New York Libs Surrender to Thugs As Usual

It was inevitable that New York’s racial provocateurs would make the fatal shooting of Sean Bell last November a central feature of Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. rallies. Sadly, it was just as inevitable that New York’s politicians would acquiesce in that gambit, thus sacrificing the New York Police Department to racial politics....'Blaming New York's Finest,' Heather McDonald, City Journal, 1/17/2007

This is an article that's painful to read, not that most who read this blog don't know about the contents already, but because nobody else, especially New York politicians, is willing to pay attention.

As McDonald makes clear in this City Journal article, the Bell shooting (50 shots, as it's popularly known) was not a racial incident. Several of the officers firing were black. But the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, not to mention those new Panthers not picketing Duke University, felt just cause in calling the shooting a sign of police abuse and racism.

But the Sean Bell shooting, tragic as it was, was not a civil rights violation. Nothing in the facts of the case suggests any racial animus on the part of the undercover officers who shot Bell. On the contrary, the multi-racial team was working the Jamaica strip club where the shooting occurred in response to complaints from minority neighbors about the drug dealing and prostitution that regularly transpired there...('Blaming New York's Finest' continued....)

Every politician from Mike Bloomberg to Andrew Cuomo to Governor Spitzer, all of whom decried the shooting as racist, knew this. It was in the NY Post and the NY Sun, but not in the NY Times or the NY Daily News. Nor was the following:

The NYPD has one of the lowest rates of fatal shootings of all big-city departments. It has driven the number of police shootings down from 54 in 1973 to nine in 2005—and all of those against suspects who were using force against the shooting officers...('Blaming New York's Finest' continued....)

Including Mr. Bell, who was using his car as a weapon and had already run over one police officer, who happened to be black, before the shooting started....

McDonald should know better than to try to write the truth about politically charged incidents in New York. Not only don't politicians want to hear it, but neither, apparently, do the voters who put them in office.

Unlike the Duke case, somebody was hurt (and killed) in this incident,but like the Duke case, a poisonous political correctness by people elected to know and to do better has made a massive wound out of what should have been a blotter entry in a precinct house. Kudos to City Journal for printing this, but sympathy to Ms. McDonald for the silence likely to greet her fine story.

Luther