Over at Legal Insurrection Andrew Branca has an exhaustive analysis of what we know to-date about last week’s fatal shooting in Wisconsin’s capital, but here are the basics.
On Friday night, Madison police officer Matt Kenny responded to reports that Anthony “Tony” Robinson, a 19-year-old black man, was running in and out of traffic. A second call reported that Robinson had been involved in an assault that same evening. Kenny pursued Robinson to a nearby apartment, where he heard sounds of a disturbance inside. When Kenny forced his way in, Robinson attacked him, striking him over the head and knocking him to the ground. Kenny fired his weapon, killing Robinson.
It’s an unfortunate series of events, but Robinson’s behavior would seem to be in keeping with his past: He pleaded guilty in October to participating in an armed robbery last spring. He had just begun, in December, a three-year probation term.
But none of those facts seem to matter to the “Black Lives Matter” protesters who have been marching through Madison’s streets since Saturday, or to the mainstream media eager to highlight Robinson’s death as part of a nationwide pattern of assassinations of black men by white cops. Indeed, on his MSNBC program, host José Díaz-Balart, keen to draw out the parallels with events last August in Ferguson, said that a Madison police officer “fatally shot an unarmed African American teen.”
That’s one way to put it.
Kenny has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation. (Wisconsin law requires that fatal police shootings be investigated by an independent agency.)