Friday on CNN’s OutFront, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. Joyce Beatty stated, in reference to the police shooting of a black teen in Columbus, Ohio to stop her from murdering another with a kitchen knife, that “it’s appalling” that police officers are trained to always shoot for the center of the body.
“We can’t say that the lady in the pink [the potential victim] would have been killed,” the clueless Beatty claimed. Apparently she didn’t see the same police bodycam footage everyone else did. “Here’s what I believe: You see in eleven seconds, four shots and a teenager on the ground dead. I think there has to be a better way.”
There is a better way. If you are trying to kill someone and a cop arrives on the scene, stop trying to kill that person immediately. This radical solution will result in far fewer people shot by cops.
Beatty went on to blather insultingly about how cops “have to learn how to de-escalate” in situations when a violent crime is underway.
“I don’t support a system that you drive up and the automatic thing is to put four bullets in the chest of a 16-year-old,” Beatty said nonsensically. “I think that it’s appalling that we can have someone say, our system is to train officers to go to the center of the body no matter what. So, if she had a water gun, if she had a sandwich, if she had keys, if she had a cell phone, and it looks like she was going to hit or harm someone, the answer is four bullets, six bullets in the back, in the chest? That’s not acceptable.”
What’s appalling and unacceptable is that our country has leaders who have absolutely no clue about police procedure, the realities of violence, and the purpose of shooting at center mass. What’s appalling and unacceptable is that we have leaders who twist life-and-death incidents into false narratives in which cops are demonized and violent perpetrators are canonized as innocent “children.” What’s appalling and unacceptable is that we have a mainstream media that aids and abets these worthless ideologues.
Lying leaders like Rep. Beatty should be required to go on a ride-along with cops all weekend in some Democrat-controlled urban killing field like Chicago, where they can get a real-world education about what cops have to endure on a daily basis.