Who Killed Ashli Babbitt?

On November 19, 2019, Nathaniel Pinnock was shot and killed by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department. Pinnock, 22, had robbed an auto parts store in Hollywood while armed with a machete and was walking from the scene when officers arrived and confronted him. Despite the presence of several officers, Pinnock refused orders to stop and drop the machete. Instead he ran to the drive-through lane of a nearby Chick-fil-A restaurant where he carjacked a Lexus and sped off. He made it only as far as the adjacent street where, after colliding with police cars, he got out and ran down Sunset Boulevard.

Officers pursued on foot, and after running some distance Pinnock turned and charged at one of them while wielding the machete. The officer retreated and fired his pistol at Pinnock, who despite being shot continued charging. The officer ran into the street where he stumbled and fell, and when it appeared Pinnock was about to deliver what surely would have been a devastating blow with the machete, the officer again fired his pistol. A second officer also fired. Pinnock fell to the ground mortally wounded.

That Pinnock’s death did not become a national news story is owing to the fact that the shooting was so manifestly justified, as can be determined even from the cursory presentation of facts above. But such is the transparency now attendant to officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles that anyone questioning the propriety of the officers’ actions can find the LAPD’s video summary of the incident and the involved officers’ body camera footage here, the civilian police commission’s 37-page report here, and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s 12-page legal assessment here. All officer-involved shootings in the city of Los Angeles are similarly investigated and documented, and while one may argue with the conclusions reached by the police commission or district attorney in any given case, no one can claim the relevant facts have been concealed.

This level of transparency regarding the use of deadly force by police has come to be expected and is now common (though not yet ubiquitous) across the country, which makes it all the more curious that what rightly should be regarded as one of the most controversial police shootings to have occurred recently has gone all but unexamined in the press. The case of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was shot and killed by a U.S Capitol Police officer during the so-called insurrection of Jan. 6, has gone largely unexamined, either in the media or among the self-professed experts who find fault in even the most clearly justifiable police shootings.

Ashli Babbitt’s shooting was not clearly justifiable, far from it in fact, yet the U.S. Department of Justice, in a memo just over a page in length, explains it away by saying their “investigation revealed no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defense or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.”

And that, peasants, is that. Your rulers have made their decision, do not dare question it.

How the other half thinks.

Within a day of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, the entire country came to know the name of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who ultimately was convicted of murdering him. (Chauvin was sentenced on Friday to 22 and a half years in prison for second-degree murder.)

Similarly the name of every officer involved in a shooting that has tickled the antennae of the Black Lives Matter movement and its fellow travelers has been made public, in some cases forcing the officers and their families to flee their homes so as to avoid hostile protesters. Yet the officer who shot Babbitt remains unidentified and, as far as we know, employed by the Capitol Police.

More disturbingly, the officer’s rationale for shooting Babbitt remains a mystery beyond the perfunctory language in the DOJ memo. Compare this to the LAPD shooting of Nathaniel Pinnock, or to any LAPD shooting in which the officers’ actions are scrutinized and publicly judged by the district attorney in light of the applicable California law and U.S. Supreme Court precedent, specifically the case of Graham v. Connor (1989). In Graham, the Court held that an officer’s use of force must be “objectively reasonable” under the circumstances. In the case of Ashli Babbitt, how can the public be reassured the officer’s actions were in fact reasonable when his explanation for firing remains cloaked in secrecy?

Loader Loading...
EAD Logo Taking too long?

Reload Reload document
| Open Open in new tab

The Washington Post has produced a video of the Babbitt shooting, compiling two points of view from cameras carried by protesters in the crowd that included Babbitt. In the video, three uniformed police officers can be seen blocking the doorway to the Capitol’s Speaker’s Lobby, beyond which is the House Chamber. A man who appears to be a police officer dressed in a suit stands nearby. Just beyond the locked doors can be seen several men, one of whom is identified as a congressman. Inexplicably, none of the police officers appears to take any action to prevent the windows from being broken or otherwise interfere with the protesters. The officers look to be perplexed but not panicked, nor do they display any apparent concern at what might occur should the protesters breach the doorway.

