Crime

Apr222021

Episode 334 – Mob Justice

The George Floyd trial ends with Derrick Chauvin being convicted on all counts. But, with the reactions of the results, we can see that this will never end.

 

The Verdict

The verdict is in:

There are major questions about this trial. I saw him getting man slaughter but never thought he was going to get convicted of murder because I didn’t think the evidence was there.

It took ten hours for the jury to convict Chauvin and they had no questions. This was a month long trial and it only took them ten hours?

The jury basically had to ignore some things:

  • The drugs in his system. Fentanyl and meth.
  • The fact that Floyd overdosed in drugs two months before.
  • Floyd’s enlarged heart.
  • Floyd’s constricted arteries to his heart.
  • Floyd’s hypertension.
  • Floyd’s criminal history.
  • The videos.
  • The lies about Chauvin being on his neck.
  • The assault Floyd committed in the police car.
  • Floyd resisting arrest.

 

The reality is the jurors feared the consequences of voting not guilty. There is no way they could convict on murder in only ten hours. The fact that the media already had a description of all the jurors is very telling and that all of them lived in the area.

This is what is going to lead to appeals. There was plenty done wrong in this case and I don’t see how an appeals court doesn’t overturn some of this. This might even lead to a mistrial.

  • Change of venue.
  • Sequestration.
  • Non-probative, prejudicial witnesses for the prosecution.
  • Biden and Waters comments.
  • Third degree murder? Depraved Heart murder?
  • Second degree murder? Intent to assault which caused the death of an individual?

 

I am a cynical guy these days. I would not be shocked if this case was declared a mistrial and will need to be retried. Not because of all the bad decisions by Judge Cahill but because the left wants a retrial. The left wants to be able to point and say there can never be justice for black people.

We will see because this is going to be appealed and the case for appeal is quite strong.

 

 

Reaction

The reaction from George Floyd’s girlfriend is basically the reaction everybody had:

BLM and Antifa continued to protest. They made it clear that they would never be satisfied with the results.

  • These people are never going to stop. Peace and justice aren’t enough.
  • They see Chauvin’s conviction as justice but see it as motivation to continue on trying to destroy the system.
  • They want communism, the ending of the police. Heroes are criminals and criminals are heroes.
  • George Floyd is not seen as a criminal but as a symbol. He is seen as one being sacrificed for the movement. Not a drug addict handing out a fake $20.
  • These people do not care about George Floyd or Derrick Chauvin. They care about destroying the system.
  • I also want to point out that everybody I’m going to talk about is basically admitting they influenced the jury.

 

Al Sharpton, maybe the greatest race baiter in modern American history, said:

 “… we don’t find pleasure in this. We don’t celebrate a man going to jail. We would have rather George be alive. But we celebrate that we — because young people, white and black — some castigated, many that are here tonight, marched and kept marching and kept going. Many of them looked down on but they kept marching and wouldn’t let this die. And this is an assurance to them that if we don’t give up that we can win some rounds but the war and the fight is not over. Just two days from now, we are going to have to deal with the funeral of Duante Wright in this same county, this same area.

“We still have cases to fight. But this gives us the energy to fight on and we are determined that we are going to fight until we make federal law — the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act must be law. We want to thank all that were involved, especially the attorney general and the governor and others.

“We want to thank President Biden, who the first time he came out of his house during the campaign he flew to Houston and met with the family and Attorney Crump and I. And he sat there and I will never forget — he said to George’s daughter that ‘I heard you say your father is going to change the world.’ Well, we can now tell George’s daughter she was right. Her father has begun the changing of the world for real.”

  • Again, this will never end.
  • George Floyd is not going to change the world. He’s not a hero. He’s not a civil rights champion. He didn’t die for the cause.
  • He was a criminal that died for resisting arrest and drugs.
  • One of Floyd’s supporters actually compared George Floyd to Emmitt Till. This is insane.

 

https://www.dailywire.com/news/black-lives-matter-activists-following-conviction-were-never-gonna-be-satisfied-burn-it-down
https://www.dailywire.com/news/rev-al-sharpton-reacts-to-verdict-the-war-and-the-fight-is-not-over
https://www.dailywire.com/news/black-lives-matter-directs-allies-to-l-a-mayor-garcettis-home-after-chauvin-guilty-verdict
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7120/text

 

Reaction in Politics

Biden and Harris

President Biden and President-in-waiting Kamala Harris weighed in on this. Of course, what they promulgated, as usual, is that we are systemically racist and we need President Biden and the federal government to change the system, have more power and save black people.

