be on the premises.”
That certainly made it sound more like what I alluded to initially. If there was a warrant out for Blake for domestic abuse, sexual assault, etc. then it would make sense if a restraining order was in place. Now, most of these details are being confirmed. The New York Post reported last night that the woman in question was a repeat victim of Blake’s and she was the one who called the police to the scene after Blake pushed his way into her home and sexually assaulted her again. Before you click through and read the rest of that article, I will warn you in advance that the details of the assault are offered in a rather graphic form and may be disturbing to some readers.
The cops involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake — which touched off a fresh wave of angry, anti-police sentiment across the country — were attempting to arrest him for violating a restraining order stemming from an alleged sexual assault, The Post has learned.
Blake, 29, was forbidden from going to the Kenosha home of his alleged victim from the May 3 incident, and police were dispatched Sunday following a 911 call saying he was there.
The responding officers were aware he had an open warrant for felony sexual assault, according to dispatch records and the Kenosha Professional Police Association, which released a statement on the incident on Friday.
So this wasn’t some meeting of happenstance between Jason Blake and the police. They had been called to the scene by a repeat sexual assault victim. There was already a warrant out for Blake’s arrest and the cops were there to execute it. The cops knew about all of this before they arrived, explaining how they might have been prepared for a confrontation when they got there and their general approach in trying to take Blake into custody. Blake’s family is calling any discussion of his history prior to the shooting “garbage” but it certainly seems relevant.
You should read the linked New York Post article to get fully elucidated. This woman was damn scared of Jacob Blake.
It may be too much to ask in this overheated summer of 2020 that everyone insist on enough facts about these situations to preclude their coming to emotion-driven conclusions that have society-wide consequences.
It doesn't take much - just a few of these situations that become the hot news of the hour without all relevant information on the table - for what remains of trust in post-America's news-reporting industry to fully evaporate. That void will be filled by common acceptance of the most inflammatory narrative out there, and the resultant anarchy will gain further momentum.
