Minnesota’s attorney general needs to pay attention to the available evidence, which in this case is incontrovertible.

By George Parry – for The American Spectator – Aug 6, 2020

My cmnt: This article fills in a LOT of detail about George Floyd’s death. When the truth is shown the jury in this case and they acquit the officers of murder charges will we have mass riots again like after the Rodney King acquittal of those innocent officers? I have included three columns below this one from the brilliant Ann Coulter reminding everyone of the FACTS about the cases involving Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and others. The democrats and the establishment media rush to judgment and are often wrong and cause incredible destruction of lives and property by misreporting on so many things involving race.

In the death of George Floyd, the State of Minnesota has charged former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin with second-degree murder and former officers Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao with aiding and abetting that murder. But, as will be shown in detail below, the physical, scientific, and electronically recorded evidence in the case overwhelmingly and conclusively proves that these defendants are not guilty of the charges and, in fact, played no material role in bringing about Floyd’s death.

Instead, the evidence proves that, when he first encountered the police, George Floyd was well on his way to dying from a self-administered drug overdose. Moreover, far from publicly, brazenly, and against their own self-interest slowly and sadistically killing Floyd in broad daylight before civilian witnesses with video cameras, the evidence proves that the defendants exhibited concern for Floyd’s condition and twice called for emergency medical services to render aid to him. Strange behavior, indeed, for supposedly brutal law officers allegedly intent on causing him harm.

Similarly, the evidence recorded by the body cameras worn by the police conclusively establishes that Floyd repeatedly complained that he couldn’t breathe before the police restrained him on the ground. As documented by Floyd’s autopsy and toxicology reports, his breathing difficulty was caused not by a knee on his neck or pressure on his back, but by the fact that he had in his bloodstream over three times the potentially lethal limit of fentanyl, a powerful and dangerous pain medication known to shut down the respiratory system and cause coma and death. He also had in his system a lesser dose of methamphetamine, which can cause paranoia, respiratory distress, coma, and death.

Beyond those findings, his autopsy disclosed no physical injuries that could in any way account for his demise.

The transcript of the video footage from the camera worn by Officer Thomas Lane combined with the transcript of the video from Officer Alexander Kueng’s camera lay out on a second-by-second basis all that transpired in their presence from the time they arrived on the scene through Lane’s ambulance trip with Floyd to the hospital.

Upon their arrival, Lane and Kueng were told by a person identified as “Speaker 1” that a man in the “blue [Mercedes] Benz” parked in front of “Cup Foods” had passed “a fake [$20] bill.” As the officers approached the car, they observed concerning movements in the front seat by the person later identified as Floyd.

Lane drew his sidearm and ordered Floyd approximately seven times to show his hands. Once Floyd finally placed his hands on the steering wheel, Lane holstered his weapon. Nevertheless, Floyd continued to plead with Lane not to shoot him despite Lane’s repeated assurances that he was not going to shoot.

After he exited the car, Floyd was non-compliant and continued to resist and move about until he was handcuffed and seated on the sidewalk.

Lane and Kueng questioned Floyd and the other two occupants of the car concerning Floyd’s behavior and whether he might be under the influence of drugs.

As the officers tried to move Floyd to a police car, the following exchange occurred:

Lane to Floyd: What, are you on something right now?

Floyd: No, nothing.

Kueng: Because you are acting a little erratic.

Lane: Let’s go. Let’s go.

Floyd: I’m scared, man.

Lane: Let’s go.

Kueng: You got foam around your mouth, too?

Floyd: Yes, I was just hooping earlier.

Lane: Let’s go.

Floyd: Man, all right let me calm down now. I’m feeling better now.

Lane: Keep walking.

Floyd: Can you do me one favor, man?

Lane: No, when we get to the car. Let’s get to the car, man, come on.

Kueng: Stop moving around.

Floyd: Oh man, God don’t leave me man. Please man, please man.

Lane to Kueng: Here. I want to watch that car [the blue Mercedes Benz] too, so just get him in [the police car].

Kueng to Floyd: Stand up, stop falling down! Stay on your feet and face the car door!

Floyd: I’m claustrophobic man, please man, please.

Later in the video transcripts are these exchanges:

Floyd: Please, man. Don’t leave me by myself man, I’m just claustrophobic, that’s it.

Lane: Well, you’re still going in the [police] car.

***

Kueng to Floyd: Why are you having trouble walking?

Floyd: Because officer [inaudible]

Lane: I’ll roll the windows down, okay?

***

Kueng to Floyd at the door to the squad car: Take a seat!

Floyd: Y’all I’m going to die in here! I’m going to die, man!

Kueng: You need to take a seat right now!

Floyd: And I just had COVID man, I don’t want to go back to that.

Lane: Okay, I’ll roll the windows down. Hey, listen!

