Racist cops and pundits over-react to Trayvon verdict?
It seemed like a reasonable question: The AP reporter wanted to know if pundits and police over-reacted to the Trayvon verdict when they predicted and prepared for riots, mayhem, lawlessness, and all sorts of other black mob violence.
Toure and his crew on MSNBC thought so. He said anyone who anticipated violence was a racist, blah, blah, blah. The other panelists dutifully and mournfully nodded their head in agreement as they always do when Toure makes one of his pronouncements on pervasive and permanent racism.
Which is pretty much all the time.
Post-verdict, we saw some violence, with the worst in Oakland and Los Angeles. Like most black mob violence, police and media tried to pretend it was less than it was.
My favorite story was the LA news anchor introducing a riot. But before doing so, she stressed several times that the rally was peaceful, but a few people had gotten “rowdy.” The same word the Los Angeles Times used for another nasty bit of racial violence: Rowdy.
Then she tossed it to her reporter in the field, who did the same thing during his voice over. With one difference: They were rolling video tape of a black mob swarming over an older white dude, beating the stuffing out of him.
Like the incident itself, the reporters tried to minimize the injuries. They were minor, were were informed. But most of the demonstrators were peaceful, they insisted. Even the people watched; even the ones who did not lift a finger to help, even the ones who did not turn the violent offenders over to police. All peaceful.
In Houston, a black mob tried to stop a grandmother taking a child to the hospital. When they car did not stop, one protestors grabbed and punched at the occupants. A local paper described the rally as “peaceful.”
We also saw largely unreported black mob violence not connected to the Trayvon verdict in places like Baltimore, Chicago, Rochester, Utica, Denver, Long Island, Brooklyn, Niagra, Portland, Madison, Lockland, Teaneck, Bridgewater, Milwaukee, Wilson, New Haven, St. Paul , St. Louis, 29 Palms, and more.
Didn’t hear about it? That’s why I wrote White Girl Bleed a Lot: Lots of black mob violence is ignored. Unreported. Even condoned.
But the question remains: Did the country burn like some pundits promised? Like some on Twitter threatened?
Not really. Not over Trayvon. Not like the 60’s style race riots recalled so fondly by so many newspaper editors. You remember: The signs, the slogans, the burning, the looting. Race riots are easy to cover when the rioters carry signs and issue press releases.
Now the Associated Press is wondering if all the preparation all over the country for post-Trayvon violence was overkill. A symptom of the white racism and white supremacy keeping so many black Americans down.
This is not a hypothetical question. It is the exact question that city leaders in Indianapolis had to answer just a few days after the acquittal as they prepared for their annual Black Expo. For the last ten years, Black Expo has featured some nasty violence, shootings, looting, rampaging, and other mayhem after the Friday and Saturday night events released thousands of black people into the downtown.
Last year, police were ready. This year too: They turned downtown into a police state complete with towers, high powered weapons, dogs, SWAT, tactical vehicles, infra red binoculars, and police breaking up crowds of 5 or more and telling them to split up. And so many cops they won’t even tell us.
There was one shooting downtown, but after the Black Expo ended, city officials pronounced it a non-violent success, although to many in attendance, it looked like racial profiling.
The kind Toure and his posse hate.
Miami Beach was faced with the same choice over the Memorial Day weekend as they prepared for the 300,000 black people in town for the annual Black Beach Week .
This event has a similar history, but way worse: Shootings. Lawlessness. Robberies. Assaults. Defiance. Property destruction. Vandalism. Drugs. And like Indianapolis, trash: Mountains and mountains of trash on the streets and beaches of this town that manages to stay pristine 51 weeks a year.
Miami Beach used the same play book: Towers. Lights. Dogs. Guns. Cops. Cops. And more cops everywhere.
And let’s not forget Kiki. In Brooklyn earlier this year, protestors looted a pharmacy and assaulted several people while railing against the death of a Trayvon-wannabe at the hands of a police officer.
After the fact, some saw the lack of violence in Indy and Miami as a success. Others wondered if all the police presence was an overreaction. Profiling.
Just like the Associated Press is wondering now.
Maybe Toure was right. There was never any danger and all those folks in Indianapolis and Miami Beach are just racists, guilty of the worst kind of racial profiling. And the potential for black mob violence, documented in White Girl Bleed a Lot: The return of racial violence and how the media ignore it, was just the delusional ramblings of a few pundits.
Despite the tons and tons of video evidence, lots of reporters still deny that black mob violence exists exponentially out of proportion.
That’s what the reporter for AP told me, anyway.
Or maybe Toure, the Attorney General and the President have it wrong: Cops were ready for anything at all of the 100 protests post-Trayvon. They stopped what Toure and his ilk thought was so justified: Outrage and violence at an outrageous verdict.
So you make the call: Cops stopped riots. Or riot preparation is just another example of the over-policing that fills prisons with disproportionate amounts of black people.
Easy enough to settle. Call Indy. Call Miami Beach. Ask the Mayors they plan on going cop-less next year.
Let me know.
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These are just some of the hundreds of examples of racial violence and lawlessness in more than 80 cities around the country as documented in my book: White Girl Bleed a Lot: The return of racial violence to America.
Thomas Sowell said : ”Reading Colin Flaherty’s book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of this problem is greater than I had discovered from my own research. He documents both the race riots and the media and political evasions in dozens of cities.” – National Review.
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