Kamala Harris said:

Biden’s comments weren’t much better and certainly didn’t deviate from the narrative:

OK:

  • I find it creepy that Kamala is with Old Joe all the time.
  • Let’s face it, this is only a local crime. Why is the White House weighing in on this? Could it be to push this narrative?
  • Old Joe and Kamala are pushing that this verdict is only the start and the end is no where to be seen.
  • Notice they talk about the “protests” of last summer. There is no mention of the riots. These riots are continuing. They have not stopped. The violence happened again last night.
  • There was never a comment about the police being good in any way.
  • They are bringing up something that the prosecution never brought up: race or racism.
  • What is really ironic is hearing about systemic racism coming from a guy who has been part of the system for 60 years and a gal who was known for throwing people in jail for longer than their sentences in some cases.
  • The thought that these two boneheads are going to fix anything is crazy.

 

These guys want to federalize everything. They want power. They need the “crisis” to continue. It cannot end with a guilty verdict of Derrick Chauvin. I’ll go a step further: I feel they really wanted a not guilty verdict. That would have gone with the narrative much better.

Nancy Pelosi

This had to be one of the most idiotic statements by a politician. OK, I didn’t get to AOC and her squad yet. But let’s listen to Nancy Pelosi:

  • This just an insane statement and actually very cold.
  • George Floyd did not sacrifice anything for anything. This wasn’t his attempt at social and racial justice. He probably died of a heart attack and a drug overdose.
  • George Floyd was not calling out to his mom, who died two years earlier. They think he was calling out to his girlfriend who he called mom. It was the name of her contact on his phone.
  • Floyd was saying “I can’t breathe” while he was sitting in his own car. He said it about 10 times.
  • This is trying to to make a martyr out of a criminal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you see a pattern here? This is not going to end until the entire system is torn down.

Ilhan Omar, in a series of tweets, really summed up what the squad and the left wants.

Omar listed the following items, which included calls to disband police departments:

  • Independent agency to investigate police misuse of force
  • Criminalize violence against protesters
  • Demilitarize police departments
  • Disband and deconstruct failed police departments
  • End traffic stops for minor equipment violations
  • Federal investigations into departments who utilize practices like arrest quotas
  • End the school-to-prison pipeline
  • Ban all racial profiling by federal, state, and local agencies
  • Legalize recreational cannabis nationwide, expunge the records and seek amnesty for those incarcerated for cannabis-related offenses
  • Restore felon voting rights
  • Ensure that formerly incarcerated individuals are fully supported in their transition back to society
  • End mandatory minimum sentencing laws for low-level offenses
  • Invest in a public-health approach to the addiction crisis

 

Getting a clearer picture to what the left wants? Anyone who is against this is a racist.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-takes-aim-at-america-following-george-floyd-verdict-systemic-racism-a-stain-on-our-nations-soul
https://www.dailywire.com/news/aoc-other-far-left-lawmakers-on-chauvin-convicted-on-all-counts-not-justice-system-not-working

 

Need to Keep the Crisis Going

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/derek-chauvin-verdict-garland-announces-doj-minneapolis-policing-probe

 

Here We Go Again

Need more proof that this is never going to end? Yesterday in Columbus, Ohio, a couple of hours before the Chauvin verdict, police were called because a 16-year-old girl, who was black, threatened people with a knife.

The girl was shot after she appeared to attack two girls with a knife. The officer was white. There are huge protests over this whole thing so the Columbus police department released the body cam footage. It showed the girl in question push one girl down and attack another girl, also 16, with the knife.

By the way, the girl who dialed 911 and was attacked with the knife is also black. That officer saved her life.

Ben Crump, the race-baiting lawyer representing the family of George Floyd released a tweet:

See the pattern? Lies, lies, lies. All this to stir up emotion and suppress reason. This girl was intent on killing someone. Another black person. It was never mentioned that a white police officer saved the life of a black youth.

Now, I feel that this case is so obvious that it’s going to go away. There is no way the left is going to BS this story into something it’s not. It’s too obvious. This girl assaulted two other girls with a knife. This police officer is a hero. But he’s under criminal investigation anyway.

This is what is going to happen in the next couple of years because the left won’t stop gaslighting and enraging the naïve youth:

  • The good police officers will start retiring.
  • Those left will not go out of their way to help people for fear of being persecuted.
  • Cities will have problems getting new police officers.
  • With less police officers on the street there will be more crime.
  • The most crime will be in black, brown and poor neighborhoods.

 

It’s that simple. The good news is that gun ownership is going to go up because the people are going to learn to protect themselves.

Here’s the thing and I am going to use some terms from greater minds than I:

  • This was a mob conviction. And mobs are never sated. This will never end. Everyone on the left has said it. -Tucker
  • George Floyd has become a symbol, a martyr, an idol.
  • Politics has hijacked the Floyd movement and our institutions. The courts were the last remnants of our civilization. It looks like even that has been taken over. There were some Conservatives that were relieved that Chauvin was guilty. It’s cowardice and it will never end unless we fight, but one can understand. -Greg Gutfeld.
  • This trial was influenced by politicians and rioters. Violence works is the message. Rioting works.