Floyd: Dang, man.

Lane: Listen!

Floyd: I’m not that kind of guy.

Lane: I’ll roll the windows down if you put your legs in [the squad car] all right? I’ll put the air on.

***

Speaker 9 [civilian] to Floyd: Quit resisting bro.

Floyd: I don’t want to win. I’m claustrophobic, and I got anxiety, I don’t want to do nothing to them!

Lane: I’ll roll the window down.

Floyd: I’m scared as fuck man.

Speaker 9: That’s okay [inaudible]

Floyd: [inaudible] when I start breathing it’s going to go off on me, man.

Lane: Pull your legs in.

Floyd: Okay, okay, let me count to three and then I’m going in please.

Speaker 9: You can’t win!

As the officers continued their efforts to get Floyd into the police car, he continued to resist and repeatedly insisted that he was “claustrophobic.” Floyd hit his head on the car’s window 

and suffered a minor cut. Consequently, the police placed a “Code 2” call for Emergency Medical Services to tend to the wound.

And then, after Kueng told him once again to “take a seat” in the squad car, Floyd announced, “I can’t choke, I can’t breathe Mr. Officer! Please! Please!”

And then, this was said:

Floyd: I want to lay on the ground. I want to lay on the ground. I want to lay on the ground!

Lane: You’re getting in the squad [car].

Floyd: I want to lay on the ground! I’m going down, I’m going down, I’m going down.

Kueng: Take a squat (sic).

Floyd: I’m going down.

Speaker 9: Bro, you about to have a heart attack and shit man, get in the car!

Floyd: I know I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. [crosstalk]

Lane: Get him on the ground.

Floyd: Let go of me man, I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

Lane: Take a seat.

Floyd: Please man listen to me.

Officer Chauvin: Is he going to jail?

Floyd: Please listen to me.

Kueng: He’s under arrest right now for forgery. [inaudible] what’s going on.

Floyd: Forgery for what? For what?

Lane: Let’s take him out [of the squad car] and just MRT [Maximal Restraint Technique by which a suspect’s feet are “hobbled” to his waist].

Floyd: I can’t fucking breathe man. I can’t fucking breathe.

Kueng: Here. Come on out [of the squad car]!

Floyd: [inaudible] Thank you. Thank you.

Officer Thao: Just lay him on the ground.

Let’s hit the pause button and consider the evidence so far. Floyd was incoherent, acting erratically, non-compliant, and foaming at the mouth. He was having trouble walking and standing up. He wanted to lie on the ground. But, while still upright, he complained three times that he was “claustrophobic,” seven times that he “can’t breathe,” and twice that he was “going to die.” And Speaker 9 exclaimed that Floyd looked like he was about to have a “heart attack.”

All of this happened before he was on the ground and immobilized by the police. Nevertheless, as he continued to resist and behave irrationally, his condition deteriorated and his complaints of being unable to breathe increased in frequency even though no one was applying force of any kind to his neck or compressing his back or chest.

After Floyd was on the ground, he continued to move about and say that he couldn’t breathe. Lane was near Floyd’s feet, Kueng at the middle of Floyd’s body, and Chauvin at his back and head with his knee on Floyd’s neck.

Thao: Is he high on something?

Kueng: I’m assuming so, we found a pipe.

Lane: He wouldn’t get out of the car. He wasn’t following instructions. [crosstalk] …

Floyd: Please, I can’t breathe. Please man. Please man!

Thao: Do you have EMS [Emergency Medical Services] coming code 3?

Lane: Ah code 2, we can probably step it up then. You got it? [crosstalk]

Floyd: Please, man!

Thao: Relax!

Floyd: I can’t breathe.

Kueng: You’re fine, you’re talking fine.

Lane: Your talken (sic), Deep breath.

Floyd: I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Ah! I’ll probably just die this way.

Thao: Relax.

Floyd: I can’t breathe my face.

Lane: He’s got to be on something.

Thao: What are you on?

Floyd: I can’t breathe. Please, [inaudible] I can’t breathe. Shit.

Speaker 9: Well get up and get in the car, man. Get up and get in the car.

Floyd: I will. I can’t move.

Speaker 9: Let him get in the car.

Lane: We found a weed pipe on him, there might be something else, there might be like PCP or something. Is that shaking of the eyes right is PCP?

Floyd: My knees, my neck.

Lane: Where their eyes like shake back and forth really fast?

Floyd: I’m through, I’m through. I’m claustrophobic. My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts. I need some water or something, please. Please? I can’t breathe officer.

Chauvin: Then stop talking, stop yelling.

Floyd: You’re going to kill me, man.

Chauvin: Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.

Floyd: Come on, man. Oh, oh. [crosstalk] I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. Ah! They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Oh!

Speaker 8: We tried that for 10 minutes.

