The New York Times, ever ready to stir up racial anger, tried to conflate Tuesday’s verdict of murder in the case of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin with a story of a nearly simultaneous police confrontation in Ohio: “Police Shooting in Columbus Leaves Black Girl, 15, Dead.”
The irresponsible Times filtered the footage-confirmed facts through its own warped ideological lens. Reporters Neil Vigdor and Brian Pietsch began:
A teenage girl who the police say threatened two girls with a knife was fatally shot by an officer in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday afternoon, shortly before a jury reached a guilty verdict in the murder trial of the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in last year’s killing of George Floyd.
The girl’s death cast an immediate pall over public expressions that justice had been served in Mr. Floyd’s case and touched off protests in Ohio’s capital city.
Note the type we've put in bold below, showing the reporters viewed the tape but still maintained the anti-cop narrative:
The [body-camera footage] showed an officer’s view while approaching a chaotic altercation in a driveway involving at least four people, asking “What’s going on?” Played in slow motion, the footage showed a person in a black shirt lunging first at someone who fell to the ground, then moving with what appeared to be a knife toward someone in pink cowering by a parked car. The officer shouted “get down!” repeatedly and pulled a gun out, firing four shots at the teenager. She collapsed to the ground near the car, dropping the weapon.
The girl who was killed was identified as Ma’Khia Bryant, 16, by a spokeswoman for Franklin County Children’s Services, who said in an email on Tuesday night that Ma’Khia had been in foster care.
The Times reporters then turned to the locals for more police-bashing. No one seemed to be asked about violent teenage girls:
The timing and circumstances of the shooting unnerved people in the neighborhood. Rayshawn Whiting said in an interview on Tuesday night that he was planning to watch the Chauvin verdict at his brother’s house just a few blocks away when he heard the gunshots….
“I’ve got daughters,” he said. “And I’m tired of it. I feel like a polar bear with the ice caps melting. We have nowhere to run. If we protect ourselves, we go to jail. If we don’t, we die.”
Chris Roberts said in an interview that he was in his backyard with his twin daughters when he heard the gunshots from just a few yards away. He said they ran in the house and called 911. Since the shooting, he said, his daughters did not want to be alone.
“How do I teach my daughters when you call for help, and you expect help to come, you could be on the other side of the gun?” he said.
....
The teenager’s death quickly received widespread attention, including from Ben Crump, the Floyd family’s lawyer, amid a continuing reckoning over police accountability and systemic racism.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air excoriated the Times for sticking to a racist-cop storyline even when the actual body-camera footage (that the Times had actually watched) contradicted the narrative. This was nothing like the Floyd case.
Bodycam footage shows that Bryant was shot as she was lunging to stab another black female, dressed in pink. Would critics have preferred the cops to stand back and let the stabbing happen? (Well, besides these guys.)
