By Steve Pomper
I say it repeatedly. There is not another job more second-guessed than law enforcement officer (well, maybe NFL coach). There is no other occupation where more people not trained to do the job believe they know how to do it better than those who are trained.
A tragic event happened recently in Seattle but it’s one that should not be controversial. According to KING 5 News, on Tuesday, February 9th, 2021, at around 9:15 p.m., near the Northwest African American Museum, a man shot two women. He killed one woman; the other is expected to recover.
On video, the suspect can be seen walking away from the women’s car. Then, when he saw the police, he immediately opened fire at them. Officers returned fire, striking the suspect who later died. Though police have not released the suspect’s name, images of makeshift memorials identified the suspect as Greg Taylor.
Now, cop-haters are free to fabricate all the impropriety against the cops they want. However, video evidence tells the tragic tale. But even video matters little to cop-haters. They don’t care that as they arrived the officers heard the shots that likely struck those poor women. Then the officers ran toward those shots to save strangers.
Assistant Police Chief Deanna Nollette reported police located the two female shooting victims in a car in a parking lot. Both were transported to Harborview Medical Center. One died en route, and the other victim is reported in satisfactory condition.
Despite non-police video showing the suspect shooting into the car the women were sitting in, police video showing the suspect shooting at arriving officers who had only seconds to react, and despite one of those women dying, the usual leftist haters have come out against the police. They’re blanketing the cops with their typical threadbare tapestry of brutality and genocide accusations.
Q13 Fox News reported, “The shootings has… activists planning to protest the officers’ use of force.” These folks now negatively react to any police use of force, even to save their lives. These people are detached from reality. They’ve replaced the real world with an ideological fantasy world.
Jason Rantz, a radio talk show host at KTTH 770, recently wrote about this incident. I’ll let him begin. “Seattle activists are livid that police shot and killed a suspected murderer after he shot at them. Why? Because the suspect is Black, and ‘ACAB’ of course. This must be a wake-up call to the city: Stop listening to these activists. They are tearing this city apart.” He’s spot on.
Rantz asks, “What should police have done instead?” People have suggested “rubber bullets” or “de-escalation tactics.” I’ll ask, when did the cops have time for a reasonable alternative? The suspect shot at them the instant he saw they were police. Rantz points out one activist berated the police because they were too hurried and should have paused to plan. I can just imagine the criticism if the officers had “taken their time” to respond to two black women being attacked by an armed man.
Think the suspect might have killed another person, if the police hadn’t acted so quickly? Shouldn’t that be a key consideration? Or should the neat little giftwrapped-with-a-bow-on-top fantasy of how perfectly things would have gone if only they’d have handled it prevail?
Rantz also wrote, “That radical, anti-police activists are upset the police shot a murderer should be a wake-up call that they need to be ignored, rather than given any power. In Seattle, however, they will not be ignored. They will still be given power.” So sad; so true.
The talk show host then mentions a person that Dan Bongino would place in a category he calls, “smart stupid people.” Educated people who act stupidly—a lot. Consider an activist who tweeted, “No form of police violence is acceptable or warranted. They [police] practice great restraint until it involves Black & Indigenous lives. This is an extrajudicial killing. This is state sanctioned violence.” This is gross stupidity. She’s a lawyer, so she knows this vile garbage is not true.
Gator-Aid Fairly tweeted, “The [anti-cop] march location has moved and this has been a confusing day but this is the final rally point. SPD should not be executioners and we won’t let them forget it. Greg Taylor deserved due process.” Officers “executed” someone who was actively shooting at them? This is delusional. But the script was already written, so….
Others are even criticizing the police for “shooting a black man, at an African-American museum, and during Black History Month.” Hey! It was the armed black man who allegedly shot two black women, one died, who put this dreadful murder into motion. That suspect chose the day, month, and place to commit violence. The cops chose only to stop him from shooting and killing more people.
Think about the profound lack of critical thinking displayed in the tweets Rantz quotes.
Seattle Revolutionary Flower Fairy tweeted, “After what we saw last night, it’s weird to wake up today and see the world continue as normal and no one really be talking about Greg Taylor. Thinking of all the families who lost loved ones to cops and the world just went on not caring or doing anything.” This is unhinged.
The only thing appropriate about two of these tweets are the Twitter account names: they both employ the term fairy. Appropriate because these folks are spinning fairytales. These appellations also show how unserious these they are. Their narrative must persist, gallantly swashbuckling through and past an abundance of facts and truth to assure the lie survives.
The charming Youth Liberation Front Seattle Division (a delightfully communist name) dutifully tweeted, “SPD murdered someone last night, an action against police violence is taking place tomorrow night at Seattle central [college] #seattleprotests #seattleprotestcomms.”
These youth have learned well from their identity politics, equity elders’ radical incantations which set an alchemy in motion that miraculously transforms one thing into its opposite—sanity into insanity. Rantz concludes, “Instead of a vigil for the actual victim, the murdered woman, activists Wednesday night marched with their traditional chants of ‘ACAB,’ shouting ‘say his name’ for the suspected murderer. How utterly disgraceful. How sadly predictable.”
Here’s another video of a unavoidable shooting that shows just how reluctant cops are to kill any person. Listen to and watch the interaction on video between the officers and the suspect. And, though the suspect is later determined to have been unarmed, watch how fast he brings his hand forward in a “finger gun” gesture, which he points at the police. Put yourself in that situation. Would you bet your life, after the suspect has told you repeatedly, he has a gun behind his back, that it was not a gun?
I’ll conclude with an idea raised by another KTTH Radio host, Todd Herman. This is not verbatim, but Herman recently addressed the radicals’ reaction to this murder. I gleaned this from his commentary. The radicals’ tweets, including from that lawyer, is evidence of having suffered emotional trauma brought on by prolonged immersion in a toxic political ideology.
The cop-haters’ trauma is evinced by comments clearly not based on the reality of those dynamic, violent situations. They apparently believe those officers should have… what? Allowed the suspect to shoot them (bad plan). Speaking of plans, should they have stopped to make a plan, so the suspect could have time to shoot and kill more people? Oh, I know. Perhaps the cops should have sprinkled fairy dust on the suspect to make him surrender peacefully. That, appears to be closer to their reality.