Floyd: Ah! Ah! Please. Please. Please.

Lane: Should we roll him on his side?

Chauvin: No, he’s staying put where we got him.

Lane:Okay. I just worry about the excited delirium or whatever.

Chauvin:That’s why we got the ambulance coming.

As Floyd continued to shout that he couldn’t breathe and called for his mother, a radio transmission was recorded saying that the ambulance was approximately four blocks away. When it arrived, Lane got in the ambulance and helped to give Floyd CPR on the way to the hospital.

Before we discuss further what happened at the scene, let’s take a look at Floyd’s 20-page autopsy and toxicology report.

The autopsy report by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office is titled “CARDIOPULMONARY ARREST COMPLICATING LAW ENFORCEMENT SUBDUAL, RESTRAINT, AND NECK COMPRESSION.” Strangely enough, the report, which thoroughly sets forth in detail all physical and toxicological findings, makes no other mention of the purported cause of death. In fact, the first iteration of the report didn’t even mention “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression,” and the criminal complaint filed by prosecutors stated that the autopsy “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.”

Moreover, prior to issuing the autopsy report, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner preliminarily found that the “autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.”  (Emphasis added.)

These preliminary findings by the Medical Examiner were incorporated in the Statement of Probable Cause attached to the arrest warrant for Officer Chauvin, which was filed on May 29, 2020. This date is significant because, as you will see, neither the Medical Examiner nor the prosecutors had yet received Floyd’s toxicology report. That report was issued by NMS Labs of Horsham, Pennsylvania, on May 31, 2020.

In short, Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder (later raised to second-degree murder by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison) without the benefit of a complete and competent investigation of all the relevant facts and circumstances of Floyd’s death.

Apparently dissatisfied with the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s findings, the Floyd’s family attorney had a re-autopsy performed by Dr. Michael Baden*, the former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, and Dr. Allecia Wilson of the University of Michigan.

In announcing the re-autopsy findings, Dr. Wilson stated that she and Dr. Baden “have seen accounts from the complaint and based on that, yes our findings do differ [from those of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner]. Some of the information that I read from that complaint states that there was no evidence of traumatic asphyxia. This is the point in which we do disagree. There is evidence in this case of mechanical or traumatic asphyxia.”

However, Dr. Wilson conceded that they did not have access to toxicology results, tissue samples, or some organs, but added that those items “are not likely to change” the results of the re-autopsy.

The re-autopsy concluded that, even without physical evidence of traumatic asphyxia, such as broken bones in the neck, the compression on Floyd’s neck and chest still caused his death by depriving his brain of blood and oxygen and his lungs of air. Dr. Baden stated that the pressure was not visibly supported by autopsy because the pressure applied by the police had been released by the time the body was examined. Noting that “the video is real,” Dr. Baden added that the abrasions on the left side of Floyd’s face and shoulder showed how hard police had pressed him against the pavement. Dr. Wilson also referenced this “physical evidence that there was pressure applied to his [Floyd’s] neck.”

After Drs. Baden and Wilson concluded that Floyd’s death was “a homicide due to the way he was being subdued,” the Hennepin County Medical Examiner then amended his report to include the reference to “complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.”

With all due respect to Drs. Baden and Wilson, however, they rendered their opinion as to the cause of death without, by their own admission, having considered the results of Floyd’s toxicology screen. If they had, they would have seen that, at the time of death, Floyd was under the influence of a lethal overdose of fentanyl, which, according to the toxicology report, is a rapid-acting synthetic morphine substitute “reported to be 80 to 200 times as potent as morphine,” as well as a lesser dose of methamphetamine, which can also cause convulsions, circulatory collapse, coma, and death.

But before we get to the details of Floyd’s tox screen, let’s consider the following autopsy findings by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner:

No life-threatening injuries identified

1. No facial, oral, mucosal, or conjunctival petechiae
2. No injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngeal structures
3. No scalp soft tissue, skull or brain injuries
4. No chest wall soft tissue injuries, rib fractures (other than a single rib fracture from CPR), vertebral column in juries, or visceral injuries
5. Incision and subcutaneous dissection of posterior and lateral neck, shoulders, back, flanks, and buttocks negative for occult trauma.

Some commentators have attached great importance to the finding of no “facial, oral or conjunctival petechiae,” which are small red or purple hemorrhages that can result from asphyxiation such as would occur if pressure was applied to block the flow of blood to the brain. However, while these petechiae can result when that happens, their absence does not necessarily prove that no such compression occurred.

Instead, the more pertinent question is whether Chauvin’s kneeling on one side of Floyd’s neck cut off the blood flow through both carotid arteries to his brain. The carotids are located on each side of the neck, and people can live with only one functioning carotid artery. This raises the question as to whether Chauvin’s direct application of pressure to only one side of Floyd’s neck cut off the carotid artery on the other side of his neck.