 

https://www.dailywire.com/news/george-floyd-lead-attorney-tweeted-columbus-girl-was-unarmed-ny-times-leaves-that-out
https://www.foxnews.com/us/officer-involved-shooting-columbus-ohio-1-dead
https://www.dailywire.com/news/activists-erupt-after-police-kill-black-ohio-girl-video-shows-cop-protected-woman-from-knife-attack

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Feb052021

Episode 290 – Wokeness for Serial Killers?

 

The Culture

Last week, Josie and I watched a Netflix miniseries called Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. Actually, I saw it twice because Josie fell asleep once and had to leave my place once. I finished it because I was transfixed.

Now I remember this case. I was 17 years old at the time and lived in Los Angeles. Josie was only 6 years old and lived in San Diego. I wasn’t into news at the time but I followed this one. I remember that we would lock all our door and windows. I remember that there were hourly reports on the case. I remember that the news, only daily at the time, spent 15 to 20 minutes out of an hour on the murders. And there were a lot of murders. One every few days.

The documentary, which I recommend if you are into true crime stories, was excellent. There were a lot of things that were skipped probably because of censorship reasons. Richard Ramirez, who ended up being the Night Stalker, was a seriously twisted…human being? No, he was an animal. Filth. But, outside of that, the story was pretty accurate.

But the Left wing news outlet, Vox, had a problem with it. one could tell by there title, Night Stalker Review: Netflix misguided Night Stalker series treats cops like gods by Aja Romano. The bad grammar on the title is theirs.

It said:

The climactic moment of Netflix’s true crime docuseries Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, is probably supposed to feel cathartic. In the final minutes of the four-part series’ third installment, San Francisco detective Frank Falzon recalls how he tracked down a friend of the California serial killer whose string of attacks throughout 1984 and 1985 made him a household name among true crime followers.

Falzon describes this moment with relish almost four decades later. In his recounting, the friend — who’d originally contacted police himself with a tip about the Night Stalker’s identity — balked when Falzon asked him to reveal the Night Stalker’s full name. So Falzon forcibly dragged the friend-turned-informant into his police car, threatened him, and punched him in the face. This is a lie. That’s not what happened and that’s not what the movie said had happened.

  • A woman calls saying her father, who was homeless, might be hanging out with Ramirez in Skid Row.
  • Police find the man and he admits that Ramirez confessed the murders.
  • He said that Ramirez gives him a gun and sold it to someone in Tajuana.
  • Police fly to TJ and get the gun. They also find a radio which has a matching serial number to one that was stolen during one of the murders. At this point, they know Ramirez is the murder but only know him as “Rick”.
  • An informant gives a bracelet to police.
  • Police question the woman who owned the bracelet and said it was a gift from her boyfriend.
  • The boyfriend was, then, confronted by police and that’s when he got smacked down for not turning over a serial killer.

Worse, he knew what Richard Ramirez was doing.

“It wasn’t my best punch, but it definitely wasn’t my worst,” Falzon says. After further threats, Falzon says, he lunged toward the informant, who cringed away from him, “threw his hands up in a cross,” and stammered out: “Richard Ramirez. Richard Ramirez. Richard Ramirez.”

As Falzon repeated the name, the music swelled and grew more ominous. The episode cut to the docuseries’ cliffhanger end credits. And all I could think was how terrified this person must have been of the police.

Um, he should have been terrified of the police. He was hiding the name of a serial killer, rapist and child rapist. A man who had victimized over 20 people that the police knew of.

On the one hand, the production must have felt it would be satisfying to deprive Ramirez of some of that notoriety. To some extent, it is satisfying. In particular, it’s inspiring to hear from Ramirez’s survivors, including one couple who narrowly escaped their brush with Ramirez, and one victim who was assaulted by Ramirez when she was a child. Seeing her declare with certainty that she’s fine feels like the ultimate victory over Ramirez.

But Ramirez’s life arguably fits into a conversation about the cyclical nature of abuse and the cyclical horror of war — each a form of trauma. Likewise, a more thorough examination of Ramirez’s actions in the context of Satanic Panic could have made for a fascinating discussion within the series, had it been handled well. To what extent was Ramirez responding to the Satanic Panic of the era, and to what extent was he acting independent of it, but still becoming a part of the larger societal hysteria? These are all themes I’d have loved to see explored.

So, what this is saying, is that the film unjustly made the police into heroes for capturing a serial killer who left few clues and was completely random in his crimes. Instead, the documentary should have showed how a rapist, serial killer who kidnapped children and raped them was a victim. Nice.

