Good day all. One of the things that the Progressive Liberal, especially White, Elites love to say is that if Kyle Rittenhouse had been black, he would now be on his way to prison for life. The reality is significantly different of course. If Kyle Rittenhouse had been black under the same circumstances, there probably wouldn’t have been a trial at all and he would have been cleared months ago.
The Rittenhouse case was pure politics by a corrupt District Attorney, nothing more. However, we have another case recently adjudicated where a black man was acquitted of firing on police officers. Here are the details from the Minnesota Reformer:
Before the white, unmarked cargo van of the Minneapolis Police Department drove down Lake Street, an officer gave Sgt. Andrew Bittell his orders: “Drive down Lake Street. You see a group, call it out. OK great! F*** ’em up, gas ’em, f*** ’em up.”
Bittell turned to his SWAT unit in the van and said, “Alright, we’re rolling down Lake Street. The first f***ers we see, we’re just hammering ’em with 40s,” according to body camera footage described in court documents. He was referring to “less lethal” plastic projectiles sometimes called rubber bullets or 40mm launchers or rounds.
Don’t you just admire the skill, training and professionalism of police and federal SWAT teams? This all happened a few days after the George Floyd business. The city had been racked with riots and the city government refused to shut down the rioters, who were quite separate from the actual protesters. Things had calmed down after a few days, but there was a curfew in place. This is was the excuse these thugs with badges used for their actions.
At 17th Avenue and Lake Street, around 10 p.m., the SWAT team saw a group of people outside the Stop-N-Shop gas station. Bittell told the driver to head toward the station and said, “Let ’em have it boys!”
“Right there, get ’em, get ’em, get ’em, hit ’em, hit ’em!” he ordered as the officers fired their plastic bullet launchers without warning. They later learned they were shooting at the gas station owner, neighbors and relatives guarding the station from more looting, as well as bystanders, including a Vice News reporter who had his hands up and was yelling, “Press!”
This is typical of a lot of poorly led and trained police departments. Absolutely no investigation was done. These idiots apparently didn’t even sit back and observe the situation for a few minutes before opening fire. It also never crossed their minds to send one or two uniformed officer in and politely see what was going on and sending people on their way. Assaulting a member of the Press, and that was a flat out assault should have send warning flares skyward.
About an hour later, three blocks to the west, they opened the sliding door of the van and began firing plastic rounds at people in a parking lot.
This is what is generally known as a “Drive By shooting.” When this happens, people who are being targeted who have the means to defend themselves, legally or otherwise, will do so, and that is just what happened.
They hit Jaleel K. Stallings, 29, a St. Paul truck driver, who says he didn’t know they were cops because they were inside an unmarked white cargo van with the police lights off. He thought they were real bullets. And, he says he was mindful of warnings earlier that day from no less than Gov. Tim Walz that white supremacists were roaming the city looking for trouble.
The fact that these uniformed thugs were in an unmarked van and that no one could see into it tells me that this bunch of yahoos were out looking for trouble. The problem was, they found it and it was someone who knew what he was doing.
Stallings, an Army veteran, returned fire with his mini Draco pistol, for which he had a permit. He aimed low, toward the front of the van, and didn’t hit anyone. When the SWAT team jumped out of the van yelling, “Shots fired!” Stallings realized they were police. So he dropped his weapon and lay face down on the pavement, according to court documents.
And these thugs, being the proverbial bad apples that spoil the barrel, promptly kicked the crap out of Mr. Stallings for daring to protect himself.
His eye socket was fractured in the beating that followed, with officers later claiming he resisted arrest.
He had the temerity of assaulting one of the officers boot with his face apparently. The good news for Mr. Stalling is that he also had a good lawyer, a competent judge and an honest jury that looked at all the facts and all the videos.
A Hennepin County jury recently acquitted Stallings of all charges after he was allowed by a judge to claim self-defense.
This is where the facts hit the SWAT officers in their fascist faces.
Court documents and transcripts reveal a far different story than the one officers told investigators, as well as the tales police and prosecutors offered up to the media. The documents and other court records also reveal what until now has remained largely obscure: How was the Minneapolis Police Department reacting to the protests, civil unrest, looting and rioting in the days after Floyd’s murder?
The answer appears to have been, poorly.