Moreover, in regard to Chauvin’s possible criminal intent or purported desire to harm Floyd, Minnesota police are trained to use a “neck restraint” technique, which is defined in the official training literature as “compressing one or both sides of a person’s neck with an arm or leg, without applying direct pressure to the trachea or airway (front of the neck).” The video of Chauvin kneeling on the side of Floyd’s neck appears in all respects to be a textbook application of this officially approved technique. Put another way, by the training that they had received, the police defendants would have no reason to believe that Chauvin’s kneeling on Floyd’s neck was either causing serious harm or anything other than the approved standard operating procedure.

We know from the video transcripts that Floyd, in addition to complaining about being unable to breathe while he was still upright, repeated that complaint for a matter of minutes while he was on the ground and being restrained by police. But Floyd remained conscious and complaining for several minutes. How can that be if Chauvin’s knee had cut off the flow of blood to Floyd’s brain? If the police had cut off the flow of blood and oxygen to Floyd’s brain, he would have lost consciousness within seconds, not minutes. (See Nichols, Larry, Law Enforcement Patrol Operations: Police Systems and Practices, McCutcheon Publishing Company, 1995.)

So why couldn’t Floyd breathe, and how did he die? The clear answers to those questions are to be found in his toxicology report, which overwhelmingly and unerringly supports the conclusion that Floyd’s breathing difficulties and death were the direct and undeniable result of his ingestion of fentanyl mixed with methamphetamine.

When Floyd arrived at the hospital, his blood was drawn. According to the toxicology report, postmortem testing of that blood established the presence of, among other drugs, “Fentanyl 11 ng/mL” (nanograms per milliter). In that regard, tucked away in the report’s “Reference Comments” is this: “Signs associated with fentanyl toxicity include severe respiratory depression, seizures, hypotension, coma and death. In fatalities from fentanyl, blood concentrations are variable and have been reported as low as 3 ng/mL.”

Got that? According to the toxicology report, which is central to the prosecution’s case, at 11 ng/mL, Floyd had over three times the potentially lethal 3 ng/mL dose of fentanyl in his bloodstream when he arrived unresponsive at the hospital.

Similarly, the toxicology report also disclosed the presence of methamphetamine, which it states is “capable of causing hallucinations, aggressive behavior and irrational reactions” as well as “restlessness, confusion, hallucinations, circulatory collapse and convulsions.”

Defense counsel should blow up those sections of the toxicology report to Mount Rushmore–size proportions, hang them on the courtroom wall, and read them every five minutes to the jury. They more than explain Floyd’s bizarre behavior, inability to stand, difficulty walking, and complaints about being unable to breathe while sitting, standing, and lying on the ground.

Moreover, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among the most common characteristics of a fentanyl overdose is “foaming at the mouth … and confusion or strange behavior before the person became unresponsive” (emphasis added). In short, Floyd’s foaming at the mouth, incoherence, physical incapacity, non-compliant behavior, breathing difficulty, and rapid downward spiral into unconsciousness and death are fully explained by the toxicological evidence that he had ingested a massively lethal overdose of fentanyl mixed with a smaller dose of similarly dangerous and debilitating methamphetamine. In other words, by the time he first encountered the police, Floyd had already rendered himself a dead man walking and was only minutes away from expiring.

So, who killed George Floyd? He did.

The only crime here has been the prosecution’s shockingly incompetent investigation of Floyd’s death. In charging and continuing to prosecute these defendants, Minnesota’s attorney general has failed to take into account the most important and material evidence in the case, i.e., the fact that Floyd’s inability to breathe started while he was still upright and mobile and the scientific proof that his death was the direct and inescapable result of a massively fatal overdose of a powerful and dangerous drug known to cause, in the words of the toxicology report, “severe respiratory depression, seizures, hypotension, coma and death.”

The proof of the defendants’ innocence is undeniable. But given the violence and rioting that has followed in the wake of Floyd’s death, will it be possible for these defendants to receive justice? In other words, will there be a judge or jury with enough integrity and courage to defy the mob and, in recognition of the clear and overwhelming exculpatory evidence, set these wrongfully accused men free.

________
* In the interests of full disclosure, I have known Dr. Baden for over 40 years. He has testified as an expert on behalf of my clients in a number of cases and is a person of great integrity, skill, charm, and learning.

George Parry is a former federal and state prosecutor. From 1978 to 1983 he was the Chief of the Police Brutality/Misconduct Unit of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, which investigated and prosecuted use of deadly force by police. He blogs at knowledgeisgood.net and may be reached by email at kignet1@gmail.com.

