Fairfax... the next Ferguson?
I don’t know how many of you are tracking the violence taking place across this country arising from police killing or injuring citizens. Much of the current wave started in Ferguson and the damage from the riots that followed have been described in the National Review as perhaps unrecoverable.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393738/steep-cost-ferguson-riots-thomas-sowell
Since then the fact pattern has repeated itself in New York and most recently — as in taking place pretty much right now — just across the river in Baltimore.
http://www.wbaltv.com/news/crowds-start-to-march-in-west-baltimore/32570292
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/25/war-zone-baltimore-erupts-into-violence-chaos-as-blacklivesmatter-riots-rage/
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20150425-baseball-fans-in-baltimore-asked-not-to-leave-stadium-as-protests-of-death-in-police-custody-turn-violent.ece
As much as I hate to hear about things like this, either the needless death or the rioting to follow, I have to admit that amid all the other worries of life I take a little bit of comfort in the fact that it is happening somewhere else. Only now it isn’t.
Sometime in Feb of this year a black woman named McKenna got picked up by the Fairfax County VA Sheriff Department. It turns out she was some sort of mental patient with a long history of illness. You can find the details online but the crux is that at some point the Sheriff Deputies decided to strap her into some sort of “restraining chair” and when she was all cuffed and masked (sounds like Hannibal Lecter) they tasered her like four or five times which, to nobody’s surprise, killed her.
The Sheriff Kincaid has done nothing but stonewall the incident, so bluntly that the Washington Post is calling for the Justice Department to step in.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/slow-motion-accountability-in-fairfax/2015/04/22/383fd326-e900-11e4-9767-6276fc9b0ada_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-outrageous-death-of-a-fairfax-county-jail-inmate/2015/04/14/4bcf5a8c-e226-11e4-81ea-0649268f729e_story.html
So in Ferguson you have a guy who is the size of an NFL linesman who gets shot in pretty much a straight-up, one-on-one streetfight. That throws a city into flames. In Fairfax we have a woman not much bigger than a poodle (I read she weighed like 100lbs) who was surrounded by half a dozen big guys in full body armor (called SERT?) and shackled to a metal chair. She doesn’t catch one freak bullet in the blink of an eye but instead gets tazed four or five times and each time you get tazed it is like five or ten second long so there had to be maybe a full minute or more of screaming and thrashing during which nobody in uniform stopped to say “hey maybe this is out of hand.”
If the first scenario threw a city into riots, this has the awful potential to explode like Pompeii meets Hiroshima in the heart of Fairfax. If the Sheriff is stonewalling so hard there must be some even worse stuff that hasn’t come out yet (gotta be video somewhere, right?). So how do citizens distance themselves from crap like this? Riots down’t burn down police stations they burn businesses and homes and stores and stuff. How do we force some sort of public release of info that (hopefully) drops the boiler pressure before this blows up in all our faces?
I don’t think the people of Ferguson ever thought they would be where they ended up, nor did New York or Baltimore. But at this point I’m thinking the writing is on the wall and we’d better get ahead of this or history will very likely follow a very clear pattern.