Leftists are upset about what they view as a double standard with respect to the Baltimore/Ferguson affair and the recent Waco gang shootout. Theyre right too there sure is a double standard.
And as usual its their own.
Consider for example an Associated Press piece by one Jesse J. Holland titled Differing perceptions of Waco Baltimore bothering some." Holland starts out writing that the prevailing images of protests in Baltimore and Ferguson Missouri over police killings of black men were of police in riot gear handcuffed protesters tear gas and mass arrests. The main images of a fatal gun battle between armed bikers and police in Waco Texas also showed mass arrests carried out by nonchalant-looking officers sitting around calm bikers on cellphones." The idea is that while the black thugs in Baltimore and Ferguson received harsh treatment and coverage the primarily white thugs in Waco were relatively speaking handled with kid gloves.
But pardon my tongue this brings us to another complaint. Holland cites people who say that while Barack Obama and other politicians called the Baltimore miscreants thugs" no such descriptive is applied to the white Waco punks. He mentions in particular radio and TV commentator Roland Martin who tweeted So the mainstream media refuses to talk (hashtag)WacoThugs huh?" And Martin has a point: While the black Baltimore rioters and looters were called thugs no white Waco rioters and looters were thus characterized. I wonder why might that be?
Oh yeah thats right: there are no white rioters and looters in Waco.
Minor details such as this seem to escape the notice of two-brain-cell journalists in search of a story but a prerequisite for having police in riot gear" is actually having you know a riot. The incident in Waco was an unforeseen event meaning the cops had no time to don any kind of special gear.
Perhaps they dont teach proper analogizing in journalism school but the Waco biker thugs arent analogous to the Baltimore rioter thugs; rather theyre analogous to the person the latter were rioting over: drug dealer Freddie Gray. And no one went out of his way to call Gray a thug.
Martin also lamented that we wont have a panel discussion on their the bikers childhood" or on fatherless homes"; no doubt as the media will soon drop the story. This is largely because they dont have a black-on-white racial angle to play up but also for another reason:
Whites wont be rallying to the defense of the biker thugs.
Matters are proceeding as they should. The police went to the scene of the crime fired on the thugs when necessary (perhaps killing some) brought matters to a conclusion and they made arrests 170 of them. Moreover all people including whites want to see justice done. In fact no small number of whites would no doubt say that more of the thugs should have been shot.
Oh as for the adjectives its self-evident that the Waco criminals are thugs. The reason why the point had to be made in Baltimore is that politicians media propagandists and race-baiting activists had euphemized the rioters as protesters" who cared about Freddie Gray (whom they would have knifed in a second for 50 bucks) and had legitimate grievances. So even Obama in a rare and fleeting moment of lucidity pointed out the obvious: get off it theyre just thugs.
The irony of the Lamestream Medias reporting on whats a flawed conception of a double standard is that it was created by their own exercise of a true double standard. As black pundit Larry Elder reported police shootings of black suspects are down 75 percent over the last several decades but you wouldnt know it from cherry-picked reportage that seems designed to incite racial unrest. Consider the following list of perspective-lending realities the media refuses to cover:
- As Elder also wrote In 2012 according to the CDC 140 blacks were killed by police. That same year 386 whites were killed by police. Over the 13-year period from 1999 to 2011 the CDC reports that 2151 whites were killed by cops and 1130 blacks were killed by cops."
- Of course blacks are only 13 percent of the population. So far more significantly and as this recent Washington State University study shows police are actually more willing to shoot white than black suspects. Why? Because police know that as Ferguson officer Darren Wilsons experience illustrates shooting a black criminal can mean media crucifixion career destruction death threats and basically the end of your life as you know it.
- Black suspects are as likely to shoot at police as to be shot at.
- Relative to whites blacks are shot by police at a lower rate than their involvement in crime would suggest. As sociologist and ex-cop Professor Peter Moskos writes Adjusted for the homicide rate whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police. Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police."
- According to FBI statistics 46 percent of those whove murdered police officers during the last decade have been black.
- Blacks commit more than half of all murders nationwide. And 93 percent of all black homicide victims are murdered by other blacks.
- Stories of generally unarmed" white suspects being shot by minority police abound but are never reported nationally. There was 20-year old white man Dillon Taylor who was shot by a Hispanic cop last year; Iraq military veteran James Whitehead shot by off-duty black police officer Robert Arnold in Texas in 2011 after a verbal altercation; white teen Gil Collar shot by a black officer at the University of Alabama in 2012; and 46-year-old white man John Geer shot with his hands up (according to four police officers on the scene) by a Hispanic cop with anger issues."