ON THE OTHER HAND, THERE’S RODNEY KING …

June 3, 2020 by Ann Coulter

Why is this case the one inciting mass protests? Ninety-nine percent of the country is denouncing the Minneapolis police in the most damnable terms possible over the death of George Floyd. The 99% are demanding that the 1% “hear their voices”?

The arrest certainly looks awful. Everything is going along relatively peacefully as Floyd is walked to a police van, then there’s some commotion out of sight of the camera –- and suddenly you see Floyd pinned to the ground, an officer’s knee on his neck. How did that happen?

One reason some of us are waiting for all the facts is that we suspect the media may not be extra scrupulous in cases that give them the opportunity to wail about “systemic racism.”

It turns out, for example, Floyd didn’t die of asphyxiation. According to the Hennepin County medical examiner’s report cited in the criminal complaint charging Officer Derek Chauvin with murder, he died of a heart attack. The autopsy also found Floyd had fentanyl in his system, had recently used methamphetamine, had coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. Two weeks ago, this would have been another COVID-19 death.

According to Nexis, these official autopsy findings have not been reported at all on MSNBC and only briefly — to be explained away — on CNN. (The family’s private autopsy concluding Floyd’s death was caused by strangulation has been widely reported.)

It could still be murder, but the “I can’t breathe” slogans aren’t quite accurate. Aw, they’ve already made their protest signs, and we’d have to re-do the chyrons — does it really matter?

There also hasn’t been loads of reporting on Floyd’s five years in prison for armed robbery. I know the guy has just died, and he seemed to have turned his life around, but the media isn’t holding a memorial service. They’re supposed to be reporting news. How about an interview with Floyd’s victims? Wouldn’t that be a newsy segment?

Again, according to Nexis, Floyd’s armed robbery conviction has been fleetingly mentioned only once on ABC News and once on Fox News.

The other reason some of us are waiting for all the facts can be summed up with two words: Rodney King.

That arrest looked pretty bad, too. The jury forewoman on the first trial said that when she saw the King video on television, “I was revulsed. … I thought they were hitting that poor man too hard and too long.”

But at the trial a year later, she got to see the 13 seconds of video that had been deliberately edited out by the media: the 6-foot-4, 240-pound King rising like a phoenix and charging at one of the officers.

The video that played on an endless loop on TV showed only the tail end of the encounter, when officers were whacking King with their batons.

In fact, however, the beating was the officers’ last resort for subduing King, who’d just led them on a high-speed car chase, at times reaching speeds of up to 115 mph, drawing several police cars and a police helicopter.

Once stopped, King’s two (black) passengers exited the car and got on the ground, as instructed. They went home without a scratch that night.

But King leapt out and began dancing and babbling, crouching, kneeling, laughing and waving to the police helicopter overhead. Both the officers and King’s passengers believed he was high on angel dust.

The senior officer, Sgt. Stacey Koon, ordered the officers to back away and holster their guns. He didn’t want to risk a fatal encounter.

Four officers tried swarming King — he threw them off his back like rag dolls. A dart from a Taser gun did nothing. Then another — also nothing. King lunged at an officer and got hit with a baton, but kept on raging. The police were running out of options that would allow everyone to stay alive.

That’s when three officers began hitting King with their metal batons, under the supervision of Sgt. Koon. If King moved, they whacked him. Finally, they managed to double-cuff him — the procedure for suspects on PCP — and put him in an ambulance to the hospital.

When Sgt. Koon first heard that the arrest had been captured on video, he was ecstatic. “This is great!” he said. “They got it on tape! Now we’ll have a live, in-the-field film to show police recruits. It can be a real-life example of how to use escalating force properly.”

Not only the jurors, but nearly everyone who saw the first trial ended up supporting the acquittal, including Roger Parloff, a liberal legal reporter who sat through most of the trial for the American Lawyer, and Lou Cannon, who covered it for The Washington Post. The renowned (black) economist Walter Williams was shocked by “the news media’s dereliction and deception” in their editing of the tape.

All this is detailed in my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, but at the time, the public knew none of it, thanks to our activist media.

The endlessly played Rodney King video hid the same part of Floyd’s arrest that’s being withheld today. Doesn’t anyone else wonder how Floyd ended up on the ground? Where are those videos?

Nah, it’s much easier — and cost-free! — to Speak Truth to the 1%.

COPYRIGHT 2020 ANN COULTER

No Facts, No Peace

by Ann Coulter August 20, 2014

It’s important to remember that, in police shooting cases like the one in Ferguson, Missouri, the initial facts are often wrong. You don’t want to end up looking like Rich Lowry, National Review editor, whose March 23, 2012, column on the Trayvon Martin shooting was titled, “Al Sharpton Is Right.”

Early accounts are especially unreliable when reporters think they have a white racism story. Stirring up racial hatred is how journalists make up for sending their own kids to lily-white private schools.