Indeed, after some moments the officers abandon their position and allow the protesters to continue their efforts to break the windows. We then see, just beyond the doors, the extended arm of man in whose hand is a semi-automatic pistol, and when protesters at last succeed in breaking one of the windows, Babbitt is the first to attempt to climb through. While she is still in the window, the man with the gun fires a single shot, striking Babbitt and causing her to fall backward to the floor.

At the time the shot was fired, the Speaker’s Lobby appeared to be empty save for the shooter and two or three men walking casually at the far end. Babbitt, who was of slight build, carried neither a weapon nor anything that might reasonably be mistaken for one. The officer was about ten feet away from Babbitt when he shot her and cannot reasonably claim he was under an imminent deadly attack at the time, nor can he claim he was defending someone else from such an attack as no one else visible on the far side of the doorway appeared to be closer than fifty feet away. If it is true that the officer fired in self-defense or the defense of others, what was his explanation for doing so when no justification is evident in the video, the only publicly available evidence we have? The government will not say.

The Capitol Police and the Justice Department may be forced to produce whatever evidence they have in the course of a lawsuit expected to be filed by Babbitt’s family, though I expect the case to be settled prior to the discovery phase with the government, i.e. the taxpayers, paying a considerable sum to the plaintiffs. Their decision to clear the officer notwithstanding, the government’s position rests on such a feeble legal foundation as to make going to trial potentially expensive and embarrassing. When the facts are placed before a jury, the shooting simply cannot withstand the reasonableness test as outlined in Graham v. Connor, and no credible use-of-force expert would dare testify otherwise absent evidence not yet revealed.

"Insurrection" or provocation?

The Babbitt case is only the most fearsome example of what can plainly be seen as a dual system of justice as it relates to political protest. The FBI and DOJ have spared no effort in identifying, arresting, and prosecuting every last person who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, and even those accused of nothing more than trespassing have languished in jail for months without trial, often in solitary confinement.

I have no sympathy for those who violated the law at the Capitol on Jan. 6, least of all for those who assaulted police officers. Yet video recorded in and around the Capitol that day reveals varying levels of criminality on the part of protesters, from those who merely walked through the hallways as if on a lark, to those who vandalized or stole property, to those who, again, assaulted and even injured police officers. Let them all be punished, each according to the law and his own misdeeds.

Would that the authorities exhibited equal zeal in pursuing all lawbreakers, but in Portland, Ore., many people arrested in the nightly attacks on the federal courthouse, in which officers were injured and the building repeatedly set afire, have been released on bail or had their charges reduced or dismissed altogether. In Minneapolis, few have been held accountable for the destruction of a police station, and in New York City, charges have been dismissed for hundreds of people arrested for rioting and looting. Similar leniency for rioters has been displayed in cities across the country.

Justice is blind, goes the old maxim, but when it comes to political protests under the current administration, one must himself be blind to believe it.

When Police Get Woke, Society Gets Broke

One of the blessings of growing older is, when tensions roil the social landscape, being able to look back on the troubled times of an earlier day and say, “Those tribulations I survived, these I shall also.” I am a Baby Boomer, born in the late ‘50s to a World War II Navy veteran and a stay-at-home mother, both of whom were conservative Republicans who did their best to usher their children through the tumult of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Nearly all of my friends growing up came from similar backgrounds, but we came of age as the Vietnam war came to its ignoble conclusion and as the Watergate scandal gripped the nation. It was a time when “questioning authority” was oh so fashionable among my generation, and, like nearly all of my friends, I rejected my parents’ conservatism and embraced liberalism, at least as the term was understood in, say, 1976.

I’m ashamed to admit it took some years to accept that my parents weren’t wrong about absolutely everything, and that the “authorities” I had so enthusiastically questioned and rejected had achieved that status for the simple virtue of having been correct. And I became a cog in the authority machine itself when I joined the Los Angeles Police Department after graduating from college, but even then it was only after a few years of patrolling the streets of L.A. that the scales fell from my eyes and I came to realize the liberalism I had embraced, far from improving the lives of those it purported to help, made them worse.

