Brian Dunn hopefully doesn’t expect to be invited back on MSNBC to talk about policing minority communities anytime soon. He surely earned himself a lifetime ban for what he said on the air this week.
Dunn, a lawyer who happens to be black, said during the funeral proceedings of Daunte Wright on Thursday that young black men need to understand the high-pressure experience of being engaged by a police officer. Noncompliance with orders from a cop or attempts to evade officers, he said, could very well escalate a situation to a fatal level.
“We have to say that this goes both ways,” said Dunn. “Yes, we don’t want the officers to use deadly force, and they have historically been all too quick to do that. But at the same time, I was taught by my father to never run because they’ll kill you. And the idea is, it doesn’t make it the fault of the person that’s being shot for getting killed. It doesn’t say that. They shouldn’t be killed at all. But at the same time, we have to understand the way these situations play out is it is frenetic energy on top of frenetic energy.”
Dunn added that “We have to teach our boys that any encounter with a police officer can quickly degenerate into a deadly encounter if they lose their cool or if they do anything that is a provocative act.”
It’s a minor miracle that his mic wasn’t cut before being hauled off the set by security for uttering such heresy.
Doesn’t Dunn know that you can’t say things like, “You shouldn’t run from the police” in liberal precincts such as MSNBC?
The only acceptable lines for liberals when talking about police are, “Cops are racist” and “It’s always the cop’s fault.”
Not to worry, though. MSNBC host Tiffany Cross was brought in to counter Dunn and accuse him of being an Uncle Tom for saying something normal, something that will literally save someone’s life. “I think that the practice of white supremacy is so deeply woven in this country,” she said, “that you will have the oppressed adopting talking points of the oppressors.”
Yeah, you read that correctly. Cross accused Dunn, a black man, of advocating white supremacy because he said it could be life-threatening to run from police.
We, in fact, know that it is. Wright, a 20-year-old black man, was shot last week by police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, after he tried fleeing in his car from an arrest. There is debate over whether the officer had intended to hit Wright with her Taser, but there is no question that he was making a run for it. It doesn’t mean he deserved to die, but it definitely meant he put his own life and the life of his girlfriend (who was in the passenger seat) in danger when he pulled away from the cops and into his car, where, for all cops knew at the time, there was a gun or some other weapon.
However, Cross saw nothing wrong with his actions. “First of all, this is a 20-year-old kid,” she said of Wright, who was older than 18 and therefore very much not a “kid.”
“Imagine what he has experienced in his lifetime, what he has seen in his lifetime, to have these law enforcement officers to put him in handcuffs,” Cross said. “He was fearful. … But somehow, we want to put the onus on this kid.”
I don’t know what Wright saw or experienced in his lifetime. There’s no indication that Cross knows either. But there is one thing we know — according to his rap sheet, this wasn’t the first time Wright took the enormous, ridiculous, stupid risk that inherently goes with running from the police, regardless of your race.
She continued, “This kid was just trying to get home. I refuse to put any blame on this kid.”
And therein lies the reason why any debate over policing is hopeless. The facts in Wright’s case don’t necessarily prove that the officer who fired her weapon was justified. They do prove that Wright had a history of violating court orders against having a gun, of skipping out on hearings, and that he had been accused of attempting to rob a woman at gunpoint.
That’s why he was being placed under arrest. He wasn’t “just trying to get home.” He was trying, again, to evade the authorities.
If liberals and Democrats won’t even acknowledge that, there is no point in having this discussion with them.