As detailed in my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, the old media’s standard for any police shooting of a black person is: “Racist until proved innocent.” We got three-alarm racism stories for the shootings of Jose (Kiko) Garcia, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart and Edmund Perry.

And then it turned out Garcia was a drugged-up coke dealer who pulled a gun on the cop, Bumpurs was a psychotic who came at the cops with a machete, Stewart fought the cops so violently he gave himself a heart attack, and Perry mugged an undercover cop.

Witness statements aren’t always 100 percent accurate. In Garcia’s case, innumerable neighbors gave the media florid accounts of Officer Michael O’Keefe beating and kicking Garcia, before repeatedly shooting the unarmed man in the back as he lay facedown on the floor. The Garcia family lawyer assured The New York Times that “this kid never was arrested; he wasn’t a drug dealer.”

It later turned out that Garcia was a convicted felon.

He had a gun the night of the shooting.

The autopsy proved he was not shot in the back, nor was he beaten.

The only eyewitnesses against Officer O’Keefe were drug dealers — for whom Garcia worked — who could not possibly have seen anything from their vantage point, as confirmed with a laser pointer used by the Garcia family lawyer.

The first headlines in the Edmund Perry case were:

The New York Post: “COP KILLS HARLEM HONOR STUDENT”

The New York Times: “HONOR STUDENT, 17, IS KILLED BY POLICEMAN ON WEST SIDE.”

The Los Angeles Times: “SAYS VICTIM ATTACKED HIM, MOTHER CHARGES RACISM: OFFICER KILLS TOP STUDENT, SETS OFF FUROR.”

Two dozen witnesses — many of them black — established that Perry had mugged the cop and was stomping on him when the officer shot him. Those witnesses were the heroes, not elite news anchors, who leave their doorman buildings to rail against “racism” from well-guarded studios or brief reporting forays to black neighborhoods.

Follow-up stories admitting that some sensational racist crime turned out to be false are never a high priority with the press.

After all the media’s hysteria about the Kiko Garcia shooting (New York Newsday: “COP SHOOTING VICTIM: HE WAS SHOT IN THE BACK”) the story just faded away.

That incident provoked riots that resulted in one person dead, 90 injured, 53 policemen hospitalized, 121 vehicles torched, 11 police cars damaged, and dozens of businesses burned or looted. But when the early accounts turned out to be lies, the media whispered the ending and tiptoed out of the room, as if reading a bedtime story to a child.

The old media just love creating huge racist hoaxes — which has done so much to improve the lives of ordinary black people!

Luckily for America, especially African-Americans, the advent of alternative media has reduced the Non-Fox Media’s ability to stir up urban riots. Today, it’s possible to get information that never would have seen the light of day in the 1980s.

In less than two weeks, the original version of the racist police execution of Michael Brown — or “Big Mike” — has already undergone major revisions. We were told:

— Big Mike was the sweetest kid, he’d never hurt a flea.

Then we got the store surveillance video of him robbing a liquor store and manhandling the clerk. Perhaps Big Mike committed his first-ever crime 11 minutes before his encounter with Officer Darren Wilson, but it doesn’t look good.

— He was shot in the back.

At least two autopsies now establish Big Mike was not shot in the back.

— He didn’t touch the police officer.

This week, we saw the X-ray of Officer Wilson’s fractured eye socket.

— He was holding his arms up surrendering when Officer Wilson shot him.

That’s at least in doubt now that a video of a Big Mike supporter has emerged, capturing the private conversation of an eyewitness confirming the officer’s claim that Big Mike was running at him.

On the tape, one black man tells another:

“Him and the police was both in the truck, then he ran — the police got out and ran after him … Then the next thing I know he comes back toward the truck ’cause — the police had his gun drawn already on him. The police kept dumping on him, and I’m thinking that the police missing … but he kept coming toward him.”

Some would say a private conversation, unintentionally recorded immediately after an event, is more credible than alleged eyewitness accounts by people who know they’re talking to the press.

But if MSNBC can spend six months on a bridge closure in Fort Lee, New Jersey, they can probably do at least a year on a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

COPYRIGHT 2014 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK

It’s Super-media! With The Power To Detect Non-existent Racism

August 28, 2013 by Ann Coulter

The media’s fixation on the Trayvon Martin case, while ignoring much more brutal crimes with clearer racial motivations, is a return to pre-O.J. America.

The thesis of my book, “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama” — out in paperback this week! — is that after decades of liberals play-acting Racist America, wherein they cast themselves as civil rights champions, and other, random white people as Bull Connor (a Democrat), it all ended with the O.J. verdict.

That’s when white America said, That’s it. The white guilt bank is shut down. It was one of the best things that ever happened to America — especially for black people.

