The Patriot Post® · Cops in Black and White
It’s difficult — perhaps even obscene — to place a dollar value on a human life. Still, it seems some lives are worth more than others.
The life of career criminal George Floyd, for example, is apparently worth around $2 billion in rioting, looting, vandalism, and arson — in addition to the costs associated with a lavish funeral, assorted shrines and murals, and the millions coughed up by corporate virtue signalers like Apple, Nike, and Pepsi to the shakedown artists of Black Lives Matter.
Earlier this week, we learned the cost of another black life — that of 43-year-old Washington, DC, resident William Green: $20 million.
As the Baltimore Sun reports, “A Maryland county has agreed to pay a $20 million settlement to the family of a man who was handcuffed in a patrol car when a police officer shot and killed him, a county official said Monday.”
In January of this year, Green was sitting in the front passenger seat of a police cruiser with his hands cuffed behind his back when a Prince George’s County cop, Michael Owen Jr., shot him six times. Green had no weapons in his possession, and Owen had arrested him when he responded to a call about a traffic accident and found Green asleep in his car, apparently under the influence of a drug.
Two witnesses said they saw or heard a struggle, but investigators didn’t find any evidence of one. For Owen, it’s a costly contradiction: He’s been charged with second-degree murder.
Here, then, we have the stories of two black men, both of them killed by cops while in custody and handcuffed. But one of those deaths caused nationwide riots, while the other caused … barely a whisper.
Why the difference?
Well, race might have something to do with it. George Floyd, as everyone knows, died under the knee of a white cop. William Green, on the other hand, was killed by a black cop. It seems downright perverse that the racial makeup of one’s killer should have a bearing on a people’s propensity to riot, but what other explanation is there?
Indeed, why is it that we shrug our shoulders at the everyday black-on-black genocide taking place in Chicago and Baltimore and Philadelphia and New York, but we race for the torches and the pitchforks at a single white-on-black killing?
As author and researcher Heather Mac Donald points out, blacks are far more likely to victimize whites, and they commit around 70% of black-white interracial homicides despite constituting just 13% of the nation’s population.
Furthermore, where was the outrage a couple of weeks ago when a lone black assailant was caught on surveillance videotape as he walked up to the passenger side of a parked patrol car and opened fire at point-blank range on two white LA cops? Sure, the cops lived, but what if they hadn’t? Would thousands of protesters have taken to the streets on their behalf? Of course not.
As it turns out, the suspect in that shooting, 36-year-old Deonte Lee Murray, has been in custody for some time already. Shortly after he ambushed the cops, he was arrested for a carjacking. But the news that this vicious would-be killer is now off the street made hardly a ripple.
But back to our original point. Black lives do matter. No one said they didn’t. But black lives don’t matter any more or less than white lives, even if those in the business of fomenting race-hatred want us to believe otherwise.