Los Angeles then.

I spent the greater part of my police career working in South Los Angeles, where I was confronted daily with the grim harvest of liberal policies that, however well intentioned in their origins, resulted in the dissolution of families and sent forth thousands of fatherless young men who, lacking guidance in the home, found it on the streets though membership in gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, both of which originated in Los Angeles and have since spread like cancer across the country.

The city’s gang culture brought horrific bloodshed to Los Angeles, most especially in South L.A. In 1976, the LAPD handled 517 murders. By 1980 the number had almost doubled, to 1,028, and when gang culture coalesced with the crack cocaine epidemic in the early ‘80s the result was even more explosive. It wasn’t until 1997 that the city’s murder total fell back below 700, and by 2010 the number was below 300, where it remained for ten years.

That reduction in violence was brought about largely through the efforts of police officers willing to go into the neighborhoods most affected by crime and confront those responsible for it. Yes, some of those confrontations were violent, and yes, it resulted in many black and Latino young men being arrested and sent to prison, as it was blacks and Latinos who committed 90 percent of the violent crime in Los Angeles, an uncomfortable but nonetheless persistent fact mirrored in any American city you can name.

There existed among police officers, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, an ethos that demanded we challenge the status quo that said violence and disorder were the inevitable byproducts of long overdue social transformations. These transformations were welcomed and applauded by the elites, but when a police officer sees a shooting victim take his last breath, when he sees the victim’s mother running down the street to see it too, he cares little for the opinions of elites fortunate enough to live and work safely distant from the violence they have fostered, and it arouses in him the will to act so as not to see such a scene repeated.

Or at least it used to.

L.A. now.

Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, and most especially since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, police work has changed so radically as to be unrecognizable to those of us who worked the streets in the ‘80s and ‘90s. America’s police, already in retreat against the advancing woke mob, now recognize that their leaders have abandoned them and the battle against crime is no longer worth fighting.

But as demoralized as police officers are today, it is not they who are paying the heaviest price. If the Black Lives Matter movement has proved anything, it is that the only black lives that matter to its adherents are those few that are lost in confrontations with the police. The thousands upon thousands of others who die at the hands of their fellow blacks inspire no protests, no outrage, no calls for systematic changes, but rather are greeted with a blithe shrug of acceptance. The police, rendered inert by political overseers kowtowing to the mob, are now bystanders to the carnage, reduced to documenting murders while doing little to prevent them.

This is not an accident or an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise benign development. This is the aim of the modern left that now dominates the political, academic, and media classes who shriek to the skies whenever a police officer uses force against a member of some favored minority, but who stand mute when some member of that same minority murders another.

When police officers are no longer useful to fight genuine evils, they will be re-tasked to fight imaginary ones, as has in fact already occurred with cops enforcing mask mandates and other restrictions on liberties most Americans viewed as inviolable only a year ago. When this occurs – and the process is already well underway – those cops best suited to fighting violent crime will drift away from the profession and find employment elsewhere, to be replaced by the type of meek, enervated drones that reflect the political eunuchs ushering in this transformation.

This summer the country will experience violence at levels unseen in decades, and by the time it awakens from its woke torpor, there may be no one left who knows what to do about it.

The Thin Blue Line is Under Attack

And now it’s Philadelphia, which joins Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Kenosha, Wisc. on the list of cities where routine police encounters have gone violently wrong, leading to days of rioting and chaos on the streets, all of which, we are endlessly assured by our sophisticated betters in the media, meets the ever more capacious definition of “mostly peaceful protests.”

On its face, the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia should not be controversial. Police were called to Wallace’s home for a domestic disturbance, and when he defied orders to drop the knife he was holding and advanced on two police officers – who had already retreated from the sidewalk into the street – they opened fire, an outcome to be expected in a rational world. But this is not a rational world, and in no milieu is it less so than in the realm of police encounters with black men.

