The Democrats’ military forces, AKA Black Lives Matter and Antifa, are destroying Kenosha. They justify their violence by claiming that Jacob Blake was unarmed. People who don’t know the law assume that the police can prove their innocence only if Blake had a weapon. That’s not the legal or the practical standard.
The law requires only that the police reasonably believed that Blake intended to use a lethal weapon. This standard exists regardless of whether or not Blake had either the intention or the weapon.
In Kenosha, the police had been called to the house for a domestic violence problem. These cases are invariably the most dangerous calls police answer.
The police learned while heading to the house that Blake, despite the pictures of him hugging some of his six children, was not a nice man. There are criminal records for a man matching his name, address, and age. These records show there were warrants against him for domestic abuse and sexual assault on a minor, and he had been arrested in the past for waving around a gun and had resisted arrest in the past, injuring a police officer.
By now, we have a good idea about the last few seconds before the shooting. Blake was violently resisting the police. We now know that (a) the police tased him unsuccessfully and (b) he had a knife.
Despite the police having their guns drawn and their repeated orders for him to put down the knife and hit the ground, Blake raced around the front of the car, heading to the driver’s door. The police kept yelling at him to stop, but he ignored them. One officer even grabbed Blake to keep him from reaching into the car.
Despite the officers’ guns and their loud and physical efforts to stop him, Blake opened the door and bent into the car. At that point, one or more officers open fire. And that’s where the misinformation starts.
Even Tucker Carlson, who’s right about 99% of the time, got this one wrong, stating, “So the question is, did Blake have a gun in the car? That is the central question.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=388&v=UPvOuFecFQ0&feature=emb_logo
No. That’s not the central question or even a question. The central question is whether the officers, at that time (not in hindsight), reasonably believed that, when he reached into the car, Blake constituted an imminent threat to them or anyone else in the vicinity.
In Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 395-396 (1989), the Supreme Court set out a “reasonableness” standard, rather than a “substantive due process” standard, to determine whether a law enforcement officer acted unreasonably. The Court even spelled out the metric for determining reasonableness (emphasis mine):
Because “[t]he test of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment is not capable of precise definition or mechanical application,” Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 441 U.S. 559 (1979), however, its proper application requires careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight. See Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. at 471 U.S. 8-9 (the question is “whether the totality of the circumstances justifie[s] a particular sort of. . . seizure”).
The “reasonableness” of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. See Terry v. Ohio, supra, at 392 U.S. 20-22. *** The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.
The standard in America isn’t whether Blake was armed; it’s whether the police reasonably feared that he was going to get a weapon from his car and use it. Moreover, they had to make this call after Blake fought with them, ignored their orders, shrugged off a tasing, and (as this screenshot shows) reached into his car:
The video below shows how quickly someone can grab a gun from a car and shoot:
These reporters engaging in simulations learned the same lesson:
The Kenosha officers had a split-second to decide what to do when a violent man who was resisting arrest reached into his car. Based on what we currently know, in the milliseconds available to them¸ the police made the right decision, whether or not there was a gun.
This article first appeared in Americanthinker.com
