Sick Society Needs Help After Jacob Blake Shooting, Police Ambush

A pair of shootings a day apart this week shows America’s need for what the liberal Atlantic called a “Wake Up Call.” The liberal pub was only half right. It properly condemned police officers shooting Black males “usually in the back.” Jacob Blake is the latest victim/celebrity.

Just a day after Kenosha police in Wisconsin shot Blake multiple times, three police officers in Prince George’s County, Maryland, were ambushed by two Black men. The media and Generation Z have effectively turned the police from heroes to villains.

According to my research, searches for “Prince George’s County officers ambushed+2020 “ on Aug. 26 at 3:30 pm yielded six results from Yahoo, Goggle showed three; 12 on Twitter (several repeats), only two on Facebook but more than 20 on Bing.

By way of comparison, “Jacob Blake shooting” was a social media breakout.  Google claimed to have 265 million hits by 4 pm on Aug. 26. Twitter did not have a count, but it too was massive. Many of the tweets were a little off-topic with pro teams boycotting on the job, Joe Biden, the kid who shot a couple of rioters included. Facebook had more than 60,000 views of videos on the subject.

Police Deserve Better

PGCPD has not named the officers who were wounded. All three should recover and return to work. Prince George’s is a minority-majority county. It has a diversified police force.

Police arrested and charged two men for opening fire on patrol officers, shooting three of those officers. The patrol officers were attacked while responding to a call for a residential robbery in progress at a home.

The suspects are 45-year-old Andre Smith of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and 27-year-old Steven Warren of Southeast, Washington. Both Smith and Warren face multiple charges to include first and second degree attempted murder, assault and gun charges.

Blake Deserved Better

If all Blake did was ignore a police command to stop, then everyone who shot him has some explaining to do. Police had already tased the man.

ABC News reported: The man who said he made the cellphone video said he saw Blake scuffling with three officers and heard them yell, “Drop the knife! Drop the knife!” before the gunfire erupted. He said he didn’t see a knife in Blake’s hands.

The governor [Tony Evers] said he had seen no information to suggest Blake had a knife or other weapon, but that the case is still being investigated by the state Justice Department.

“While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country,” Evers said. Then came the familiar days of rioting.

Why Can’t We Just All Get Along?

It is time to take a page out of Rodney King’s playbook and defuse the protests. People must begin listening to each other. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Black Lives Matter because all lives matter.

Rioting, looting and shooting people are wrong. Each of us can start becoming part of a universal solution by doing the next right thing. Treat others as you want to be treated. None of this takes a government mandate. Nor is it new. The solution has been around us for at least 2,000 years.