Pretextual Race Baiting

 

The idiots at the Propaganda & Criminals continue in their efforts to stir up and inflame the fires of racial discord. Their recent article “Pull over: Practice of pretext police stops under fire” is just the latest in which they use poorly presented statistics as a pretext to publish yet another hit piece on law enforcement to show their support for the NAACP and Dot “It’s a badge of honor to kill a nigger” Scott.

As most of you already know, the Propaganda & Criminals and Jive 5 News tend to be the propaganda mouthpieces for the NAACP, NAN and the socialists in the poorly named “black lives matter” movement. The other two television news stations in Charleston have recently jumped aboard that bandwagon in an effort to increase their own ratings. CTL is the sole voice of reason in the Lowcountry since your local “journalists” have abandoned all pretense of impartial journalism.

The article begins with a one-sided anecdotal story from one Antonio Ellis. We suppose we are expected to give his words additional weight after we are told he is an adjunct professor at the College of Charleston. After all, there is no way someone as serious as a professor would lie or fudge on the facts of a story when it comes to something as serious as racial profiling. Right?

Ellis tells us he was stopped one night on Rivers Avenue because an officer thought he had a headlight out. We are given his side of the story with few real details, but the authors failed to go any further to verify the claims. It would appear they never bothered to ask for a copy of the warning (or police contact) citation all officers are required to provide to every motorist who is stopped. That requirement was set forth by state law due to the usually fraudulent, yet constant, claims of racial profiling. We find that failure to follow up is the norm for local “journalists” when there is the possibility the facts uncovered might not jibe with the slant of their reporting. However, they never fail to to file the necessary paperwork to get the history of a police officer.

The P&C did use data from those contact forms, however. They had to use them in order to accurately determine how many traffic stops a department makes. We are told their analysis of those documents over the past five years shows a traffic stop is conducted every eight minutes in North Charleston. We think that is kind of slack because we can’t seem to drive for more than two minutes anywhere in the Lowcountry without seeing some moron we would like to pull over and issue a ticket to. To be fair, those officers do have to actually answer calls, though.

We are further informed over half of those stops result in no citations which would levy fines or points on a drivers license. Gee, seems to us like those police officers are being rather generous with the warning citations. Not so, according to the P&C. They imply officers only issue those warnings because the stops are fraudulent to begin with and the cops are just harassing black folks.

Our proposal to remedy that situation? All of our officers should simply stock up on ticket books and write an actual points/fine citation for every traffic or equipment violation. The taxpayers of South Carolina have to pay for all of those useless warning citations officers are handing out and we get no return on our investment.

Another mantra we always hear is that cops are just revenue generators. Okay, so go out and generate some damn revenue then. Give the people what they want. We are willing to bet NCPD could quintuple that 1.4 million dollars in revenue the P&C says they generated in 2014. Once again, the P&C failed to provide you with a breakdown of just how much of that 1.4 million went to the state and how much the city received. They would rather you believe it all went to the city. They think that will make you angry enough to overlook the other shortcomings in their reporting.

The authors of the article tell us NCPD makes more stops than any other department. Good. Have you seen the crime rate in North Charleston lately? The authors immediately drop into the “more blacks are stopped” argument to support their implication that law enforcement officers are racist. Here is where we get into the catch-22 that all law enforcement officers are aware of. They are expected to do their jobs and ferret out crime. Traffic stops is one tool to do just that. We want our police officers to be proactive. Even the black community has demanded that. Well, except for when black folks get arrested or do something stupid and get hurt as a result. When that happens the cops are racist.

Take the case of the folks in the Dorchester Waylyn neighborhood of North Charleston. Before the former police chief was finally run off by the Mayor the folks in Waylyn were whining and complaining about all of the cops patrolling that violent, crime ridden area and stopping people. They had time to whine because they were ducking fewer bullets and were not being robbed as much as they usually were. They decided the police presence and activities necessary to keep that crime rate down was suddenly oppressive. Race-baiters like James Johnson complained.

We are told the former chief issued a policy he called “sell the stop” in an effort to gain the cooperation and understanding of people in high crime areas like Waylyn. That policy required officers to approach the violator and say, “Good evening, I am officer Do-good. I stopped you because you have a brake light out. We are in the neighborhood because there have been quite a few armed robberies, sexual assaults, shootings and murders. May I see your license and registration, please?” You can see why the writers of the article would not let you know about the sell the stop policy even though they have been aware of it from the time it was instituted.

