As it happens, my office overlooks the main drag of Kansas City’s counterculture/ homeless hub. On one lonely day during the weird COVID spring of 2020, I heard screaming out on the street, not unusual here, but when it persisted, I went down to check it out.
What I saw wasn’t pretty. A white male Kansas City police officer was kneeling on the neck of a woman. My first thought? “Thank God she’s white.” The woman was large and rambunctious. Using just a well-applied knee, the officer managed to hold her in place for at least ten minutes until back-up arrived. The arriving cops slipped a Hannibal-the-Cannibal mask over her face. That wasn’t pretty either. Take-downs never are. I had considered recording the incident on my cellphone, but I chose not to. In retrospect, I should have. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: The Semantic Burden of Speaking While White)
From the moment I saw the edited video of George Floyd’s arrest a few weeks later, I knew better than to accept the media verdict. Derek Chauvin used exactly the same maneuver my local cop did. The woman in Kansas City had lungs enough to wake a neighborhood. Floyd did not. The problem, I suspected, was not with Chauvin, but with Floyd.
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