When Will Activists (and the Media) Get Honest About Police Shootings?
30th April 2021
Minutes before Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts of murder and manslaughter, Ma’Khia Bryant, a black teenage girl in Columbus, Ohio, was shot dead by police. Almost immediately, enraged protestors gathered outside police headquarters. “Say Her Name!” they chanted. The New York Times reported that the girl’s grieving mother, Paula Bryant, had told WBNS that her daughter was “a very loving, peaceful little girl.”
In an attempt to correct a tendentious version of events immediately promoted by civil rights attorney Ben Crump (and uncritically repeated by the Times) in which the young victim was described as unarmed, the Columbus police department took the unusual step of releasing the officer’s body-worn camera video the same day. During a briefing at which the footage was exhibited for the press, police played the video twice, the second time in slow motion—because events on the ground escalated with such rapidity that it’s the only way to follow what happened.
The police officer gets out of his squad car and approaches a group of people milling about in the driveway in front of a suburban home. Amid much yelling and cross-talk, Bryant suddenly lunges at a girl, knocking her to the ground, before turning on another dressed in pink and charging at her with a knife in her fist. The officer’s repeated shouts of “Get down!” are ignored and he shoots Bryant four times as she swings the blade at her intended victim. Only 10 seconds elapse between the moment the officer first asks “What’s goin’ on?” as he approaches the scene and the fourth shot. The shooting required split-second decision-making to save the girl in pink from being stabbed.
I’m thinking never.