In 2020, the death of George Floyd at the knee of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin launched the “summer of rage” — race riots all over the country followed by a drastic uptick in violent crime. Democrats cynically fueled that rage and, along with exploiting the pandemic, used it to win the 2020 election. Clearly, they’d like a repeat.

How else can we explain the Leftmedia’s seemingly coordinated effort to mislead and outright deceive the public about the police shooting of a thug in Chicago?

During a March 21 traffic stop over a suspected seatbelt violation, 26-year-old Dexter Reed, a black man in Chicago bedecked with a ski mask and riding behind darkly tinted windows, was slow or refused to comply with instructions (albeit profanity-laced) coming from five plain-clothes officers. He soon opened fire on police from his vehicle. He fired 11 rounds, emptying his gun and wounding one black officer. Four cops responded by firing 96 rounds, killing Reed.

Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) investigates such incidents. Andrew Kersten, head of that board, said there are “serious concerns about the validity of the traffic stop” and “serious questions about the proportionality of their use of deadly force.”

The ACLU jumped in to criticize officers for making “no efforts at de-escalation” before the shooting. Reed’s family attorneys claim that the stop was unconstitutional and that body cam footage shows “an officer, military-style, executing Dexter while he laid by his vehicle, unarmed and helpless.”

The body cam videos that have been released are indeed harrowing, but they show no such thing. The investigation is ongoing, and there are some reasons to question the actions of the officers involved, but there is almost no doubt that Reed fired first. That is the only reason he is dead.

Clearly, the Leftmedia’s characterization is meant to stir up racial strife in an election year.

Numerous headlines make no mention of Reed being armed or firing first, instead reporting how many shots police fired and that they killed a black man during a traffic stop. The image at the top of this story illustrates just three examples. The highlighted Washington Post story leads with Reed’s graduation photo and waits until the eighth paragraph to note that Reed fired first.

That story and others often lead with or prominently feature quotes from Reed’s family. “He was just riding around in his car,” said Dexter’s mother, Nicole Banks. “They killed him.”

“If you didn’t stop my nephew, he will be alive today,” Reed’s uncle added.

We don’t for a second question the genuine and heart-wrenching grief of Reed’s loved ones. No mother should lose her son that way. But again, the reason he’s dead is not the traffic stop but his response to it.

Could the officers have responded differently? Perhaps. But the specific neighborhood where Reed was killed is one of the most dangerous in Chicago, and Reed was on pretrial release for a pending felony gun charge — that’s a little tidbit much of the media completely ignored. Illinois and Chicago have some of the toughest gun laws in the country, yet somehow he still had and used a gun the day he was killed. Maybe Kim Foxx, Chicago’s George Soros-backed district attorney, could explain.

Furthermore, how many black men killed other black men in Chicago alone this last year? What about nationwide? That’s actually not rhetorical. In 2022, the FBI reported 19,196 murders in the U.S., 10,470 of whom were black and the vast majority of whom were murdered by other blacks. We’re virtually never subjected to coordinated media headlines about racial grievances after those 10,000 murders each year.

Police know those stats, and they know that statistically, young black men are far more likely to be armed and dangerous than other demographics. Such knowledge and the resulting training affect every traffic stop because those cops have families and want to make it home themselves at the end of the shift.

The activist journalists who type their condemnations on a keyboard safely tucked away in an office somewhere have never even tried on a police officer’s shoes, much less walked a mile in them.

The same Leftmedia that highlights nearly every police shooting of a black thug as part of the need for what The Washington Post called a “racial reckoning” largely ignores the police killed in the line of duty, often during traffic stops — like New York City Police Officer Jonathan Diller just last month.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that this story blew up on the day O.J. Simpson died. Racial tensions were high after the LA Police beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the four officers’ subsequent acquittal. So in 1994, when Simpson, who was black, (allegedly!) brutally murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a friend, Ronald Goldman, both of whom were white, the majority-black jury let him off the next year despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt. One juror even admitted it was “payback” for King’s beating, a sentiment largely shared by blacks.

Racism exists, and it has been a problem in America for centuries. That does not excuse gross injustice in Simpson’s case or flat-out lies in Reed’s, both of which are meant to advance a cynical political agenda. Instead, the way forward is truth and equal justice — and maybe a little obedience at traffic stops.