There has arisen in certain quarters the preposterous notion that someone facing arrest has the right to resist an officer’s efforts – even to the point of assaulting him with a deadly weapon – and still expect an injury-free apprehension. Wallace appears to have shared this notion, as do the people “protesting” his death. Even Joe Biden, proving he can be just as uninformed about police work as he has been about everything else for 47 years, thinks police officers can shoot an attacker in the leg and somehow expect to survive the encounter.

Old-fashioned detective work may soon be a lost art.

How long can this continue? How long can we ask police officers to venture into America’s inner cities and combat crime while placing upon them these unreasonable expectations? And finally, who wants to be a police officer at all under these circumstances?

Raymond Chandler, the creator of the fictional detective Philip Marlowe, said it best: 

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.

Whenever some heinous crime occurs, one that rises above the ordinary daily American mayhem to shock the nation’s conscience, we remain anxious and unsettled until an arrest is made, even if we have no direct connection to the victim. Last July, for example, who could help but be horrified by the video of Anthony Robinson being gunned down while walking hand-in-hand with his seven-year-old daughter on a Bronx street corner?

We take it on faith that the perpetrators of such crimes will be identified and arrested, and indeed we found some measure of comfort when, less than two weeks later, three men were arrested and charged with Robinson’s murder. But what if there came a time when we could not have that faith, a time when we had no choice but to resign ourselves to seeing this kind of savagery go unpunished?

That day is coming, and soon.

The Robinson shooting was captured on video, which quite naturally raised public expectations that the killers would be apprehended. The police would find the car shown in the video, it was assumed, then they would find the killers. Easy, right? Just like on television.

The reality was not so simple. Finding the killers required the practice of what soon may be a lost art: old-fashioned detective work. And detective work in its turn demands the mastery of a number of interrelated fields, including forensic science and video technology. But far more than technical knowledge, detective work requires talents much less easily conveyed in a classroom or a textbook.

The presence of DNA at a crime scene and video of the crime as it occurred are powerful evidence, certainly, but in the overall scheme of a criminal investigation they are all but useless until they can be woven into the fabric of the case by a skilled detective. And any criminal case, even one buttressed by the strongest forensic evidence, can collapse in the absence of someone adept at the most overlooked skill in police work: talking to people.

There might be a hundred witnesses to a murder, there might be video of the crime as it occurred, there might be every type of circumstantial evidence tying a given suspect to the crime, but to secure a conviction it all must be tied together by a detective who can walk into an interview room and elicit the truth from people who in many cases would prefer to keep it hidden.

And that same detective, after having assembled the case and secured a criminal filing, must then be able to take the witness stand and persuade a jury that the man seated over there in the defendant’s chair is guilty as charged.

Tough even without a gun.

But where do we find such detectives? They come from the ranks of street cops, of course, men and women who learn, while riding in a radio car or walking a foot beat, how to talk to the parties involved in crimes – victims, witnesses, and suspects – according to each the appropriate level of skepticism, which may approach but never reaches zero.

It has been my experience, after nearly 40 years in the trade, that the best cops, those who do most of the heavy lifting in any police department, would have found equal success in any other field they might have chosen, but they were drawn to police work not merely as a job or even a career, but rather as a vocation. Today that vocation is threatened by the corrosive politics of the Left, which would hold that the police are not a remedy to crime and disorder but rather the very cause of it.

The undermining of law enforcement has been a goal of the Left for decades, and the campaign has achieved varying levels of success over the years. But with the death of George Floyd last May, the assault on police legitimacy has accelerated beyond anything seen before. A February 2020 article at City Journal lamented what was already a police recruiting crisis, but that crisis has now grown even more dire. Worse than a lack of candidates applying for the job is the accelerated flight of tenured officers from some police departments. In Seattle, for example, the problem is finely drawn: more officers left the city’s police force in the first nine months of this year than did all of last year or in 2018.

