A Pattern Not Worth Repeating

I see a pattern. We ought to learn from patterns. But maybe some people don’t learn.

I’m going to use three historic examples, all within my adult memory, plus a current one. And then we’ll talk about the pattern.

archive illustration found on Pixabay

 

LA Riots— Rodney King, 1991-2

Before I start with this one, I want to go back a bit further. We lived in California during the mid-1980s. A neighbor was a police officer. I remember him telling us about an incident that had happened recently on a freeway we frequently used in the east Bay Area. I don’t remember all of the details of that incident, but there was gunfire, and I believe both an officer and the suspect were killed. The neighbor told us that the guy was on PCP. His eyes told the officers that. The guy had a gun, and a crazy look, and there was no reasoning. Guys on PCP have crazy strength and just keep going. I don’t remember for certain, but I think they had to shoot him, more than once, to take him down and stop him from menacing the public.

That story stuck with me.

Rodney King, photo from here

Now, it was the early 90s. We no longer lived in California, but it was LA where this took place. A guy named Rodney King took the police on a high-speed chase—as fast as 115 mph—for eight miles, before he got blocked and they tried to apprehend him. He resisted arrest, acted strange, laughing and waving at a police helicopter overhead, and continued to try to get away.

The officers used batons, rather than more certainly lethal weapons. (I think a taser might also have been used; King claimed a burn mark from a taser.) But he kept getting up.

What the video showed was multiple officers (four were charged) beating an apparently unarmed man, repeatedly, in what looked like excessive force.

The officers were acquitted on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, and three were acquitted of excessive force, while one was left undecided by the jury. The case had been moved out of LA County, to Simi Valley, where the jury, rather than being all or mostly black, was majority white with an Asian and a Hispanic.

The verdict of the case was the ostensible catalyst for rioting that lasted days. Many businesses were destroyed—mostly minority-owned. Billions of dollars in damages.

A later federal civil trial found two of the officers guilty of depriving Rodney King of his civil rights. But this was after the damage was done.

I’m probably one of the few Americans from that time period that never saw the video of the beating. I don’t really know why; I think I didn’t consume a great deal of TV news, and I had little kids around me all the time, and I didn’t want to see the violence.

But I heard about it, of course. And my first thought was that story of the guy near San Jose years earlier who had been on PCP.

Rodney King wasn’t tested for alcohol until hours after the arrest; results came back just under the legal limit. That means he was very likely quite impaired during the high-speed chase. Toxicology came back negative for PCP, but there was some marijuana in his system. PCP can remain in a person’s system for one to two weeks. So I think we have to assume his erratic behavior wasn’t caused by PCP. But, if you were an officer, just ending an adrenalin-charged high-speed chase to apprehend a danger to traffic, and your life and others’ had been in danger, and then the guy gets out and acts erratically and continues to resist arrest no matter what force has been inflicted—you would probably assume this was PCP or something similar, and that your life was in danger if you didn’t subdue him. [Note: PCP, along with alcohol and cocaine, was in his system at the time of his death by drowning in 2012.]

According to court reports, the officers’ defense was that they followed their training. That may be true.

Whether to follow a speeding car to pull him over, and then have an ensuing high-speed chase were decisions made without knowing the race of the person in the vehicle. Whether to subdue the resisting perpetrator, and use force to do so, were decisions made regardless of the race of the individual—who was doing what he was doing, and just happened to be the race that he was.

King was not an innocent black man who just happened to become the target of racist cops. One reason he stated for attempting to flee was that he was in violation of parole. But being a target of racism is the story that set off the riots.

I got some historical details from these two sources, plus an AI search of court proceedings:

·         “The 1992LA Riots: A Historian‘s Perspective on the Causes and Consequences” 

·        “Los Angeles Riots of 1992” Britannica 

 

Hands Up Don’t Shoot!—Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri, 2014

In 2014, a black man was shot and killed by police. The media claimed that he had his hands up and had said “Don’t shoot!” but the cop shot him anyway. The grand jury heard testimony that there could be a case, but the prosecutor, going through that information, chose not to prosecute, and found the officer had acted in self-defense.

