Black Lives Matter was never an organization worthy of anyone's respect. The group rallied around so many cases of violent, terrible people being killed and trying to make it about race that it's impossible to take anything they say seriously.
And based on a letter sent to Birmingham, AL officials by a co-founder of BLM there, nothing has changed.
See, there were recently a couple of officer-involved shootings, and activists are very upset.
A coalition of community activists, clergy and others have issued an open letter to Birmingham city and police leaders concerned about recent officer-involved shootings, including the deaths of a man and a woman one month apart.
“As families grieve the losses of Vanessa Ragland and Jamal D’Angelo Williams, it has become clear that this administration must reckon with the reality of individuals being killed, harmed and hurt by police,” said the Rev. Eric Hall, co-founder of Black Lives Matter.
“Both Jamal and Vanessa were living with mental illnesses at the time of their murders,” the open letter states. “Their loss exposes the fragile conditions under which Black residents are forced to live in this city and illustrates the failure of city systems designed to protect the most vulnerable.”
...“Your administration must reckon with the frequency with which police responses end in death, particularly when residents are experiencing mental health or medical crisis,” the letter states. “A city cannon claim safety while its residents cannot trust that calling for help will keep them alive.”
“Black people in Birmingham deserve to make it home to their families with the same certainty and protection that police officers enjoy,” the letter states.
The letter also challenged the “despicable practice of vilifying victims of police violence by framing them as deserving of slaughter.”
“This ritual of posthumous character assignation is part of the state’s machinery to convince the public to accept police killings of Black people as reasonable, even necessary,” according to the letter.
The problem is that these "murders," as the letter frames them, are clear-cut cases of justifable shootings by police.
Let's start with Williams.
He was a paranoid schizophrenic who also had bipolar disorder and refused to take his medication. Police show up to a ShotSpotter call. Video of the incident shows Williams hitting a car, pinning a woman to the ground, and walking around with a firearm in his hand before officers arrived. When they did, he pulled a gun out of his hoodie, which prompted the police to shoot him.
In the other incident, video shows two women on top of a single officer fighting with him when he fired three shots, killing the woman...who had, incidentally, gained control of the officer's taser.
In other words, both have video evidence showing these people acting violently and putting officers' lives at risk. Yet because Williams had profound mental health issues and Ragland was autistic, they're supposed to get a pass? The police are supposed to do something completely different?
Again, video evidence showing why these two were shot by police.
My own daughter is autistic, and while it does exist on a spectrum, any autistic individual who thinks fighting with the police and trying to take one of their weapons from them is a good idea is going to get the same treatment, and they'll get it not because they're autistic. It's because they're crossing the line.
Hell, autistic people are notorious for following rules, even if they think they're stupid. That's because they have a profound need for structure, predictability, and clarity. It's not universal, but that also means someone being autistic isn't some groundbreaking reason to let them incapacitate a police officer, which could well lead to their murder.
If there's any good news behind this whole thing, other than two dangerous people being removed from circulation for good cause, it's knowing that the "brains" behind various BLM organizations haven't gotten any less stupid.