But then in 2007, Barack Obama brought it all back. In order to immunize the most left-wing presidential candidate the nation has ever seen, the Non-Fox Media went into overdrive reporting their fantasies of an America full of racists, constantly terrorizing innocent blacks.

Of course, once Republicans got the Democrats to stop terrorizing black people, there was no one else doing it. Nonetheless, for decades, the media would highlight every apparent white-on-black crime, treating each such incident as the Crime of the Century.

White-on-black crimes were, and are, freakishly rare. But the media weren’t showcasing these one-off events as man-bites-dog stories, but rather as dog-bites-man stories in a universe brimming with packs of rabid dogs. According to liberals, whites attacking blacks was an epidemic — a nationwide “cancer,” in the words of erstwhile New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

In December 1986, a gang of white toughs were roaming around Howard Beach, Queens, brawling with anyone they met. They beat up an off-duty white fireman. They attacked a couple of Hispanics. But it was only when the young delinquents fought with three black men — Cedric Sandiford, Timothy Grimes and Michael Griffith — that they secured their place in history and became the literary event of the season!

After the initial encounter between the black and white punks — there were epithets exchanged and criminal records on both sides — the white gang returned with a baseball bat, spoiling for a fight. Grimes ran off unharmed, Sandiford got beaten, and Griffith tried to flee by climbing through a hole in a fence — and ran directly into a busy six-lane highway, where he was hit by a car and killed.

The police summarily concluded that the white gang’s other fights that night had “no racial overtones.” Only the fight with the blacks constituted a hate crime. The FBI opened an investigation and 50 police officers were assigned to investigate. Hollywood made a movie about Howard Beach. The New York Times still celebrates anniversaries of the Howard Beach attack.

News stories were brimming with references to Birmingham and Selma. Columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, “Howard Beach suddenly has become what Birmingham once meant.” (A few years later, the ethnically sensitive Breslin was suspended for denouncing a young Korean-American colleague in the newsroom as a “slant-eyed bitch.”)

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Atlantic editor Jack Beatty blamed Howard Beach on the Republican Party: “From Richard M. Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’ to Ronald Reagan’s boilerplate about ‘welfare queens,’ the legatees of the party of Lincoln have wrung political profit from the white backlash. Howard Beach shows that the politics of prejudice may have some vile life left in it yet.”

In 1986, only 2.6 percent of all homicides in the entire country were white-on-black killings. Black criminals killed nearly three times as many white people (949) as whites killed blacks (378) and they killed 16 times as many black people (6,235) as whites did.

Mayor Koch called the Howard Beach attack “the most horrendous incident of violence in the nine years I have been mayor.”

Earlier that year, a 20-year-old white design student, Dawn Livecchi, answered the doorbell at her Fort Greene, Brooklyn, townhouse and was shot dead by a black man, Anthony Neal Jenkins, who had followed her home from the grocery store.

One Queens woman interviewed by the Times about the Howard Beach attack mentioned that her husband had been beaten so badly by a group of blacks that he remained in a coma two years later.

In one of dozens of “retaliatory” attacks that invariably follow these media-created racial incidents, the day after the attack, a black gang beat and robbed a white, 17-year-old boy sitting at a Queens bus stop, shouting, “Howard Beach! Howard Beach!” “He’s a white boy, and they killed a black boy at Howard Beach.”

Just a week before the Howard Beach attack there was another interracial crime in a neighborhood only slightly farther away from The New York Times’ building than Howard Beach is. A 63-year-old white woman, Ann Viner, was attacked at her home in New Canaan, Conn., savagely beaten, dragged to her swimming pool and drowned by two 20-year-old black men.

It was the first murder in the affluent town in 17 years. That seems like a newsworthy event to me.

But the Times mentioned Viner’s murder only in three short news items, totaling less than a thousand words. The longest piece, 500 words, was an initial report on the murder — when there was still hope that the killers were white! No other major news outlets in the country mentioned Viner’s murder.

So if you’re confused by the blanket coverage of the Trayvon Martin case — attracting even the attention of the president of the United States! — while far more common and more vicious black-on-white murders are ignored, try to understand that liberals are frightened by change. They are desperately clinging to a world that never existed.

Their fantasy of an America bristling with racists allows them to portray any criticism of our massively incompetent and dangerous president as just another sad episode of oh-so-typical white racism. They have to protect Obama, so the rest of us have to get Mugged .

COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK

To Avoid Looking Like A Criminal, Don’t Commit A Crime

July 17, 2013 by Ann Coulter

Black liberals keep bemoaning the danger to their own teenage sons after the “not guilty” verdict in George Zimmerman’s murder trial. To avoid what happened to Trayvon Martin, their boys need only follow this advice: Don’t walk up to a stranger and punch him, ground-and-pound him, MMA-style, and repeatedly smash his head against the pavement.

