The police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina, was justified and no law enforcement officers will face charges over the incident, Mecklenburg County District Attorney R. Andrew Murray announced Wednesday.
As security footage from a nearby convenience store played by Murray showed, Scott was armed with a weapon. After being ordered repeatedly to exit his vehicle, Scott finally did so, gun in hand. Scott then refused multiple commands from the officers to put the gun down, before one officer ultimately opened fire.
“I know some are going to be frustrated.”
The decision should come as little shock to most Americans. The pattern of outrage, protest, condemnation, and even rioting in the immediate aftermath of police shootings, followed by evidence the officer acted appropriately, has become commonplace.
“I know some are going to be frustrated,” Murray said. Of course, if so-called civil rights activists and liberal politicians didn’t immediately rush to the defense of every petty criminal shot by a police officer, facts be damned, they might not be so frustrated every time a police shooting is deemed appropriate.
Scott is at least the fourth person in as many years whose death was held up by activists, media liberals, and even elected officials as proof positive of a systemically racist legal system in America — whose death in the end turned out to be justified.
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In 2012, after Trayvon Martin was killed while assaulting overzealous neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, President Obama said that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
In 2014, Michael Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, while assaulting Wilson and trying to take his gun. Liberals throughout the country seized on the false narrative that Brown was killed while his hands were up, and “hands up, don’t shoot” became a rallying cry for anti-police activists across the country. Unfortunately for activists, that narrative was built on a falsehood.
In 2015, Freddie Gray was killed while in the custody of Baltimore police. Once again, activists and community members immediately responded as if Gray were an innocent man murdered by racist officers. The fact that Gray had an extensive rap sheet and that half of the officers in whose company Gray died were black were apparently irrelevant to liberals.
Scott is just latest name on this long list of false martyrs. Indeed, after his death, Scott’s family claimed that the poor man was just trying to read a book in the peace and quiet of his SUV, and that racist Charlotte police officers shot the unarmed Scott in cold blood before planting a weapon on the scene.
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But as Murray explained on Wednesday, the story peddled by Scott’s family — and adopted by Black Lives Matter activists across the country — is a complete and utter fantasy. Scott was indeed armed and did not relinquish his weapon after being told to do so by police.
Of course, at the time, Black Lives Matter activists and members of the local community didn’t wait for the full facts of the case to come out before proceeding to wreak havoc on the city of Charlotte. “It’s time for the voiceless majority to stand up and be heard,” said Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney during the riots.
“It’s time to change the narrative because I can tell you from the facts that the story’s a little bit different as to how it’s been portrayed so far, especially through social media.”
Maybe now that yet another Black Lives Matter martyr has been revealed to be nothing of the sort, Black Lives Matter and its allies will pause before jumping to conclusions the next time a suspect is killed by law enforcement.
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