Not coincidentally, as the number of police officers decreases, and as those who remain on the job grow more apprehensive about making arrests lest they find themselves fired or prosecuted should an incident go awry, crime has increased across the country. Violent crime has risen in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Baltimore, and most other cities you can name, including, yes, Philadelphia, where homicides are up 44 percent from the same time last year. Sadly, few people with the authority to do anything about it seem willing to speak honestly about the problem, as evidenced by Joe Biden's fatuous instruction that cops shoot attackers in the legs.

The world needs people like those Raymond Chandler described, but it may soon find them in short supply. Someday, when the carnage has not been abated by the legions of social workers now proposed, when the bloodshed has grown intolerable even to those who today ignore or rationalize it, people will once again look to the police to solve the problem. But when that day comes, the pool of accumulated wisdom that has been passed from generation to generation of street cops and detectives will have evaporated for lack of use. “Please,” some mayor will implore his police chief, “do something about the crime.”

And the chief will shrug his shoulders and say, “We don’t know how.”

Some Non-Negotiable Demands for Utopia

Just when you’ve started wondering what topic you should write a column about—an activity that mostly leads to hours of more wondering—a lightning bolt strikes and clarifies your duty. On this occasion the lightning bolt took the friendly form of a left-wing petition urging me to save the world, more or less, by signing a petition making certain demands on . . . well . . . the world.

It’s easy to mock such things, and I shall try to do once or twice here, but the idea of petitioning parliaments, congresses, and governments is an ancient, honorable, and essentially democratic one. As a mode of debate it’s greatly to be preferred to hitting the heads of people with whom you disagree with mallets. And it has sometimes brought about peaceful democratic change—notably in the case of the People’s Charter of 1838 which brought millions onto the streets, made the ruling classes nervous, and persuaded Parliament to introduce most of the essentials of the country’s modern democracy over time.

The petition sent to me was somewhat more ambitious. It was addressed flatteringly to “policy makers” and it bore the grandiose title Covid-19 Global Solidarity Manifesto. It is well-designed, having that look of authentic simplicity that disarms skepticism, and it is indeed short, simple and declarative. Its nine main points begin with the words, “We demand . . .”

Or else.

What’s being demanded we’ll come onto in due course, but the petition varies its demands with assurances that these things are going to happen anyway. Oh yes. This kind of writing is known as the “imperative indicative,” but it’s less imperative than they might wish because the element of threat is so understated. Reading it is rather like being held up by a man wearing a Covid-19 health mask and wielding a banana.

Let’s now come to the content—the weak spot here as in so many left-wing manifestos. The first demand is for “strong, universal health care systems and health care as a basic right for all humans.” Such things would certainly be desirable outcomes, but they cannot be granted as rights because they are unattainable in present circumstances and would impose insupportable burdens on everyone everywhere including those countries which currently have good health systems.

Consider this: even in progressive health care systems in rich countries there’s a constant irresolvable struggle to combine three things: universal access, the full range of (ever-expanding) medical treatments, and cost control. Pick any two. The attempt to have all three results in regular crises in which queues for particular treatments lengthen and expensive treatments cease to be available at all.

That discomfiting reality rests on the truth that the demand for health care is potentially infinite. As the former UK health minister, Enoch Powell, wrote in a 1960s book (I quote from memory): Unrestrained by price, the demand for health care rises until it consumes the entire national income. When I quoted that to a distinguished doctor of firmly liberal views on the faculty of Stanford University, he told me that he hated to agree but that he was reluctantly bound to do so.

The end result of Demand #1, therefore, would be the universalization of health poverty as the fruit of an attempt to equalize health care upwards. So Demand #2—a massive reduction in war, conflict, and defense spending—would fail as well since half of its purpose is to pay for Demand #1 and some of the other causes listed (“housing, childcare, nutrition, education, Internet access, and other social needs.”)

There is only one way the world could afford to pay for this catalogue of costly benefits and that is if we were able to achieve a fantasy of high economic growth without end. Unfortunately, that prospect is scotched by Demand #3 which calls for “the fantasy of endless growth” in unsustainable capitalist economies, “[to] be replaced with cooperatively based economies of care, where human life, biodiversity, and our natural resources are conserved and a universal basic income is guaranteed so that governments can work together to combat the existential threat of climate change.”

