Here we go again.
In Berkeley, Mo., adjacent to Ferguson, a white St. Louis County police officer shot and killed Antonio Martin, an 18-year-old black man, last Tuesday night.
Some 200 rioters quickly gathered late that night. As the Los Angeles Times reported, they hurled rocks and bricks at the police, detonated bomb-like fireworks, vandalized a cop car, ignited small fires, and shattered the windows of a convenience store across the street from the gas station where this shooting went down. Two officers were injured in this melee. Lootings, traffic obstructions, and die-ins have unfolded ever since.
Demonstrators have deployed the usual accusations: Yet another racist white cop gunned down yet another young black man. “The War on Black America,” as the radical ANSWER Coalition has christened it, registered its latest casualty.
Well, it turns out that Antonio Martin was not a sweet young man, home from college, who was cut down while buying a Christmas tree. According to police, Martin had been arrested since age 17 for stealing, assault, and armed robbery.
Tuesday night, Martin was outside a gas station when police responded to a shoplifting complaint. Surveillance video confirms that when that St. Louis County officer confronted Martin, the teenager took a loaded 9 mm gun with a defaced serial number and aimed it at the cop.
“A police officer has killed another young black man, and this has to stop,” one protester yelled at Berkeley mayor Theodore Hoskins’s subsequent news conference. “If it doesn’t stop, this country will remain accountable from this day forward, from sea to shining sea.”
It would be refreshing to turn on the TV and not see black people reflexively running out to defend, sometimes with violence, seemingly every black person shot by a white cop. While some such cases are inappropriate, time and again, the black men who wind up dead are shot while committing crimes (as was Ferguson’s convenience-store-robber Michael Brown) or, even worse, while aiming guns at cops.
What was the still-unidentified, 34-year-old cop in this case supposed to do? Should he have waited until he got shot in the chest, and then — while bleeding to death — fire back at Antonio Martin?
“Everybody don’t die the same,” said Mayor Hoskins, who is black. According to Black Entertainment Television’s website, Hoskins added: “Some people die because they initiated.”
Those who claim they want to improve relations between the police and communities they serve should pick their battles more carefully. Standing with criminal scum like Antonio Martin erodes what little legitimacy remains as this cause becomes overwhelmed by lies about reputedly “racist killer cops” and struggles to overcome growing disgust with Ismaaiyl “Wings on Pigs” Brinsley’s December 20 assassination of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.
The “Black Lives Matter” movement also has been soiled by leftists who attacked the “racists” at JetBlue for offering to fly policemen for free to the funerals of these murdered NYPD cops of Asian and Hispanic ancestry. Some demand a boycott of the airline. Another cop-hater complained: “JetBlue is perfect example of white corporate America perpetuating white supremacy n [sic] police brutality.” Similarly, extremists in Portland on Saturday night offered unbridled hate speech when, one week after the Liu and Ramos assassination, they sang this reprehensible mock Christmas carol: “Deck the halls with rows of dead cops, fa la la la la, la la la la.” (Imagine the national volcano that would have exploded had even one Tea Partier hummed: “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a bomb in downtown D.C. . . .”)
For the late Antonio Martin’s part, the most enduring lesson that he can teach is both remarkably simple and highly life-saving:
If you don’t want a cop to shoot you, don’t point a gun at one.