Needless to say, selling the stop did little to appease certain folks because they view any law enforcement presence in their community as an occupying force and any effort by police to hold black folks accountable for following the law is racist. The writers of this article and those interviewed actually tell us black people should not be stopped for violations of the law.

After the former chief moved the new Chief instructed officers to retreat a bit on those proactive policies.  After events like those in Ferguson, New York and the Walter Scott shooting the proactive approach was withdrawn even further. In addition to the official draw-down on proactive policing, a lot of officers who were very active in trying to make certain communities safer have decided it just isn’t worth the risk. Many of them are now content to just roll around in their cruisers and answer calls rather than engage in preemptive activities that could place them at risk for false allegations of racism. Since most local departments won’t bother to charge anyone for filing a false report on an officer those fraudulent allegations have been flying fast and furious.

Just a few months ago the media was gleefully reporting on a letter to the Mayor of North Charleston. That letter was allegedly written by a resident of the Waylyn neighborhood and demanded the police start doing something about all of the crime in the area. You know, kind of like what they were doing prior to being called racists. Now the police are being accused of being racists and not caring about the black residents who lived in that violent neighborhood.

Racist if you do, racist if you don’t.

The authors couldn’t wait to draw parallels between what they want you to believe are racist traffic stops in the Lowcountry and incidents in Texas and Cincinnati. Just for the record, we have reviewed that video from the Cincinnati stop. That officer has some real problems with that case. We think he’s going to prison for a very long time and justifiably so, unless there is an in-car video actually showing him being dragged by the suspect. The media likes to take one or two isolated examples, however questionable, and conflate them into a full blown war on blacks by police.

While the P&C and those in the legal field like to call stops for missing license plates, burned out lights, bald tires, improper lane change and no seatbelt “pretext stops” it does not change the fact that all of them are violations of the law. We couldn’t help but notice how the prosecutor in Cincinnati called that stop for a missing front license plate a “chickenshit” stop. Well, the citizens and legislators in Ohio decided cars should have two plates, front and back, and passed a law to require it. Not having one of those plates is a violation of the law and officers in Ohio are sworn to uphold those laws. We are willing to bet if that stop in Cincinnati had led to the arrest of that driver on outstanding charges of robbery or murder that prosecutor would not be standing at a podium calling it a chickenshit stop. He would be calling it excellent police work.

The authors of the article use the words “inherently dishonest” to imply that police officers stopping black citizens for violations of the traffic and vehicle statutes is a bad thing. Dot “It’s a badge of honor to kill a nigger” Scott doubles down on this implication saying it is dishonest for police to stop a black person for a traffic violation if they suspect that motorist might be up to no good, committing or about to commit another crime. Strange. We would call that good investigative skills. But, we aren’t race-baiters.

Glenn Smith and Tony Bartelme managed to make a generalized accusation that officers “escalate” these stops and humiliate innocent black folks. Point of fact - a violation is a violation. Thus, a stop for that violation is legal and proper. However, the authors want you to believe the perception of “humiliation” by people stopped for those violations is what justifies any “accidents, mistakes and violence” the offender might engage in against the officer as a result of the stop. In that one paragraph they managed to indict every police officer who conducts a traffic stop, particularly those which go bad because of the actions of the violator. Here we have the media trying to give people a defense for bad behavior and poor decision making.

In their continuing effort to paint our local cops as racists the P&C points out that in 65 percent of the stops in North Charleston, and 40 percent of those in Charleston,  the violators were black. That must mean the cops are racially profiling, right? Nope. For folks who don’t see a racist behind every tree those numbers are insignificant. Logical people can watch the news (even if it is slanted) and easily see black communities have the highest crime rates and are where the majority of our violent crimes occur. It naturally follows that officers are concentrated in high crime areas in an effort to keep those numbers down. More police officers equals more traffic stops and more citations.

Where would you rather see more police officers? Maybe we can draw off half of the officers in those high crime black neighborhoods and stick them in Coosaw Creek or Wild Dunes instead. That simple action should stop the killings of mothers, the shooting of five year old kids and the blight of black bodies littering the streets in those areas, right? Yeah, not so much. Remember that letter from Waylyn mentioned above? Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

The authors of the current article also conveniently failed to mention the results of another P&C analysis from about a year ago. That article showed that officers tended to issue more warning citations to black violators than to white violators who were stopped for the same offenses. Damn racist police!