The Justice-for-Trayvon crowd keeps pretending there hasn’t been a trial where the evidence overwhelmingly showed that Trayvon committed the first (and only) crime that night by assaulting Zimmerman. Instead, the race agitators are sticking with the original story peddled by the media, back when we had zero facts. To wit, that Zimmerman had stalked a young black child and shot him dead just for being black and wearing a hoodie.

Dozens of these hair-on-fire racism stories are retold in my book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama. In the golden age of racial demagoguery, they came at a pace of about one a year. Al Sharpton was usually involved.

A normal person would hear some of the more outlandish allegations and think, “I can’t believe it!” not meaning, “Wow! What a blockbuster story!” but rather, “I would like to hear the facts because I literally don’t believe it.” (That was much of America’s reaction to the media’s claim last year that a neighborhood-watch captain in Florida had hunted down a black teenager and shot him dead just for wearing a hoodie.)

Whenever a much-celebrated claim of racism turned out to be false — which was almost always — you’d just stop hearing about it. There would never be a clippable story admitting that the media’s harrumphing had been in error: Attention, readers! That story we’ve been howling about for several months turned out to be a complete fraud.

A little time would pass, and then we’d get an all-new, excited “America is still racist” media campaign. Journalists are incapable of learning that they should get all the facts before launching moral crusades.

As a result, the official record shows: A few hate crimes and some unverified hate crimes with no clear resolution one way or another. As long as the fraudulent hate crimes didn’t get counted as strikeouts, liberals always looked like Ted Williams.

Since they didn’t keep an accurate batting average, I did it for them in Mugged.

The case most like George Zimmerman’s is the Edmund Perry case. In 1985, Perry, a black teenager from Harlem who had just graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, mugged a guy who turned out to be an undercover cop. He got shot and a few hours later was dead.

Instead of waiting for the facts, the media rushed out with a story about Officer Lee Van Houten being a trigger-happy, racist cop. When that turned out to be false, The New York Times looked at its shoes. It was the kind of story the elites wanted to be true. It should be true. We had such high hopes for that one. Damn!

The initial news accounts stressed not only that Perry was a graduate of Exeter on his way to Stanford, but that he was unarmed. (In all white-on-black shootings, the media expect the white to have RoboCop-like superpowers to detect any weapons on the perp as well as his resume.)

A few weeks after the shooting, The New York Times called Perry “a prized symbol of hope.” In a telling bit of obtuseness, The Times said that “all New Yorkers have extraordinary reasons to wish for the innocence of the young man who was killed.” I doubt very much that the cop being accused of being a murderous racist hoped for that.

An article in The Village Voice explained: “[L]ike so many other victims in this city,” Perry was “just too black for his own good.”

Luckily for the policeman, Perry had mugged him in a well-lit hospital parking lot. Twenty-three witnesses backed the officer’s story in testimony to the grand jury. (Unlike Zimmerman, Van Houten’s case was at least presented to a grand jury.)

As I wrote in “Mugged”: “God help Officer Van Houten if he had been mugged someplace other than a hospital parking lot with plenty of witnesses.” Such as, for example, a dark pathway in The Retreat at Twin Lakes. There weren’t 23 witnesses backing Zimmerman’s story, only about a half-dozen. But, as with Van Houten, the evidence overwhelmingly corroborated Zimmerman’s story.

In Van Houten’s case, even after it was blindingly clear that Perry had mugged him, the truth was only revealed amid great sorrow. When the facts were unknown, the cop was a racist. When it turned out Perry had mugged the cop, it was no one’s fault, but a problem of “violence,” “confusion” and “two worlds” colliding.

Perhaps, someday, blacks will win the right to be treated like volitional human beings. But not yet.

As with Zimmerman’s case this week, some journalists pretended to have missed the court proceedings that supported the self-defense story. Even after the grand jury’s refusal to indict Van Houten, Dorothy J. Gaiter of the Miami Herald wrote about Perry in an article titled “To Be Black and Male Is Dangerous in U.S.” She asked: “How do you teach a boy to be a man in a society where others may view him as a threat just because he is black?”

Van Houten said he was jumped, knocked to the ground, punched and kicked by Edmund Perry. Grand jury witnesses backed his story. Isn’t it possible that Van Houten saw Perry as a threat for reasons other than “just because he is black”?

(And please stop talking about Martin’s “hoodie”! Zimmerman wasn’t worried about the hoodie; he was worried about being beaten to death.)

Instead of turning every story about a black person killed by a white person into an occasion to announce, “The simple fact is, America is a racist society,” liberals might, one time, ask the question: Why do you suppose there would be a generalized fear of young black males? What might that be based on?

Throw us a bone. It’s because a disproportionate number of criminals are young black males. It just happens that when Lee Van Houten and George Zimmerman were mugged by two of them, they survived the encounter.

COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK