St. Louis: Riots Erupt After Police Officer’s Acquittal
Mob rule seeks to overturn rule of law
I have to admit that I am weary of and even becoming a tiny bit bored by this sort of thing, but . . . here we go. Again. A white police officer shoots and kills a black suspect in the line of duty, is duly acquitted in a court of law, and . . . riots erupt in protest of the ruling. Again.
That this violent and unhinged reaction is related only to the races of the officer and the suspect rather than points of law seems a given. Again.
Demonstrators clashed with police officers Friday night in St. Louis after the acquittal of a white former police officer who was charged with murder last year for fatally shooting a black driver after a car chase.
In a video tweeted after midnight Saturday, St. Louis police Chief Lawrence O’Toole said at least 23 people had been arrested as of 6 p.m., and 10 police officers had suffered injuries, including a broken jaw and a dislocated shoulder.
“Many of the demonstrators were peaceful. However, after dark, many agitators began to destroy property and assault police officers,” O’Toole said in a joint video statement with Mayor Lyda Krewson (D).
O’Toole said the protesters assaulted police with bricks and bottles, and officers responded by using tear gas and firing pepper-spray balls as a “less lethal option.”
Roughly 1,000 protesters descended on the mayor’s home, throwing rocks and breaking windows, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They were met by about 200 police in riot gear who tried to disperse them with tear gas. The mayor did not appear to be home.
https://twitter.com/10_gop/status/908879292083376128
Burning an American flag does not signal disapproval of a single acquittal of a single police officer; it has a much broader context that cannot and should not be ignored. These rioting mobs intend to undermine, even overturn, the rule of law on which our country was, at least in part, founded.
One reporter tweets that the St. Louis mob of thugs came close to attacking him and that this was “the scariest moment in [his] career.”
Scariest moment in my career. Protesters upset about not guilty verdict for an officer accused of killing a suspect, turn on me and media. pic.twitter.com/iZyvg3gX0p
— Dan Gray KTVI Fox 2 (@DanGrayTV) September 15, 2017
Screech loudly enough, break enough windows, set fire to enough things, intimidate and assault enough reporters and innocent bystanders, and eventually, these violent mobs insist, “justice” will be done.
That “justice,” however, directly contradicts and undermines the rule of law, and as such, is the very definition of injustice. When race, not the alleged offense and evidence, is expected (demanded?) to be the key element in legal proceedings, we all lose.
Worse, when these perfectly normal legal proceedings are manipulated into condemnations of America herself and when enough people believe it, we are lost.
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Comments
Gun Up!
call out the Guard: live ammo & bayonets.
that would clear the streets most ricky tick.
We should remember that for 8 years we had a president who openly encouraged such actions. And that many in the media justify their crimes. And too many in the education system who teach them to hate and destroy.
They are thugs – but they have been taught and encouraged to be nothing but thugs.
Cheer up—at least this isn’t like Baltimore, where the local government was on the mob’s side.
Baltimore is already beyond repair. Like St. Louis and parts of Chicago (and Gaza), it should be walled off.
Dilution of the race-bait brand.
Without obama, holder and lynch, soros’ mob is without teeth anymore – and about as credible as the ny times.
I hope you are correct.
To me, these jerks have never been credible, and their numbers and acceptance by the establishment seem to be growing.
Why all the hoopla over shooting a drug dealer? If the penalties for shooting drug dealers was waived the war on drugs would have over decades ago. Instead we have a judicial jobs program.
It’s sad that such a disgusting comment has 6 upvotes (as of now). Murdering a drug dealer is exactly the same, both legally and morally, as murdering you and your entire family. The constitution guarantees both drug dealers and your children the equal protection of the law, so if the penalties are “waived” for the former, as you wish, then they must be for the latter as well.
If Stockley killed Smith for being a drug dealer, or indeed for any reason except self-defense, then he is a vicious murderer and belongs in prison. Unfortunately the legal finder of fact found evidence wasn’t up to the task of proving that beyond reasonable doubt, so the correct verdict is that he goes free. Note that the very same guarantee of equal protection that prevents “waiving” the penalty for murdering drug dealers also prevents “waiving” it for murdering likely scumbag murderers such as Stockley.
Incorrect moral equivalence here: Killing a drug dealer = killing your family.
The drug dealer in question fled from arrest, stopping only when his vehicle was rammed by the police car, and (disputed) attempted to retrieve a gun in order to shoot the police officer.
The last family I knew of who did that was Bonny and Clyde.
Someone here doesn’t understand the difference between moral equivalence and legal equivalence; he also doesn’t understand that he is not the ultimate authority on morality for anyone but himself.
Why do you say “unfortunately”? Are you biased towards Stockley being guilty of something?
I was wondering if it was legal in MO to fire back at thugs who were throwing rocks and bottles at your home…so I looked it up. Yes, under Missouri Revised Statutes
Chapter 563 – Defense of Justification, it’s legal to use deadly force if:
It seems like if the thugs were on your lawn throwing bottles that could be Molotov Cocktails, that would be legal (and a target-rich environment).
Even if they’re not firebombs, they can still cause death or serious injury, and they’re also still a forcible felony from which one is entitled to protect oneself.
They say, “All we want is justice.” Then there’s a trial and an acquittal but they are still unhappy. So, what they really wanted was particular outcome, a conviction. Why not be honest about it?
I was watching some of the protest earlier on one of the local channels. Of course they were shouting Hand up Don’t shoot.
The big lie continues.
Do you think that anyone protesting read the judges decision?
Nope! IF they did they would not be protesting.
“Do you think that anyone protesting read the judges decision?” Of course not, these things cannot read and comprehend.
To be fair, how many people condemning the protesters have read it? I haven’t, and I’m not sure that if I were to examine all the evidence I would come to the same verdict, but he’s the finder of fact and I’m not, he’s seen all the admissible evidence and I haven’t, so I have to defer to his judgment.
Anytime an event like this is known in advance, radical orgs send in thugs to spark anger and violence if necessary. These ‘protests’ (riots) are far from grassroot. That’s all antifa is, for example, $20 a day ideological thugs serving as useful idiots for external radical/anarchic groups.
So far there has been little downside to these riots. The dinosaur media continue to refer to the “demonstrations”, and some “demonstrators” who got out of hand. Out of hand means torching buildings and vehicles, throwing rocks, assaulting police. Some use this as cover to loot stores and settle gang scores. Very little, if any prosecution results, almost no work is missed and the perps are looked up to in the minority community, where it is considered evil to even talk to law enforcement, let alone testify against anyone.
BTW: now that the cop was acquitted, does he get his j*b, career, reputation and privacy back?
😎
No, and he shouldn’t. Even if he didn’t commit a crime (which remains undetermined) he’s definitely guilty of serious violations of department policy. There’s no possibility of denying that.
The case against the officer was rather interesting, especially the presentation of a lack of evidence presented to bolster the charges. Kinda interesting.
The predictable aftermath, not so much. This is the same old thing. B/M committing a criminal act gets shot by a W/PO and it is automatically murder. And, when the PO is not convicted, the B/Mob demands that he be convicted to avoid acts of violence. This is not an exercise of free speech, but extortion by threat.
even if the cop was convicted, i’d bet they’d riot, if only because “see, he was murdered and you racist pigs…”
the Dindu’s don’t need a real reason to destroy 5hit: it’s about the only thing they do well, if at all.
And they are having a good time while “protesting” or as some would say rioting. I have seen their happy faces.
Perhaps you’ve followed this case more closely than I have. Going solely on what the news media have reported (and we all know how much those are worth) it seems like the case against Stockley was pretty solid, and that the judge bent over backwards to find reasonable doubt of his guilt. Which is fair enough, but I can’t help wondering whether he’d’ve done the same had Smith killed Stockley instead of the reverse. Because that is what the rule of law is about — a cop who kills a suspected drug dealer and a suspected drug dealer who kills a cop must be treated exactly the same, the evidence examined with the same degree of skepticism, and all reasonable doubt resolved in favor of the defendant. I hope the judge honestly applied this standard, but I understand why peaceful protesters might suspect he didn’t. But such a suspicion, however reasonable, can’t justify violence.
You said that you haven’t read the opinion and only going by the biased and agenda driven main-stream media do you see a case for the prosecution??? Do you really want to broadcast you thought process like this? Read the opinion, I did and it was easy to understand that this case should never have been brought and it wasn’t for years until political agendas forced it to be after the BLM fiascoes.
The real issue I see is that this officer’s life is over as he knows it– so the next time any police officer thinks about making an arrest or stopping crime, maybe he stays in his car and texts his wife and kids unless he is in a nice neighborhood.
Here is a neat little video synopsis of some of the evidence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgNJ0v_U3PA
Haven’t seen any mention or pics of looting. Perhaps there’s nothing in the area to loot. St Louis is already one of America’s premier high-crime hellholes, and those usually don’t have much in the way of stores with big display windows to showcase all the easily lootable stuff.
They also don’t have outdoor ATMs, phone booths, bicycle racks, etc. Developers drive through and look for that sort of stuff when they’re considering investing in an area. Once crime moves in, it’s very hard to attract anything else.
I live in St. Louis, and you are wrong, wrong, wrong. While not a glittering east or west coast city, it is a lovely town with lots of retail and mercantile and cultural establishments. Yes, there are some bad elements in the area. But they are only a small measure of what exists here and do not in any way hold sway in the region. The Michael Brown case was totally aided and abetted by organizations that were not local – Black Lives Matter – and others. Why do you feel a need to trash St. Louis and I’ll bet other midwestern metropolises that are struggling to stay afloat or recover from the decline of manufacturing and industrial enterprises?
Riots don’t just erupt. Someone incites a riot.
1) What is this “rule of law” that you referred to? I’m pretty sure there is no such thing anymore.
2) I am supposed to get upset because a reporter got threatened by a Leftist mob. They have the same boss. As Professor Glenn Reynolds has said; they are just political operatives with bylines. The media has joyfully cast off any semblance of journalistic ethics. Since I know that they are lying to me as their primary function and that they support the suppression of any non-Leftist expression, I have cast off any semblance of caring if they get taken out by “friendly fire”.
I used to travel to St Louis on business 25 years ago. There was a black oriented am radio station that had a commentator that was doing his best to incite a race riot. All the callers felt the same way. I listened because I was aghast — the same way you would stare at a house on fire. I am from the south and had NEVER heard such racial animus. This is NOT NEW for St Louis. The Dems have been prepping this for a long time.
These are out of control, violent, psychotic, morally depraved savages – very much like what you have in Gaza.
And Greitens should deal with it the same way. Wall it off, and use police and National Guard to control movement in and out.
Did anyone catch the post-verdict comments of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner who prosecuted the case?
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mplyfo6Og4
That the people of St Louis would elect someone like Gardner, tells you a lot about St Louis.