A tragic officer-involved shooting of a black man has sparked nearly two weeks of activist marches and cries for justice in St. Paul, Minnesota. Angry protesters demanding police transparency have flooded the city’s streets and added 31-year-old Ronald K. Davis to their list of “martyred” African American males “unlawfully” shot and killed by police.
The evidence of this crime, it was presumed, was on the white police officer’s body camera video footage. Officer Steven Mattson’s patrol car had been rammed by Davis at intersection of North Griggs Street and Thomas Avenue. As Mattson exited his vehicle, Davis ignored Mattson’s demands to halt.
Davis rushed at Mattson with a knife, and Mattson subsequently shot Davis, killing him.
Following a shooting investigation conducted by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a statewide criminal investigative agency, St. Paul Police Chief Todd Axtell was prompted to release Mattson’s body camera footage — a fairly unprecedented move in an investigation that has yet to be formally concluded. Axtell explained his reason to do so by citing the barrage of unfounded accusations lobbed at his department.
He defended Mattson, describing him as “an officer who had no choice but to defend himself against an immediate and violent threat.”
St. Paul’s African American mayor, Melvin Carter, after reviewing the footage, provided his impression: “I see Officer Mattson defending himself while retreating, and as a son of a police officer … I can’t say I see anything beyond that we could have expected him to do.”
But the factual revelation of irrefutable body camera footage was never to be enough to satiate the bloodlust of anti-police activists. As more and more police departments outfit their officers with body cameras, the new protest tactic in the wake of inconvenient false-narrative-trampling hard evidence is to simply refuse to believe one’s lying eyes.
According to a release from the Anti-Police Brutality Coalition, as reported by KMSP FOX 9:
“It is unclear from the limited body camera footage what types of de-escalation tactics were used by Officer Mattson, why he fell to the ground, why his flashlight fell, and whether he attempted to use nonlethal force before using deadly force against Ronald Davis,” the coalition wrote in the release. “The public also has a right to demand an independent investigation in police shooting cases in Minnesota, given the relative frequency within which they have been occurring the disproportionate rate of Black men and other men of color being killed by police. Beyond that, there have been allegations of corruption within the St. Paul Police Department and the BCA for many years and those concerns have not been taken seriously by Governor Walz or other elected officials.”
There you have it: A fair and impartial accounting of videotaped officer actions in this incident and a complete gathering of all the facts in the case never were part of the desired end state. In the activism business, you have to stoke fiery emotion, and it does not necessarily require a tethering to facts. The “grievance industry” is predicated on stirring up raw, naked sensations and opportunistically isolating the few bad actors in order to smear an entire profession.
Ultimately, we may never know why Davis made that fateful decision to ram Mattson’s cruiser and then charge him with an edged weapon. Was he truly committed to becoming a cop-killer? Was he a preternaturally unstable person suffering from mental health issues? Or was he simply seeking to commit suicide-by-cop, knowing that his actions would be met with justifiable lethal force?
Tragic as his death may be, the blame lies squarely at the doorstep of Davis.
The activists seeking to keep this tragic chapter alive have certainly co-opted former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s cynical philosophy that “you never let a serious crisis go to waste.”
That explains a lot in St. Paul, where activists are leveraging this incident to serve their cause.
It was never about transparency: They received the video footage before it should have been released. It was never about police brutality: Charge a police officer with a weapon, you should expect to be met with lethal force. And it was never about de-escalation: Davis, armed with a knife, failed to comply with the officer’s commands.
You simply don’t have time to de-escalate a knife-wielding perpetrator as they rapidly close a short distance with you. In the defensive tactics realm, this is the “21-Foot Rule” — colloquially understood to be “a measure of distance that related to the time it would take an officer to recognize a threat, draw a sidearm, and fire two rounds center mass against an attacker charging with a knife or other stabbing weapon.”
Mattson is guilty of nothing except electing to serve as a police officer during these woke times. He is also the “beneficiary” of slanted and loaded anti-police news coverage: the grist that helps to fuel activist rage. An armed white male shot while charging a police officer would never receive the level of press coverage or have clear-cut video footage of the appropriate dispensing of lethal force continue to be questioned.
Need further proof of media slant? Here’s the headline at twincities.com five days after the shooting: “St. Paul police to release body cam video from shooting; man shot was father, recent grad.” No mention in the headline of the critical fact that Davis was “a knife-wielding perpetrator who charged a police officer before being shot to death.” More important for the media narrative was to highlight Davis’ recent Facebook post about graduating from a maintenance and facilities training course and that he was a father.
These are perilous times to be a police officer. Line-of-duty deaths are a constant threat. To date, 35 law enforcement officers have been killed by assailant gunfire this year and two by assault. But the pernicious effects of activist narrative distortions, aided by the media, are crippling the policing profession as well. What youngster aspiring to protect and serve could possibly desire to undergo the attendant gratuitous smears, second-guessing, and outright lies? Leading Democratic presidential candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, and billionaire Tom Steyer have recently been admonished by fact-checkers for dishonestly labeling the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a “murder.”
Sadly, we’re about to undergo more smears of police officers in the run-up to the 2020 election as Democrats scramble to solidify their base. If we have learned anything in the wake of the St. Paul police shooting of Davis, it is that facts be damned.
When irrefutable videotaped evidence of an officer in St. Paul defending himself from an armed attacker can be casually set aside as inconclusive, we have crossed the Rubicon. Maybe there needs to be an assessment of why the policing profession stands alone in the arena of public discourse as assailments against it are welcomed and not viewed as an undermining of our sacred governmental institutions.
James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John’s University.
