One of the things the left does that drives me up a wall is that they blame the victim for what happens to them. Even after 9/11, the US State Department, at the urging of many groups (such as CAIR, a fine organization), had a little get-together in which they discussed what we did to make the poor oppressed men who blew 3,000 of our citizens into dust do what they did.
As much as it drives me crazy when they do it, however, I think I’m gonna have to borrow a play from their playbook here.
The police in London screwed up. Before I say anything else, I’m going to get that out of the way. I don’t think that killing an unarmed man wrongly is something to be taken lightly, glossed over, or forgotten. When you make the decision to pull the trigger, there are consequences if you do so incorrectly. As human beings we all need to examine our biases and such.
But there’s one question I have to ask that I have not seen one major news outlet ask yet (and I’m open to indications that somebody did). I’ve read the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the New York Post, lots of online resources (AP and Reuters mostly), The Financial Times, and watched CNN and Fox.
No one asked a very simple question.
The AP had the following opening on a story on their newswire yesterday afternoon:
SAO PAULO, Brazil – Brazil’s government demanded an explanation Saturday for the fatal police shooting of Brazilian citizen on a London subway car. London police initially said the man chased down and shot to death by plainclothes officers was tied to the recent terror bombings, but conceded Saturday that they no longer believed that was the case.
The Brazilian government said the man, identified by British authorities as 27-year-old Jean Charles de Menezes, was “apparently the victim of a lamentable mistake.”
“The government expects the British authorities to explain the circumstances that led to this tragedy,” the statement said.
He was chased down.
Now ponder for a moment, the wisdom in running from the police in London on that particular day. They tell you to stop. They have guns drawn. Your first instinct is to run? Reminds me of the Amadou Diallo case, in a way. An immigrant, when told, in a really bad neighborhood, to put his hands in the air, kept reaching into his pocket despite repeated warnings not to do so. When he finally pulled his wallet out, he was shot multiple times until he hit the ground.
The tragic part of that case was that Diallo didn’t speak English.
The man, in London, however, had no such excuse:
“He spoke English very well, and had permission to study and work there,” Menezes’ cousin Maria Alves told the O Globo Online Web site from her home in Sao Paulo.
So he spoke English “very well” and yet his first instinct in a jittery city that had just been rocked by two sets of bomb explosions is to run?
The more I repeat it, the more absurd it sounds. His running away, in my opinion, is suspicious behavior, the likes of which would cause you to be shot, particularly if you decide, while running from the police, to do so into a subway car during morning rush. I almost hate to say it, but if the police are pursuing a man that runs into a subway car, in London, in the context of what had happened in the past two weeks, I’d fire any officer that didn’t shoot him and do so to kill.
All this guy had to do to save his own life was stop.
In this case, I’d have to say most of the responsibility for this man’s death lies in his grave with him.