The answer: Fiercely — and at times indiscriminately.
I stand corrected. In any case, the judge that first heard the case was not amused by the antics of the police.
In a pre-trial order, Hennepin County District Judge William Koch (who did not preside over the trial) was critical, if judiciously so, of MPD leadership:
“While the court recognizes there can be appropriate bravado to support colleagues ‘going into battle’ or to address concerns about personal safety, it is not too much to expect those in leadership positions to know the proper way to motivate and support their officers without inciting them to inappropriate behavior toward the public they serve,” he wrote in a February order. “How a superior expresses himself can help cool heads, or heat them up.”
There were two versions of what happened. There was the police version, then there was the version that was caught on the body cameras that officer now use routinely these days. The police version was that a group was planning to throw rocks and stuff at them, an that the officers fired nonlethal rounds at them to stop the attack.
At that point, Mr. Stallings opened fire on them, apparently not firing into the van proper. I suspect that Mr. Stallings is a far better shot than most police officers. Citizens who carry tend to spend a lot of time practicing, unlike most police officers who might fire a couple of hundred rounds a year at most. If he had wanted to hit them, I suspect he would have.
The officer then continued lying by saying that Mr. Stallings tried to run away and then resisted arrest. However, the thugs in uniform were wearing bodycams and, as they say, one picture can is worth a thousand words, and video will tell most of the story.
Court hearings and court documents describing bodycam footage tell a different story: That night the SWAT team’s white, unmarked cargo van slowly rolled down East Lake Street with 20 to 30 police cars trailing farther behind.
The first problem was the unmarked van. If they were using it for plain surveillance, then they shouldn’t have been loaded out with a pack of trigger happy morons. This pack of yahoos had no interest in enforcing the law or curfew, they were out looking for trouble. They opened fire on several groups that were just standing around, not doing anything. This went on with variations for a while when they came across the group that Mr. Stallings was with.
As the van proceeded toward 15th Avenue, Stallings and three friends were in a parking lot at 14th Avenue and Lake Street. He’d gone out for his third night of protests after seeing the video of Floyd being pressed into the pavement, dying under the knee of Derek Chauvin.
“It was something that I couldn’t believe — just watching someone kneel on the back of a man’s neck for 9 minutes,” he said in a Reformer interview. “I was extremely upset by it.”
As was everyone else, including myself, when we first saw the videos. Regardless of the trial’s outcome, (That is another story), it is now known that Floyd had a lethal dose of Fentanyl in his system and was, basically, a dead man walking without prompt medical attention. For some reason, the paramedics called in by the arresting officers went to the wrong location. At the time, of course, no one knew any of this.
He was wearing a green sweater, basketball shorts and a face mask and drove his big, white Chevrolet Silverado. He had his Mini Draco — a modified pistol that looks like a sawed-off AK-47 — for protection in the face of the disorder and stories about violent white supremacists seeking to sow chaos.
Those stories were put out there by the Main Stream Media with absolutely no evidence that it was actually happening. Basically, the media was lying again. Still, I can see why Mr. Draco was taking precautions. I would in similar circumstances.
Stallings said he and his companions were in the parking lot trying to figure out what to do when someone came running down the street yelling, “They’re shooting! They’re shooting!”
“I assumed that they meant somebody’s out here trying to kill people,” Stallings recalled.
Notice that no one realized it was the police that were doing the shooting. It’s well within reason that the people there might have thought it was the fictional “White Supremacists” the Communazi Propaganda Corps was lying about.
Stallings’ friend went to the street and immediately turned away, running, so Stallings turned around to take cover near the back of his pickup as the others headed toward vehicles. Stallings turned to get into his pickup as a white van came into view around the corner of the building bordering the parking lot to the west. He couldn’t see anybody inside the van.
That appears to have been the intent of the goon squad. They didn’t want to be identified while they were shooting at people who were, for the most part, peacefully standing around.
The van’s sliding door was open, and the officers immediately began firing. Officer Cushenbery fired first, hitting Stallings’ torso, saying later in a court hearing that he’d been trained to aim at the chest, legs or buttocks.
And this is when Mr. Stallings reacted. He didn’t know that these were police officers, or that they were using rubber bullets. (Or their equivalent) All he knew was that someone was shooting at him and that he had been hit.
