Black lives always matter. But in the eyes of the Left, and the sentencing reform crowd (Left and Right), there is a different slant. Black lives matter when the police can be targeted for their loss, but they do not matter when they are lost because of retroactive sentencing reduction that sets the killer loose. The movement to reduce legally imposed sentences for felony-level drug trafficking is so important that, if black people get murdered in the rush -- well, hey, ya know, stuff happens.
That's a strong statement, I understand. But the reaction to the Ferguson shooting of a black man, when compared to the reaction to the murders of three black people -- an adult woman and two children in Columbus, Ohio by a drug trafficker who was out on early release -- leaves room for no other conclusion.
It's hardly necessary to recount the Ferguson incident. A small-time thief, 18 year-old Michael Brown, a black man, was killed in self defense by white police officer Darren Wilson after Brown and Wilson had scuffled and Brown was advancing on Wilson. Forensic evidence examined independently by state and federal grand juries showed that, contrary to the once (and current) slogan, Brown did not have his hands up in surrender. Wilson's innocence of wrongdoing was so oppressively clear that Barack Obama's Justice Department vindicated him, finding that there was not even probable cause, much less proof beyond a reasonable doubt, to believe that Wilson had committed any criminal conduct at all.
Ferguson and "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" nonetheless became a huge national movement largely aimed to smear police from coast to coast as racist thugs. That point was sometimes put more gently and sometimes more bluntly, but that was the narrative. To think otherwise is to have lived in a cave for the last year and a half.
Ferguson, more than anything else, gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Now enter the murders of three black people in Columbus, Ohio by long-time drug dealer Wendell Callahan. I blogged about this horrifying case here. Without a retroactive application of reductions in his federal sentence, Callahan would have been in prison on the day he butchered these three completely innocent black people. Reduced sentencing was a direct but-for cause of the murders.
The murders were sufficiently grotesque that, as the NY Daily New reports:
The carnage was so gruesome that responding officers are being offered counseling,..Hours before she was killed, Hammonds, who frequently posted on social media about looking towards the future, shared a "Lessons Learned in Life" meme on Facebook.
"No matter how good or bad your life is," it reads, "wake up each morning and be thankful that you still have one."
Only now she doesn't have one, thanks to Wendell Callahan's reduced sentence.
Now here's the question: Where's the outrage?
Three black people were butchered because of the joint decision of a number of government actors that the killer would be prematurely released from prison, thus enabled. Those actors include Congress, which passed the retroactive sentencing reduction bill; the Sentencing Commission, which promulgated the new, watered-down sentences; the public defender, who told a judge that Callahan did not represent a danger to the community; the United States Attorney's Office, which (the Columbus Dispatch reported) concurred in the release; and the judge, who allowed the new, lower sentence and thus set Callahan free to do his work.
Has any of those people expressed regret?
Did they attend the funerals of the dead?
Send a card?
And where is our outrage toward any of these enablers?
The answer is that it does not exist. Indeed, the Callahan early release/murder story has received barely any coverage I can findbeyond Columbus (although I did see the NY Daily News piece), and half of even this tiny amount of reporting omits the critical point that Callahan was able to commit these murders only because his drug sentence had been cut.
The bottom line is this: Black lives matter to the liberal media and sentencing reformers when they are taken in justified though tragic self defense by a policeman whose career is then ruined. They do not matter when they are taken because, as a result of the successful advocacy of the movement for federal sentence reduction, a violent drug trafficker is put back on the street before he otherwise would have been.
The even shorter bottom line is this: Black lives matter when convenient to the ideology of the elite, and not otherwise.
Police kill about 400 people a year (mostly criminals & some innocents). Of those about 25% (~100) are black. Most of the rest (~300) are whites
& hispanics. NOW in contrast, about 8,000 (EIGHT THOUSAND) blacks are killed by OTHER blacks every year.
In other words, for every 1 (one) black killed by a white cop each year (many of whom were committing a crime while killed) 71 (seventy one) blacks were murdered by other BLACKS. In the past 35 years about 323,000 (yes that's THOUSANDS) blacks have been murdered by other blacks. Over 9,000 per year on average.
The logical & factual conclusion (rather than insane, hysterical, emotional ranting) is that as a black person, you are FAR safer in the company of a white cop than you are in the company of another black person.
Therefore, if you are going to mobilize MILLIONS of people against the LEO killings and NOT the black on black killings (as the BLM group is doing) at MOST you will save about 50 black lives a year. If you take
that energy instead to convince BLACKS, that black lives matter (should be easier than convincing the so called racist, white police right?) you could save THOUSANDS of black lives per year instead. Which one is a SANE person going to do?
BTW, of the approximately 1 MILLION violent crimes committed in the USA each year, 85% are committed by blacks and only 25% by whites. Even though blacks only make up about 14% of the population.
Police kill about 400 people a year (mostly criminals & some innocents). Of those about 25% (~100) are black. Most of the rest (~300) are whites
& hispanics. NOW in contrast, about 8,000 (EIGHT THOUSAND) blacks are killed by OTHER blacks every year.
In other words, for every 1 (one) black killed by a white cop each year (many of whom were committing a crime while killed) 71 (seventy one) blacks were murdered by other BLACKS. In the past 35 years about 323,000 (yes that's THOUSANDS) blacks have been murdered by other blacks. Over 9,000 per year on average.
The logical & factual conclusion (rather than insane, hysterical, emotional ranting) is that as a black person, you are FAR safer in the company of a white cop than you are in the company of another black person.
Therefore, if you are going to mobilize MILLIONS of people against the LEO killings and NOT the black on black killings (as the BLM group is doing) at MOST you will save about 50 black lives a year. If you take
that energy instead to convince BLACKS, that black lives matter (should be easier than convincing the so called racist, white police right?) you could save THOUSANDS of black lives per year instead. Which one is a SANE person going to do?
BTW, of the approximately 1 MILLION violent crimes committed in the USA each year, 85% are committed by blacks and only 25% by whites. Even though blacks only make up about 14% of the population.