Assistant Chief Burgess of NCPD addressed the issue of concentrating police in high crime areas, but he stopped short of calling it like it is. Surprisingly Chief Mullen of CPD stepped into the gap left by Burgess and told the truth about the correlation between black neighborhoods and high crime rates. That was very politically incorrect of the usually PC chief of police in Charleston.

Next up is a comment from one of the usual suspects, Pastor Thomas Dixon, who says traffic stops for violations of the law are “over aggressive” policing. Would he feel the same way if the rich white folks in Coosaw Creek were the violators? Once again we come face to face with the concept that black folks should be exempt from the law simply because they are black.

What Dixon should be telling folks is to make sure all of the equipment on their vehicles is in working order as required by the law. He didn’t bother to use this appearance in the media to tell people not to smoke or carry marijuana in their cars because cops can smell that stuff and it gives them reasonable suspicion to take the stop a step further. He didn’t tell them to stop leaving all that loose cigar tobacco or baggies with residue in plain sight. That would be too easy and would put a damper on his ability to race bait and raise money. Dixon further claims people are being stopped simply because they drive nice cars and cops think they are drug dealers. Of course, it is racist to think someone driving a $50,000 SUV with $5,000 rims or a late model Mercedes who lives in known Section 8 housing and shops with an EBT card might be up to something shady.

You readers knew the P&C would eventually run to their racial propaganda director Dot “It’s a badge of honor to kill a nigger” Scott for some racist commentary and they didn’t disappoint. She says officers stopping black folks in violent black neighborhoods creates a siege mentality. No, Dot, what creates a siege mentality is your complete silence and lack of action or concern when it comes to the bodies of black folks (e.g. women, children, bystanders and thugs) leaking blood all over the streets of those neighborhoods. Those bodies being the direct result of the violent actions of other black folks. But you don’t want to talk about all that, do you? Being truthful about black on black violence doesn’t fill the coffers of the NAACP like bullshit claims of racial profiling do.

The authors then go into some detail with a liberal professor who wrote on a book on how black folks feel when stopped by the police. Feelings. Solid stuff right there. The black members of our team were wondering why lily white professors and media folks feel the need to tell black folks how to feel about a subject. The melanin deficient professor in question in this article is Charles Epp of the University of Kansas. Epp claims cops use traffic violations as a means of targeting black folks and asking them questions. Apparently, according to Epp, police never question white folks on traffic stops.

In closing the authors of the race baiting law enforcement hit piece tell us another anecdotal story without bothering to check into it. That story came from a fellow by the name of Tereze Legare. Legare has appeared in these pages before when he appeared at a function where the NAACP was telling folks CPD and SLED lied about the suicide of Denzell Curnell. This time Legare treated us to a story of how a racist black cop stopped him for no reason and searched his car because, you know, it’s a nice car and the racist officer assumed he was a drug dealer. Of course, Legare and the authors leave out the actual reason for the stop. They fail to tell us the offense he was stopped for, and believe us, Legare gets stopped a lot. Not because he’s black or because he drives a tricked out car or belongs to a car club. He gets stopped and cited for actual violations of SC law. We counted 21 traffic citations since 1992 just in Charleston County. Of course, in the eyes of race-baiters that has to be result of racial profiling and not the poor driving abilities of Legare or his apparent willingness to violate traffic laws.

Legare tells us he is only ever stopped by police because he drives a tricked out car. Let’s take a look at Legare’s attitude about cops first.

 

 

 

 

Now, we already been fed the implication every traffic stop conducted on Legare was because cops are racist and racially profiled him and his tricked out car. Those stops had nothing to do with having the wrong license on his car (a charge still pending), speeding (multiple offenses) or failing to wear a seatbelt as required by law. We only went back five years in Charleston County since the P&C only went back five years. There are quite a few more traffic violations for Legare as mentioned above.

 

 

 

 

That sure is a whole bunch of “tried in absence, found guilty” dispositions. You would think an activist who is constantly accusing cops of being racists would actually appear in court and fight what he seems to believe are traffic violations issued solely as a result of racial profiling.

 

Yes, we know we are tilting at windmills here. Most of the folks who actually pay for and read the Propaganda and Criminals are die-hard liberals who believe every word written therein. No one can change their minds. We know that, but just find it necessary from time to time to provide a counterbalance to the propaganda and bias spewed forth in those pages by folks who are supposed to be unbiased journalists. Unfortunately, there are very few of those left.