It’s a harrowing video. A man, scared for his life, saying he can’t breathe while police laid him down, put him in handcuffs, restrained his legs, and knelt on his body for over 10 minutes. The video shows him crying “help me” and “you’re gonna kill me” while begging for his life to police officers before he eventually dies.
Tony Timpa was a 32-year-old trucking company executive when he died in the custody of the Dallas Police Department in 2016 after calling 911 for help, telling dispatchers he had mental health issues but had not taken his medication.
You’ve heard of George Floyd, but you most likely haven’t heard of Timpa, who died nearly four years earlier. One was treated as a martyr, whereas the other was completely forgotten about.
Reports surfaced on Sunday that a statue of George Floyd in New York’s Union Square Park was vandalized. Police have surveillance video of an unidentified man throwing paint on the statue at approximately 10 a.m. and then fleeing. While this act was indeed wrong, the big question is, why does Floyd have a statue to begin with? Furthermore, why does he have a statue when Timpa doesn’t?
People miss the fact that the police shoot and kill a lot of white people. The media, ever eager to turn every police shooting of a black person into a national story even when the shooting is completely justified, just don’t care when whites are killed by the police.
In fact, more unarmed whites (26 in 2020) than unarmed blacks (18 in 2020) are shot by police in any given year. Liberal Democrats have created a false narrative that black people are in constant, imminent danger of being killed by police, but the reality is more complicated. And the media, eager to stoke racial tensions, simply ignore stories like those of Timpa, because even if they point to something very wrong about how policing is done, they don’t advance the preferred racial narrative.
Yes, a higher percentage of black people are victims of police shootings compared to their share of the U.S. population (13%). But this is, at least in part, a function of their disproportionate involvement in crime, particularly with violent crime. The FBI reports that 39% of homicides with known offenders are committed by black people. If police confrontations are disproportionately with black people, you would expect disproportionate results.
If dying in police custody warrants a statue dedication, then perhaps we need a statue of Timpa. Or Daniel Shaver. Or hundreds of white people who died at the hands of police.
But probably none of them should have statues, including Floyd. The better explanation is simply that biased liberal journalists and Democrats deliberately ignore white victims of police brutality because they cannot weaponize or racialize their deaths — and that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
