OPINION:
The crime in Atlanta’s latest racial explosion is that city authorities with hair-trigger quickness fired Officer Garrett Rolfe for shooting Rayshard Brooks in the back.
Mr. Brooks, 27, while resisting arrest had assaulted Officer Rolfe and Officer Devin Brosnan.
Mr. Brooks then fled, turning only to fire at Officer Rolfe with a stun gun wrestled from the officer moments earlier. Mr. Brooks later died of his wounds.
If you were in Officer Rolfe’s shoes, you may have let Mr. Brooks get away, with your stun gun in his hand.
You may have said, “Hey, man, you win — have a nice rest of the night.”
You may have been willing to tell your supervisor that you let Mr. Books not only evade arrest but do so with an Atlanta police department’s stun gun to which you had been entrusted.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Only a Taser. Delivers a mere electric shock?”
Wrong. Cops receive training in the use of Tasers, which can be deadly in unpracticed hands. Even when trained policemen pull a stun-gun trigger, things can go haywire.
“More than 1,000 people in the U.S. have died after police stunned them with Tasers, and the stun gun was ruled to be a cause or contributing factor in 153 of those deaths,” a 2017 Reuters examination found.
Again, if you were that Atlanta cop, you may have stood down after trying but failing to arrest a drunken Mr. Brooks.
You got the call because he was asleep behind the wheel of a rented car in a Wendy’s fast-food drive-thru line. He was blocking other patrons.
Mr. Brooks was so drunk (and for all you knew possibly high on something else) that he kept falling asleep when you tried to talk to him.
Remember, in this hypothetical, you’re dealing with a man who just failed a sobriety test. On questioning, he insisted he was in some other town than Atlanta and in a Wendy’s on a highway nowhere near the restaurant.
Or maybe you would not have let him get away from you.
You are, after all, a police officer who can’t be sure what this guy is up to or what else he has on his person besides your stun gun.
And if he stuns you and your partner, he can grab your service pistols. And then what?
Videos show that both police officers were consistently respectful and exceedingly polite to the mostly incoherent Mr. Brooks, who in turn addressed the two officers as “sir.”
That changed when he failed the blood-alcohol test and the officers attempted to cuff his wrists.
In a heartbeat, Mr. Brooks turned into an astonishingly athletic, physically powerful Mr. Hyde, a Wendy’s video clearly shows.
He pulled both officers to the ground, thoroughly manhandled them, struggled free and ran.
Some feat for a nodding-off drunk. But there you have it on the video.
If you were Officer Rolfe, would you be saying to yourself, “What the hell, let him go. It’s not worth it”?
Maybe. What did happen hours after the shooting is that Atlanta authorities felt their knees buckle, a not unusual experience for them.
They feared if they didn’t act with prejudice against the Caucasian law enforcers, they’d face rioting, arson, looting and all the other accouterments of today’s racially inspired peaceful protests.
So they acted against the officers (they put Officer Brosnan on administrative assignment).
They got racial unrest and the torching of Wendy’s in return from the usual confederacy of slogan-shouting, pious, peaceful protesters, thugs, arsonists and rioters.
Yes, really bad cops exist, the bullies you knew in high school who now are in uniform. Plus assorted sadists and race haters with badges who are best suited to spending their lives inside bars — the vertical kind.
And yes, we have to find a way right now to shatter for good the cops’ code of silence about bad apples within their ranks. More and better internal policing of police forces is doable.
Better that taxpayers money goes to that than to more “social services” that serve the grievance industry.
As you watch the Atlanta videos, you may have a thought from your own experience and from that of your family and friends.
It’s that way fewer bad cops exist than bad guys who would ruin your life and livelihood but for the good guys with badges and guns.
The problem is that a portion of Americans of African descent have come to consider the crime of resisting arrest and assaulting police officers as cool and even expected behavior.
That’s the case for some in America’s under-educated, crime-prone underclass.
In 2015, more than three-fourths or 77 percent of the births of Americans of African heritage were to unwed mothers.
They are mostly little girls with as little education in morality as the little girls who a few years earlier were their unwed mothers.
For Caucasians, the birth rate to unwed mothers was 30 percent, which may or may not account for the disparity in violent crime, arrest and incarceration rates and for stereotypes.
So now what?
Look for Americans with influence and courage to speak up, buck the grievance industry and get the public behind changing our law-enforcement expectations to include making resisting arrest no longer fashionable.
That will happen when the risk is greater than the reward and before all of America goes up in flames.
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