And here we come to the nub or gist of the problem. In a way, the petitioners are pointing to something important which they misunderstand: endless growth under capitalism is not a fantasy but the experience of capitalism over more than two hundred years. Such growth has proved to be a fantasy, however, under all other economic systems, notably those “cooperatively based economies of care” which provide their citizens with economic security, but which also restrict them to much lower living standards than their capitalist neighbors. Such economies have delivered economic wastelands despite being given a series of Western loans and investments over the years.

Moreover, the various kinds of communist/socialist economies in the last century that attempted a (more realistic) version of this program did not handicap themselves by swearing off cheap fossil-fuel based energy as the main mover of industrialization and prosperity. Quite the contrary. Lenin defined communism as “Soviet power plus electrification,” and unlike some modern environmentalists, he didn’t think that electricity grew on trees (not without the trees being chopped down, converted to wood chips and then transported thousands of miles to power stations across the world.)

But the signatories of the Covid-19 Global Manifesto want to deliver all the benefits above, including a program of universal income grants, without using cheap fossil fuel energy that underpins prosperity worldwide. Their “fantasies” of electrification provided entirely from renewables like wind and sun were recently diagnosed into oblivion by Professor Michael Kelly of Cambridge University in his monograph Electrifying the UK, in which he cites, with examples, the costs of engineering the delivery of energy—even in the cases where its generation is relatively cheap. They turn out to be enormously expensive.

Loader Loading...
EAD Logo Taking too long?

Reload Reload document
| Open Open in new tab

For instance:

It is often pointed out that electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines, and this is true; there is a factor of three involved. But the low energy density of batteries means that much of this advantage is lost in having to carry around a heavy battery. The power pack for a Tesla weighs half a tonne and occupies much of the floor pan of the car: for the same 600-km range in a petrol car, you would need 48 litres of petrol, weighing just 36 kg.

And:

The £45 million battery installed by Elon Musk outside Adelaide, South Australia, can power that city for 30 minutes. It would power the emergency wards (20% of total demand) of Addenbrooke‘s Hospital in Cambridge for 24 hours on a single 80–20% discharge. Back-up is currently provided by two 1500- kVA diesel generators, which run for as long as fuel is available and cost £250,000. So if you wanted to be able to cover a 3 week’s power outage after a major storm, it would cost around 1300 times as much using batteries as it would with diesel generators.

I'm not over-confident that you can simply multiply that cost by the number of hours in a day and days in a year to get an accurate estimate of what it would cost to power Adelaide for a year, but if so, the cost would be upwards of a trillion dollars. And there are similar mind-boggling cost overruns attached to almost every Green technical insight. I doubt Adelaide’s city fathers would think that a practicable proposition. Nor would the government of South Australia, nor the Australian federal government in Canberra. Nor other governments not headed, however temporarily, by visionary idealists.

That may not matter a great deal to the authors of the Global Solidarity Manifesto.  Consider the organizations that so far have signed up to the manifesto. Here was the list as of yesterday:

My guess is that unlike the  Chartists of 1838, these bodies are looking to present their reforms to organizations representing the whole of mankind rather than to narrow nationalist democratic governments that have to pay for their policies by taxing their citizens and justifying expenditures to the voters in elections. Insofar as they seek to change the policies of national governments, they do so by  influencing UN and other globalist bodies which then lean on governments to follow them in ways that Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte has called a fantasia of “global governance.”

In other words, it’s the stage army of transnational progressives mounting another membership drive. They have little or no genuine  democratic credentials, and they frequently proclaim that their favored concerns are "too important to be left to democracy—which is all the more reason for the rest of us to apply democratic criteria to their manifestos.

There are about nine billion people in the world. Yesterday the Covid-19 Global Solidarity Manifesto had 1600 signatures. When the figure reaches five billion, call my office.