Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The message from police, from the right, and even from some Democrats is the same: Ma'Khia Bryant had a knife, and so she had to be executed.

 

An Ohio criminal-justice professor who studies the fatal use of force by law-enforcement officers didn't hesitate to render an opinion after watching body-camera video of a Columbus police officer fatally shooting a 16-year-old girl Tuesday afternoon on the city's Southeast Side.

"My first impression is that the officer was legally justified in using deadly force," said Philip Stinson, a Bowling Green State University professor who has compiled nationwide statistics on fatal shootings that have led to criminal charges against officers.

"It's a terribly tragic situation, and my heart goes out to the girl and her family and friends," he told The Dispatch Wednesday. "But from looking at the video, it appears to me that a reasonable police officer would have had a reasonable apprehension of an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death being imposed against an officer or someone else. That's the legal standard."

The body-camera video, which the city first showed during a news conference late Tuesday night, captured the perspective of Officer Nicholas Reardon, who shot Ma’Khia Bryant seconds after he arrived outside a home on the 3100 block of Legion Lane on a report of an attempted stabbing.

The video shows Bryant, who is holding a knife, push a female who is falling down backwards at the officer's feet, then turn and charge at another female dressed in a pink outfit. The female in pink is pinned against a car in the driveway while Bryant appears to swing the knife at her, prompting Reardon to fire what sounds like four shots.

James Scanlon, a retired Columbus Division of Police SWAT officer who spent 33 years with the division, has since trained officers, and served as an expert witness at trials in use-of-force cases, agreed with Stinson's assessment of the video.

"An officer is justified in using deadly force if his life or the life of someone else is at risk," Scanlon said Wednesday. "Few would argue that there weren't at least two lives there that were at serious risk."

In this case, Scanlon said, Reardon wasn't trying to protect himself, "but to save the life of someone he doesn't even know. ... It's a shame that no one has recognized that that officer, in all likelihood, saved one or more lives."

 

No attempt made to deescalate. Just summary execution of a 15-year -old Black girl.

Four bullets in the chest and dead.

 

Due process isn't for us, you see. We're not human. The penalty for having a knife and being Black is death, and then, later, America justifies it.

Just another dead Black girl.

 

But her life mattered.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.