“I immediately thought I was being shot at with real bullets and was about to die,” he said. “I was under the impression that I was bleeding out.”
Then Stetson fired, hitting Stallings’ pickup door, leaving a dent. Stallings’ military training kicked in, and he fired three rounds at the van while retreating to the rear of his pickup. When he was in the Army, he was taught to shoot “center mass,” but said he aimed low and toward the front of the van to try to scare off whoever was shooting at him.
Mr. Stallings showed far more restraint then those trigger happy buffoons, or me for that matter. If someone is shooting at me, and I have the tools to respond, I’m shooting back at the source.
“I had enough rounds (that) if I was intending to harm or kill anybody I could have easily done that,” he said. He could’ve fired 31 rounds and hit every person in the van, he said, but fired three.
And once again, Mr. Stallings shows that most armed citizens are far more restrained than most police officer and federal agents. They are more likely to dump their entire magazine, reload and dump that one as well. At this point, the stormtroopers jumped out and Mr. Stallings realized they were police officers. This is when the bodycams proved that the officers were the thugs, not Mr. Stallings.
The officers yelled “Shots fired! Shots fired!” and jumped out of the van, and Stallings said that’s when he realized they were cops. Court documents describe bodycam footage that show he dropped his gun on the ground and lay face down, with his hands to the side above his head, as though he was surrendering.
And at this point, all the police may do is cuff the suspect and take him in. Instead, they decided to kick the snot out of him.
“You f***ing piece of shit!” Stetson yelled, and began kicking and punching Stallings in the head and neck, according to court documents. Stallings didn’t move. He was trying to surrender and de-escalate the situation, he said in an interview. Bittell began kneeing and punching Stallings in the stomach, chest and back. The beating went on for about 30 seconds — with Bittell and Stetson punching and kicking Stallings in the head, neck, stomach, chest and back.
It looks to me that the wrong people were arrested.
The officers also arrested another person who was with Stallings, repeatedly tasing him.
Stetson beat Stallings so badly he said his hands and feet hurt afterward, and wondered aloud whether he broke his hand, according to court documents.
Which makes me wonder why he isn’t in jail himself. I do believe that assault and battery is illegal. In any case, the officer involved shut off their bodycams and proceeded to concoct their testimony. Mr. Stallings, now under arrest, got a lawyer who seems to know his job. He got the footage from the bodycams.
Stallings hired defense attorney Eric Rice of St. Paul, who obtained two hours of bodycam videos that he said tell a different story than what officers and prosecutors told the public.
“It’s hard to watch the videos,” he said in an interview. “They are very graphic and visceral. It makes it very clear what the intention of the officers were.”
The videos show the SWAT team tried to conceal its identity, didn’t warn people before firing on them, gave numerous false and misleading accounts of the incident and — when presented with contradictory evidence — changed their stories, Rice said.
The story in the Minnesota Reformer goes into the details of the court case. The judge sitting on the case should have dismissed the charges and referred misconduct charges against the officers. Instead, he “allowed” Mr. Stallings’s lawyer to offer self defense against the thugs in uniform.
Stallings got his day in court on July 22, in a five-day jury trial presided over by District Judge Tamara Garcia. The prosecution called the officers to testify, and the defense called only Stallings. He was acquitted of all charges.
When bodycams started being used, most police officers were against them. However, there have been a number of cases where an officer was accused of misconduct and the bodycam footage proved that he or she acted professionally and adhered to the laws and the rules. On the flip side, you also catch uniformed criminals such as these “Law Enforcement” officers who abuse their authority and flat out lie about.
As of now, there doesn’t appear to have been any action taken against the officers. Hopefully, Mr. Stallings will sue the pants off them. This is also one of those times when the DoJ should step in since this was a classic violation of Mr. Stallings, and other’s constitutional rights. I would also hold the leadership time, up to and including the political leadership of the city accountable as well.
In any case, this puts the lie to the Progressives mantra that a black man can’t get a fair trial. Mr. Stallings did, and there have been others as well. (I’ve heard reports that the Moonbats on Twitler are continuing with the mantra and people have posted dozens of cases refuting their moronic claims) We do have a problem with some police departments. Defunding them isn’t the answer. Good leadership, training and providing good service to the community is the way to go.
Thatisall
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