Michael Brown, illustration found here

Again, this was claimed to be systemic racism against an innocent unarmed black man. But what had actually happened was much different than the media story. I wrote about it at the time, so I’ll repeat the basic story:

 A very large young man, on drugs, robs a store, shoving the (Asian) store owner on his way out with unpaid-for merchandise. Minutes later, when a report of the robbery is being sent to police officers nearby, he’s walking down the middle of the street, where he will attract the attention of law enforcement. He doesn’t take direction to get out of the street, but reaches in to a police vehicle, attacks the officer, goes for his gun, threatens his life.

When the officer shoots, still with the perpetrator looming over him within the police car, the man begins to run away. He has just represented himself as a threat; it is the officer’s duty to pursue to see where he goes, particularly because this is near residential areas; people could be harmed by this man. In Officer Wilson’s statement, he never intended to apprehend the big, dangerous man alone. He had called for backup and was just keeping eye contact. But Michael Brown turned around and started coming at the officer.

Considering the previous attempt on the officer’s life, just moments before, there were a lot of things the officer could fear: another physical attack that might knock him out; losing control of the weapon and having it used on him and on other innocent civilians. He fired several rounds at the charging man. He saw a flinch, so he knew he had hit him. He paused. Michael Brown didn’t do the normal thing—stop, hold up his empty hands, surrender. After being shot, he continued to charge at the officer. He kept charging, despite additional bullet wounds. Nothing stopped him but the final head shot—when he was within three yards of the officer.

Unarmed does not mean not dangerous. Clearly this man was dangerous and was exhibiting threatening behavior. Would it have been nice if we had some sort of instantaneous tranquilizer gun, instead of real bullets? Maybe. But when you’re up against a criminal with real bullets, you might not want to risk a slow response to his getting hit. And you might not know in the moment all the details that get examined after the fact. So officers carry guns, and I think we’re in agreement that’s for our protection and theirs.

What about Tasers? Good in some circumstances. But you have to be quite close, with all circumstances right. And there is always a chance they could still cause death. So I’m still waiting to hear what problem exists with the system.

There was one sure, certain way this tragedy could have been avoided: Michael Brown could have behaved less like a thuggish threat and more like a civilized human being.

He could have raised his hands to show he had no weapon. He could have respectfully obeyed the officer. He would probably still be alive if he had done everything wrong except for charging at Officer Wilson even after receiving bullet wounds. Stopping at any point would have saved his life.

I link to several sources within my piece; plus I referred to another historical source, both below:

·       "Contrasting Civilization and Savagery in Ferguson" December 1, 2014. 

·       “Michael Brown is killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri” This Day in History, published August 6, 2020.

 

Summer of Love—George Floyd, 2020

Remember, I’m one of the few people who never watched the Rodney King beating video. I am also one of the few who never watched the video of the officer on the neck of George Floyd. (I have seen photos and short snippets; even these, like the accompanying photo here, look shocking.) This may make me seem less informed than the ordinary person. But I think, for me, I was better able to hear facts and evidence without the emotions the video would cause.

George Floyd, held down by
Officer Derek Chauvin,
image from Wikipedia

I wrote about this quite a lot at the time, although not a lot describing the actual event, more about the aftermath—what got termed the "Summer of Love" or "mostly peaceful protests" that led to billions in property destruction. My first impression was that the story we were given by the media was accurate: that a 44-year-old white police officer, Derek Chauvin, had caused the death of a black man, George Floyd, brought into custody for using a counterfeit bill at a store, and then resisting arrest and behaving erratically. I believed the country agreed it was a bad act, while there were disagreements on what to charge, and what should be done.

As we went through the case and learned more, what we learned was that the man, George Floyd, was in bad health. And he was a drug user. And it was possible that he swallowed drugs to avoid prosecution for having them in his possession. We also eventually learned that he did not die of asphyxiation, but of heart failure. The officer was holding him down in a position that he was trained to do while waiting for paramedics, which had been called. Think back on the PCP situation and Rodney King; police have good reason to be wary of suspects behaving erratically. It may be an ironic twist that the training given to Officer Chauvin was in order to avoid the apparent police brutality in the Rodney King case.

