I’m an old head. As a child I watched a lot of Westerns. I still do. One of my favorites was “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.” Most Westerns have central plot, good versus evil. But this movie introduced another dimension, “The Ugly.” It was the perfect title for this article. By the way if you have not seen it, I highly recommend it. Although the main character is the closet racist and NRA super spokesman Clint Eastwood, if you can stand throwing up in your mouth and looking at it from a historical perspective, its pretty entertaining.
On November 13, 2018, in a Chicago, Jemel Roberson was was killed by police officers while apprehending and subduing a potential mass murderer. Midlothian police officers responded to a shooting at 4 a.m. that morning at Manny’s Blue Room Lounge in Robbins, Illinois, about 20 miles south of Chicago. Three people and the alleged shooter were wounded in the incident. Roberson had told a group of drunk men, they had to make like the Rockettes at the Radio City Music Hall in New York and get to stepping. One of the them didn’t like it and came back with a gun and started shooting. According to witnesses, Roberson was able to capture the thug and had him on the ground faced down. He was on top, pinning him down with his knee. He had his gun pointed squarely at the back of the perpetrator’s head, telling him don’t move!! It was around this time that the men charged with protect and serve arrived. Within a couple of minutes of their arrival, they shot Jemel dead while he was holding down the man who had went into the bar and opened fire on its patrons. Witnesses testify when the police arrived they shouted at them that Jemel was on the security team at the bar. He also had a hat emblazoned with the word security across the top as well as a vest on with the word security on it. Of course the Po Po want to cover their behinds and came out with the following statement, “The Illinois State Police and its officials are investigating the shooting. According to witness statements, “the Midlothian Officer gave the armed subject multiple verbal commands to drop the gun and get on the ground before ultimately discharging his weapon and striking the subject.” I bet the other witnesses were other police officers. Subsequently they came out with this statement, “What we have learned is Jemel Roberson was a brave man who was doing his best to end an active shooter situation at Manny’s Blue Room. The Midlothian Police Department is completely saddened by this tragic incident and we give our heartfelt condolences to Jemel , his family and his friends. There are no words that can be expressed as to the sorrow his family is dealing with.” Naturally the mofo Jemel had apprehended left the scene in a police car with minor injuries. As of this writing no charges have been files against the suspect.
The Good
Ain’t nothing good about this “ish” except there were witnesses who saw a white police officer come into a black neighborhood and shoot a black man apprehending a suspect who was firing an automatic weapon in a bar full of people. The police team who shot Jemel wasn’t even from that area. They were a swat team out of Chicago. Mayor Tyrone Ward expressed anguish about the incident Tuesday evening wondering whether the situation would have ended differently if a Robbins officer had encountered Roberson first. “I wish it had been one of our officers who came across the situation. They may have been more familiar with security at the bar. That’s my honest opinion.”
The Bad
This was just a case of the police shooting first and asking questions later… only asking questions because there were witnesses. I can only surmise that their training teaches them if they encounter a black person with a gun, shoot them. Even if it a child with a toy gun. Hardly a week does by without some police officer killing a black person under questionable circumstances. It doesn’t even make the national news anymore. According to some reports, a new study finds police killings exact a toll greater than accidental gun deaths. Police officers in the US shoot and kill hundreds of people each year, according to FBI data, far more than other developed countries like the UK, Japan, and Germany, where police officers might go an entire year without killing more than a dozen people or even anyone at all. The FBI database on police shooting is limited. There is no law that police departments have to report police killings to the federal government. There may be thousands that are killed and tens of thousands that are shot by the police every year. Who knows, no one is keeping records. What we do know is that people of color are disproportionately shot or killed at greater numbers as a percentage of the population by the police. According to a CNN report, “Few police officers ever face trial for shooting deaths, let alone are convicted. In recent years, fatal shootings of unarmed black men across the United States have sparked outrage and concerns over police use of lethal force. Despite several high-profile cases and increased video evidence, convictions have been rare.”
The Ugly
A study conducted by Charles Menifield, dean of the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University–Newark, concluded that white officers do not kill black suspects at a higher rate compared with nonwhite officers. That’s right, as a percentage, white police officers actually kill black and other minority suspects at lower rates than we would expect if killings were randomly distributed among officers of all races. Do tell huh? The study went on to say, “We find that nonwhite officers kill both black and Latino suspects at significantly higher rates than white officers. This is likely due to the fact that minority police officers tend to be assigned to minority neighborhoods, and therefore have more contact with minority suspects.” White police mostly kill and shoot white people. It is for the same reason that most minorities are killed or shot by minority policemen, because white officers are mostly assigned to the white communities. So now we get to the ugly part. How does a highly trained swat team from Chicago end up in a black suburb that has its own police department. Why when they were told by dozens of black bar patrons that Jemel was security, they subsequently killed a black man defending other black people? Why wasn’t the dispatch routed to the local police? Who sent that white police team to Midlothian? Why wasn’t they told there was security on the scene? What kind of crooked police “ish” is going on there. The police killed a young black man defending other black people for no cause and its the ugliest thing i have seen.
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