Generic Infantile Problem-Seeking Tattoo. At least it’s not on his forehead.
Recently, there was a sliver of good news on the Destroy All Police and Salt the Earth With Their Children’s Bones front.
Garrett Rolfe is the officer who shot an addled Rayshard Brooks AFTER an extensive efforts to reason with him AND an extensive struggle with Brooks, during which “Brooks struck the other officer on the scene, Devin Brosnan, hard enough to cause a concussion, grabbed his Taser and aimed it at Rolfe, who then fired as [Brooks] ran from the scene,” according to the increasingly-good-at-police-coverage daily city paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The sliver of good news is that Rolfe has been reinstated as an officer by the Atlanta Civil Service Board, which admitted that they jumped the gun, as it were, by immediately firing him even before an investigation was made by the state’s GBI about whether it was a justified shooting. Of course, Atlanta Mayor “Double Dipping” Keisha Lance Bottoms and Atlanta D.A. “Double-Dipping” Paul Howard immediately declared Garrett Rolfe double-dipping guilty and then went on to further burnish their reputations by saying more stupid stuff like this, from Mayor Bottoms, who always has Fanplex, the failed entirely imaginary miniature golf course to fall back on now that the DNC has figured out that even she was too dirty for the Biden administration. Ms. Bottoms opined that:
“Given the volatile state of our city and nation last summer, the decision to terminate this officer, after he fatally shot Mr. Brooks in the back, was the right thing to do,” she said. “Had immediate action not been taken, I firmly believe that the public safety crisis we experienced during that time would have been significantly worse.”
Translation: Bottoms caved to a lynch mob. Then she continued caving to the lynch mob as they murdered two more people for daring to drive past the Shrine of the Immaculate Rayshard She only backed off her “lynch mobs are good social policy” stance after the mob murdered eight-year old, darling Secoria Turner, whose mother had the misfortune of making a wrong turn and ending up being gunned by the Rayshard Squad who were allowed to occupy that street corner armed with uzis by none other than Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Maybe uzi miniature golf has some fiscal potential we don’t yet know. Maybe Keisha Lance Bottoms is actually a secret genius, like that dogcoin guy who hosted Saturday Night Live.
Secoria Turner, Eight
As I wrote at the time, trying to explain how innocent, random victim Secoria was one of the first victims who should have been memorialized by our spanking new hate crime laws:
Then there is the murder of eight-year-old Secoria Turner by BLM rioters occupying the burned-out Wendy’s in Atlanta on July 4. Why would a black child being killed by black illegal occupiers be counted as racial bias hate crime? Because that’s the way the laws are written. The rioters’ intentions in violently occupying that parking lot and shooting at passers-by (they had already killed two others) was racial: therefore, even though their victim was also black, their animus was still racial bias. There are a million ways hate crime laws and hate crime activists dehumanize and officially disappear victims of inconvenient crimes in order to achieve the highly curated victim/offender statistics they crave. Secoria Turner is one such dehumanized victim.
Meanwhile, long-long-long-time Atlanta District Attorney Paul Howard was trying to milk the Garrett Rolfe case like Mrs. O’Leary milking Elsie on the deck of the Titanic. No, he really is in that much trouble. It’s amazing. Despite, like, knowing the law, he paid himself $125,000 from some unbelievably fake nonprofit called People Partnering for Progress (that sounds entirely unsuspicious), then he actually got crooked former Mayor Kasim Reed to sign the checks, then he sent Reed a thank-you note!
Ordinarily, I’ve been taught by women far scarier than you or I, that you always, always send a lovely thank-you note.
This is the ONE exception to such times. Also, People Partnering for Profit makes me think of Up With People and the million other cults that make boring but addictive watching whenever Netflix makes “documentaries” about them.
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We have strayed far away from the plight of Garrett Rolfe. I apologize. Let me try to focus.