Without argument, there was nothing in the case showing racism, and racism was not even brought up in the case. But that was the pretext for the weeks of rioting and looting, and the spread of Black Lives Matter across the country and around the world.

Below are the pieces I wrote during that first month.

·        “Don’t Mistake Rioters for Protesters” June 1, 2020 

·        “Don’t Mistake Rioters for Protesters, Part II” June 4, 2020 

·        “Chaos Is Tyranny” June 8, 2020 

·        “Those Who Stir Up to Anger vs. Those Who Inspire” July 6, 2020 

 

Deportation—Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Returned to El Salvador, April, 2025

This current story in the news this month is different in that it doesn’t involve white police and black suspects. It’s about an illegal alien from El Salvador, who was sent back along with other criminal offenders to an El Salvador prison.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, image from here

The news story claims that this was a mistake, that the man was guaranteed safety from being sent back to his home country. The media refers to him as a Maryland man, a married father.

They leave out some crucial details. He is an MS-13 gang member; this was adjudicated twice. His wife twice had protective orders against him for beating her. He was directed to leave the country in 2019. There was an order not to deport him to a particular country—but it was Guatemala, not El Salvador. A clerical error in the court papers? Well, probably not. His claim had been that a gang was threatening him and his family, which had been doing a pupusa business out of their home in El Salvador, from which he fled to the US. However, the rival gang had been destroyed since then, after President Bukele’s crackdown on gangs—changing the country from the most dangerous to one of the safest in the world. So the threat to Garcia no longer existed. And the family, previously threatened by the rival gang, was no longer in El Salvador, but were in Guatemala.

When MS-13 was designated a terrorist organization, that overrode any previous order preventing his deportation to a particular place. He was deported to the country of his origin—and citizenship—where he was wanted as an illegal gang member.

In other words, Garcia was not mistakenly deported to El Salvador; he was legally deported to his home country of El Salvador. [He has since been moved from the terrorist prison, CECOT, to a less intimidating prison.]

A federal judge took it upon himself to claim the President had no right to deport this illegal alien gang member. He ordered the plane—already in flight—to be turned around on his order. And he is trying to find the President guilty of insubordination. That means he sees the President as one of his subordinates, which is laughable.

What we do not need to worry about is ICE “kidnapping” and deporting innocent legal aliens, let alone naturalized  or native born US citizens with Hispanic surnames. [I actually know people with these needless worries.]

There were a number of sources on the more accurate details of this story. Among my favorites was an explanation to the media by Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. This full 14-minute clip from C-SPAN has him answer the question near the beginning, but he adds details later as well. 

Most of the information I got came from Robert Gouveia videos, in which he went through the court documents. Here is one from two weeks ago:

  ·        “Trump Held in CONTEMPT! Kilmar Hoax SHATTERED! Poison Pill Attorney FIRED! Tish James BUSTED!” 

  

What Is the Pattern?

Someone, an enemy of civilization, looks for a narrative. They need an example case; they are ever on the lookout for such a case. In several of these (and we could have added Trayvon Martin, given time and space for yet another), they find what is supposed to be a typical innocent black man harmed or killed by systemically racist police officers. And in the last one, it is supposed to be a typical illegal alien, come here to build a better life, innocent except for that transgression of entering the country illegally.

In every case, they have used very non-innocent suspects and non-racist officials. If there are actual examples of their narrative—which there would be, if the narrative were true—they could find plenteous examples. But they don’t.

They say things like, even though it isn’t precisely true in this case, it’s the overarching truth, the bigger truth.

But, again, if it were true in the larger sense, there ought to be examples galore. Are they just really unlucky, happening serially upon negative examples by chance, among all the other incidences of systemic whatever they’re claiming?

More likely, they choose really bad examples of innocence being oppressed by their enemies—We, the People—because their narrative is false.

Some people might have believed them the first time or two. But lately (see "The Propaganda Beast Is in a Doom Loop"), fewer people are falling for the false narrative. And that could bode well for our future.