Police

A cellphone video surfaced in Chicago last week showing three African American women twerking on top of a slowly moving Chicago Police Department SUV, as a crowd of night-time revelers urged them on. The clip quickly went viral. Although important details have yet to emerge, CPD officials have acknowledged the incident and stated that an investigation is 'ongoing’. To a fossil like me, twerking anywhere is distasteful, even disgusting — and to do so out in public is at once incivil and degrading. To do so on top of a moving police vehicle strikes me as borderline degenerate, but such paracoital gyrations will doubtless be read by some as ritualistic community expressions of both disrespect for and indignation over the po-po.

Defund the police! The clarion cry of protesters and middle-class warriors everywhere never fails to stir Cockburn’s passions. Slashing police budgets, cutting resources and further increasing crime rates is the most logical step to improving our societies and neighborhoods. Isn’t it? But it transpires that calling for the police to be fleeced of their budgets comes easier if you are Maya Wiley, Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, who lives in a $2.7 million brownstone in a Brooklyn precinct where the crime rate has plummeted in the past year. And Wiley’s partner Harlan Mandel, CEO of the non-profit Media Development Investment Fund, has been paying for a guard to patrol their tiny neighborhood.

Has Police Scotland misunderstood the purpose of policing? A recent crackdown on 'controversial stickers' appears to suggest as much. 'On Monday 17th May we received a report of controversial stickers having been placed on lampposts,' said a message on Kirkcaldy police's Twitter feed, posted last week. 'Should you come across stickers of this nature, please contact ourselves or Fife Council so that their removal can be arranged'. So what did the stickers actually say? It transpired that they were emblazoned with the words: 'Women won’t wheesht' Baffling? Maybe. But is it really the business of the police to investigate such stickers? Various hashtags, including 'SexNotGender' and 'WarOnWomen', were also included.

Will January 6 go down as another 'day of infamy,' an assault against America akin in its seriousness to December 7, which commemorates Pearl Harbor? Maybe, but not for the reasons that comparison suggests. Sure, many irresponsible commentators — but here I repeat myself — and Democratic politicians compared the January 6 protest at the Capitol to December 7, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, even (thank you Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer) to the Civil War. Back in February, I noted here that there were a few differences between these two sets of events.

The headline ‘Government to allow people to hug’ one might have expected to hear on early evening news bulletins in January 1661, shortly after Oliver Cromwell was posthumously executed and puritanism began its slow and welcome withdrawal from England. It sounds a little odd in 2021. Below the headline came the inevitable caveats from the medical clerisy. While hugging you should turn your face aside so as to minimise the risk of infecting the person you are embracing. I think people are also enjoined to keep their hands well above the waist — during amorous encounters with people in your ‘bubble’ you are allowed only to ‘get your tops’, as we schoolboys used to put it. No kissing, and certainly not with tongues.

Any gunslinging sheriff can tell you that if you shoot from the hip you may hit the target but not quite with the precision you wanted. Priti Patel, very much a minister to draw first and ask questions later, is in much this position with her challenge to the police establishment over the weekend on its policy of recording all non-crime hate incidents. Most of what she said is spot-on; but in two respects she may have to think a little more carefully. The problem with the present police policy, as Matthew Parris trenchantly pointed out in this week’s Spectator, is that even if you never break the law it makes being rude to anyone on social media a risky business.

NBC's flagship news program completely garbled one of the week’s top stories: a deadly fight among teenage girls in Columbus, Ohio, which ended with a policeman shooting and killing a knife-wielding attacker, 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant. The network’s coverage was an abomination. NBC omitted vital information and distorted what actually happened. The Biden White House immediately piled on, insisting that the Columbus shooting was the product of racism. They did so at an incredibly sensitive moment — minutes after a Minneapolis jury convicted policeman Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd. Since NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and other media programs did not report the Columbus story fairly or accurately, let’s do so here.

The jury rendered guilty verdicts on all three charges against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter — after 10 hours of deliberations. He will be sentenced on the second-degree murder charge that was the most serious of the three. The charges were brought in an atmosphere of mob justice on May 29 and June 3, 2020, within days of the death of George Floyd on May 25. Indeed, the charges were filed in response to the demands of the mob while the Twin Cities were burning down at its hands.

For years, activists have demanded stricter gun control in America, on the cogent (though perhaps unconstitutional) grounds that fewer guns will save the lives of young people in American cities. Cockburn has an alternative proposal: instead of gun control, America needs celebrity control. Lacking any skin in the game and let loose on Twitter, famous people are saying extremely insane things that are going to get people killed. The chief honor this time goes to alleged ‘comedian’ Chelsea Handler, after the shooting death of Minneapolis’s Daunte Wright. Wright tragically learned the hard way that resisting arrest puts you at risk of being shot by a birdbrained police officer who confuses her taser with a pistol.

So far in the 2020s, American citizens have been hectored endlessly about wearing masks, staying safe indoors and standing apart out. Yet the people who smash up neighborhoods are encouraged to keep expressing their pain. The concept of law and order is therefore becoming a twisted joke. Yes, Minneapolis is rioting again — another police violence video circulated on the internet, another round of anarchy, another bonfire of American values. This time it’s Daunte Wright, a young man shot dead as he tried to escape the police in Brooklyn Center, a northern suburb of the Twin Cities. The officer responsible, a woman called Kim Potter, seems to have believed she was using a Taser to stop Wright. But she got him with a gun instead.

The ugly scenes in Bristol last night make it plain to see that Britain can no longer turn a blind eye to a particular brand of political disorder. Violent clashes during the city’s ‘Kill the Bill’ demonstration – supposedly in protest against the Conservative government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill – resulted in 20 police officers being injured, burned-out police vans, and a police station being attacked. Two officers who were seriously injured suffered from broken ribs, a broken arm and a punctured lung. So who was to blame for this violence? The chairman of Avon and Somerset Police Federation, Andy Roebuck, labelled last night’s anarchy a form of 'unprecedented violence'.

Misogyny will now be recorded as a hate crime by police. But is this really the victory for women’s rights that campaigners are claiming it to be? It’s absolutely right, of course, that the law is bolstered so that incidents against women are taken seriously by the police. But the wording of the policy is disappointingly woolly, relying heavily on what the victim perceives as the motivation for the crime. Speaking in the House of Lords, Home Office minister Baroness Williams said that from the Autumn:  ‘We will ask police forces to record and identify any crimes of violence against the person… where the victim perceives it to have been motivated by a hostility based on their sex.