I say that what has happened to Garrett Rolfe is merely sliver of optimism because, in the process of learning about the most recent status of the Rayshard Brooks/Garrett Rolfe case, in which it turned out the Rolfe was wrongfully terminated, then reinstated, I was shocked to learn that the Rolfe has been banned from associating with any other police, and that ban holds.
A bit of background on banning association with known criminals: when run-of-the-mill repeat gun felons, gang members, child molesters, granny beaters, subway gropers and so on are cut loose before trial, usually without bail thanks to the evil Koch/Soros anti-incarceration empire, they are often barred from associating with their fellow gun felon gang member child molesting granny beater subway groper cohort, or forbidden from contacting their victims, or showing up at the scene of the crime, for reasons which should be obvious.
But why should a police officer being ludicrously politically charged with firing at a crazy felon who was firing back at him be banned from associating with other police? Police aren’t felons. Police aren’t gangbangers. Police unions, who represent police charged with ludicrous political crimes, are usually staffed with police. The Police Benevolent Associations, which represent police, are usually staffed with police. Police officers on duty while charged with ludicrous non-crimes still report to their superior officers, who are also … police.
When a judge or lawyer is charged with a crime (hey, I live in Georgia, look up “sex on car hood”), they aren’t banned from associating with other judges or lawyers. When a journalist is charged with a crime (one may dream), he or she is never banned from associating with other journalists. When a city council member is charged with a crime — well, we’d have no city councils at all if all indicted city council members had to stay away from each other. When a teacher is charged with molesting a kid, they quite reasonably may be banned from being around kids, but they aren’t banned from being around other teachers.
When an ACLU attorney is charged with a crime, you can bet nobody prevents them from getting a sheet cake delivered directly from Publix to the ACLU office to celebrate with fellow ACLU members their exciting five minutes behind bars.
Admittedly, when lower-level public servants are arrested, the rules are a bit different because they don’t fall under NLRB guidelines. But that’s irrelevant too. When was the last time you heard of a potentially felonious garbageman being banned from playing Go Fish with other garbagemen? When have you ever heard of Air Traffic Controllers banned from playing Jenga with other traffic controllers? When have you heard of Park Rangers, a solitary bunch at best, being forbidden from play a game of Bollywood Charades with their three other Park Ranger pals?
Precisely how much do we plan to dehumanize police before we just drive them directly from academy graduation to death row?
The case at hand here is the shooting of crazed aspirational burger drive-through patron Rayshard Brooks by APD officer Garrett Rolfe. Since Rolfe encountered Brooks and tried reasonably to deal with him for a very long time before the shooting started, the decorated officer has been treated to the usual international (add “e” for accuracy) demonization, starting with anti-cop dolt Atlanta Mayor Keisha “recreational-center-double-dipping” Lance Bottoms declaring that she would personally destroy Rolfe and proceeding ideologically southward, as previously respectable D.A. Paul Howard, burned what was left of his reputation. Which I once respected a great deal.
Judge for yourself. A video exists of the one and a half hour exchange between Rolfe and Brooks before the shooting started. I can’t embed it directly for some likely nefarious reason, but here’s a possible working link. and here is the video address itself to type in, which does work seem to work that way (thanks S.): https://youtu.be/vsaZK3aXpfA.
I think it’s very telling. I think it’s a great example of how we should not pre-judge police based on the little outrage snippets we see on the news. Here are two men, both rough men, both tough men, both men who know what their role is in life, interacting and trying to not let events get ahead of themselves until Rayshard Brooks startlingly lunges, and the rest is history, not the heroic type. Let’s let these men tell their story.
And for details of the Atlanta politics that cause crises like this, read anything Tom Wolfe wrote, but especially A Man in Full, that time warp that still describes race relations and Atlanta mayoral politics down to every gold-leaf fleur-de-lis that litters City Hall, as blood soaks the streets three blocks away, and the people pocketing their double-dips couldn’t give a flip.