"I haven't done my research and this is the last thing that I can grasp at."

 
I need to make something clear to people: Jacob Blake was not paralyzed from the waist down for life over two disorderly conduct charges. Those are the charges that he plead guilty to well after the incident in a plea deal.

Nobody in his or her right mind thinks that police should also be the judges, juries, and executioners; but, that's usually not what happens.

Sure, it does happen that a cops just decide to murder a guy. Sure, cops may get a call, go into the situation knowing that the dude has felony warrants (as Blake did) and decide to kill him rather than take him in. When that does happen, those cops should die in prison.

That's not what happened with Jacob Blake. That's usually not what happens. Jacob Blake wasn't shot because of his past crimes or the future guilty pleas.

Blake was shot because his ex called the cops telling them that he was trying to take her kids, Blake fought with the cops with a knife, Blake was still resisting after two taser hits, and he was getting into that car with those kids and with the knife and was trying to abduct them.

He wasn't shot because of the warrants. He wasn't shot because of past convictions. He was shot because of what he was doing at that moment.

If Blake had no warrants and no criminal record and was still behaving in the same way and engaging in the same actions, he would have been shot because the alternative was to let him speed off with two kids and leave the kids at Blake's mercy.

This seems to commonly be the case when it comes to shootings by police. Michael Brown wasn't killed for shoplifting. He was killed because he was attacking the officer. Walter Wallace Jr wasn't killed because of his mental health issues or his drug abuse. He was killed because he was lunging at people, including police, erratically with a knife.

Of course when something like the shooting of Walter Scott happens, which was clearly murder by police, the cop should go to jail for the rest of his life and we should be pissed about it.

The fact that these acts of pure evil happen doesn't make your narrative true. I'd dare to wager that situations like the murder of Walter Scott in which Scott was, realistically, not shot for anything that he had actually done other than piss the cop off a bit and the cop decided that he'd rather shoot him in the back than do a little jogging, are far more common than shootings by cops who just decide to shoot the guy in cold blood because of his rap sheet.

Two things that I have to say that I think are constructive rather than entirely critical:

• If we want to make progress on anything, the facts need to outweigh the narrative. To say that Jacob Blake was shot because of two charges of disorderly conduct is factually and logically incorrect. People are only saying that because they want it to be true because it fits a narrative that they need to be true in order for their worldviews to be true.

• I hate to have to reiterate this; but, I've only had two pleasant interactions with police - most of them have been awful and terrifying and I'm saying that as a white guy with no criminal record - still, your best chance of getting out of an encounter with police alive is to comply. I know that that's weird coming from an anarchist; but, it's true.