The absence of Ramirez from his own story wasn’t that confusing to me because I could see what Night Stalker was trying to do. But it was confusing to other viewers I’ve spoken with, many of whom were totally unfamiliar with Ramirez’s story and naturally expected to learn about the titular serial killer.

There’s an obvious argument to be made that “understanding the mind of a serial killer” is too often used to justify overblown, glorified serial killer narratives. Sure. But we also need to understand the minds of serial killers, as well as the societal and personal circumstances that can lead to criminal behavior, if we’re ever going to fully understand criminality and attempt to rehabilitate potential offenders before it’s too late.

The only thing that would have confused me is why the writers didn’t say all that Richard Ramirez did. A lot of that was cut out because of the shear brutality of his crimes. There was more than enough as far as the timeline goes and pictures and videos of the crime scenes. In fact, other critics said that the documentary was too violent.

Perhaps it was. Carrillo and Salerno seemed to do good police work, even if the clue that led to the killer came from a Northern California citizen who apparently got punched in the face for his good deed. We need dedicated police officers who have positive relationships with their communities. Whenever cops do good work — work that truly serves the public — that moment feels like a victory. It comes with deep relief and pride in the justice system for functioning as it should.

But herein lies the difficulty of being a true crime fan: We have to recognize that police officers as a group perpetuate an inherently flawed and racist system of justice that fails people of color and marginalized communities far more often than it serves them. We can never lose sight of the reality that for every moment when the cops and the community are in harmony, there are countless others when the police force is the oppressor. And cases like Ramirez’s are often used as excuses for police to crack down and enact violence on people who aren’t serial killers.

Night Stalker doesn’t acknowledge this paradox at all. Instead, it treats Carrillo and Salerno like demigods. It approvingly lets a cop talk about punching an informant in the face and edits it like a pivotal, satisfying moment of triumph rather than a horrifying example of police brutality. And that strange omission — I mean, it’s dealing with the LAPD in the ’80s, perhaps the most notoriously racist police force to exist outside of the LAPD in the ’90s! — undermines Night Stalker’s effort to excise the bad seed at the heart of its story. Especially given the racial tensions between the police and their communities that erupted across the nation in 2020, I’m wondering if the production team ever stopped to think about how their approach to the police might be perceived.

Do you know how the police could reach out an support the community? By capturing a serial killer who was raping and sodomizing women, girls and boys. Arresting a man who was killing people every couple of days with no discernable pattern and would not leave any clues. Guess what? The community thought that too. Ask the 50 people who beat the crap out of Richard Ramirez when the caught him.

These detectives were not demigods. They made mistakes. They problems in their family lives. They were drinking too much. They made mistakes during the investigations. All this was in the show including that the police officer lost his temper and smacked down that guy who wouldn’t tell them who Richard Ramirez was.

And about that guy. This author is making the guy who got punched into a “citizen”. This is crap. He knew what Richard Ramirez was doing. He was fencing the stuff Ramirez was stealing during his crimes. How do you think the cops found him. He was also be belligerent and was picking a fight. This is something the writer of the article kind of leaves out. That guy was not an individual that the community of color would have embraced.

But, the writer has to say this because it validates the narrative that cops are bad and they abuse innocent civilians. And any story or documentary that show how the police did their jobs and how they felt cannot be celebrated. Here’s the thing: this case may never have been solved simply because the assaults and murders were so random and there were no clues left.

Night Stalker is a reminder that building a true crime story around the non-criminals isn’t enough. You need balance — and more crucially, context — for every narrative beat, especially because these are real crimes, still sending ramifications and echoes throughout society decades later.

Those echoes are clear, just from the fact that so many people who witnessed and lived through the Ramirez story are still around to talk about it nearly four decades later. History is living and walking — and very occasionally still stalking — among us. In the case of Night Stalker, that history deserved more careful attention.

The story was about how Richard Ramirez was caught. So it makes sense that the writers would talk to the cops who were involved in the investigation. This was not about the mental capacity of Richard Ramirez, his life that may have made him, or what the community thought of the police. This is a true story.

The last line where “history is living and walking” is a lie. History is history. It does not change. This podcast is history and it’s not going to be change. It’s people who change history. The revisionist history. That doesn’t mean the history actually changed. We are seeing this in our history books today. We are seeing this in our children who cannot tell us who the first President was and can’t pass the civics exam to become an American citizen

Overall I thought the movie was very good. It brought back a lot of memories and showed aspects of the case that were not known back then. I did not know how much of an unimaginable bastard Richard Ramirez was until this documentary and how much effort the police had to make to catch him. It’s worth a watch if, for nothing more, because Vox says you shouldn’t see it.

https://www.vox.com/culture/22240673/netflix-night-stalker-docuseries-frank-salerno-gil-carrillo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ramirez

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