Well, well, well, what do we have here other than, of course, an example that would seem to very clearly point out that the mass rioting in Ferguson, over the shooting of another black punk was essentially nothing more than another excuse to riot. What I’m referring to here is the fact that we now have two cases that on the surface would appear nearly identical. In one case we have Michael Brown who was black, and Dillon Taylor, who was not. Two young, unarmed men with sketchy criminal pasts, both shot to death by police officers, and just two days apart.
But while the world knows of the highly publicized situation involving the 18-year-old, nearly 300 pound, Brown, whose Aug. 9 death in Ferguson, Missouri touched off violence, protests, looting and an angry national debate, very few people outside of Utah have ever even heard of the 20-year-old Mr. Taylor. And by the way, does anyone recall seeing anywhere on the news how it was that mobs of rampaging whites burned and looted Salt Lake City where Dillon Taylor was shot by a black police officer? I mean, I certainly don’t recall hearing anything about it.
According to critics there’s a reason for the obvious discrepancy in media coverage and it all comes down to nothing more than the race of these two young men. You see Brown was, as everyone should know by now unless they’ve been residing under a rock somewhere, black and the officer who shot him was, of course, a racist white cop. But Mr. Taylor wasn’t black. He, like George Zimmerman, has been described as being a white Hispanic, and the officer who shot him on Aug. 11 outside a 7-Eleven in South Salt Lake was not white, nor Hispanic.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that what we have here is an example of a double standard that we have seen play out any number of times before. And these events are now, and rightly so, fueling resentment and talk of double standards not only on conservative talk radio but also throughout social media sites, where the website Twitchy compiled a list of Twitter comments asking why Brown’s death has been front-page news for weeks while Mr. Taylor’s was a footnote at best. In fact I stumbled across it pretty much entirely by accident.
Critics of this disparity in coverage and level of outrage claim that it is actually the Brown case that is the outlier stating that statistics indicate that black-on-black crime is far more common than the case of a white-on-black crime. For homicide, for instance, the FBI in 2012 found that of the 2,648 black murder victims, some 2,412 were killed by fellow blacks and only 193 by whites. And yet if you listen to the race hucksters, you’d think that open season has been declared by whites as they go about picking off stray blacks wherever they may find them.
Al ‘Bull Horn’ Sharpton, in speaking at Monday’s funeral service for Brown, attacked local policing methods in the case and the militarization of local police forces, but also noted that American blacks also must learn from Ferguson. Sharpton said, "Some of us act like the definition of blackness is how low you can go." He went on to say, "Blackness has never been about being a gangster or thug. … Blackness was, no matter how low we were pushed down, we rose up anyhow." What he talking about? Being black has always been about being a thug!
The obvious difference between Missouri and Utah was that Mr. Taylor’s death didn’t result in whites taking to the streets, breaking widows and looting stores in search of a new pair od sneakers or a big screen TV. While there were peaceful protests a week ago outside the Salt Lake City police headquarters covered by local media, there were no outbreaks of looting or violence as happened nightly on the streets of Ferguson. Thus we have what is yet another obvious different between the civilized and an uncivilized response.
Communist News Network, aka CNN, host Jake Tapper acknowledged the disparity in coverage of the Brown and Mr. Taylor cases in the mainstream media, noting that the press often undercovers such topics as inner-city violence and the high rates of black-on-black crime. But Tapper said Monday that media "critics fail to see" that the greater context of a story such as the Brown shooting, including the reaction it sparked in the St. Louis, in the black community nationwide, and with local authorities and from Barry’s administration.
As with the Brown case, what provoked police to shoot Mr. Taylor is currently under investigation. Officers were responding to a report of a man "waving a gun around" when they confronted Mr. Taylor, his brother and his cousin leaving the 7-Eleven. "South Salt Lake Police Sgt. Darin Sweeten said three officers gave Taylor verbal commands to reveal his hands, but Taylor failed to comply and was ‘visibly upset,’" said an Aug. 19 report in the Deseret [Utah] News. "Taylor was subsequently shot and died at the scene."
Salt Lake Police Chief Chris Burbank said at an Aug. 19 press conference that the officer, whom he described as "not a white officer," was wearing a body camera. He said the video would be released after the investigation into the shooting had been completed. "The officer did not set out to use deadly force," said Mr. Burbank on the press conference video. "We have an unfortunate incident where Dillon Taylor lost his life. But I cannot stress enough that this is not Ferguson." Well of course not, because the victim was ‘white’ and the shooter, black.
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