Let me start this off by saying the circumstances of this story are tragic and should not have happened.
North of me outside Gainesville, Fla., police were forced to do the precision immobilization technique (PIT) maneuver, that thing where they crash into a car in such a way as to cause the target to spin around, to stop a stolen Honda SUV and force it to crash as it was speeding at approximately 111 miles per hour.
Two were killed in the crash immediately, while the other two died in the hospital. Two were wearing ankle monitors, and three had active warrants for their arrests
What makes this story awful is that all four thieves were teenagers between 14 and 16 years old. It is truly terrible they died young, but it's worse knowing they were criminals at such a young age.
The Daily Mail's coverage of it, however, only acknowledged their criminality near the end of the article, after they had focused on the police's usage of the PIT maneuver and the backstories of the thieves, particularly two who attended Newberry High School, how one of them played on the football team, and how his family has set up a GoFundMe for funeral expenses.
Again, the whole thing is a tragedy. None of these kids deserved to die, but it is utterly disingenuous to not mention they were already becoming established criminals until after the reader is already incensed at the cops for stopping a car containing four minors in a way that ended up killing them.
As the Daily Wire's Matt Walsh pointed out, the way the article was framed makes it sound like the police should have waited until they crashed into someone else, which would easily result in more casualties. "Then all the people outraged at the cops now would blame them for not preventing the tragedy. They can’t win," as he noted.
So if a car is stolen and speeding 100 miles an hour down the road, are cops supposed to sit back and watch while the criminals endanger the lives of everyone on the road for as long as they like? What happens if they crash into a minivan and kill a whole family while the cops… https://t.co/h0Q67hm2sl
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 29, 2024
The Daily Mail's spin on this story bears all the earmarks of other incidents in which young black criminals are turned into martyrs of supposed "systemic racism" pervading America: focus on how they were incapacitated and how they died, making sure the reader is good and angry at the cops before quietly admitting that the deceased were criminals and would have easily endangered others.
Rinse and repeat.
We saw it with Trayvon Martin (in the same state, no less), Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and of course George Floyd. None were particularly ideal candidates for martyrdom, all with rap sheets and unsavory stories surrounding them.
Related: All Black Lives Matter, But Some Black Lives Matter More Than Others
But before you make this a racial thing, know that up in Jacksonville last May, a guy I knew when he was little named Holden Dodson was involved in the murder of a man named Gary Jackson, along with two other guys. You would think this story had gotten more attention because the shooter, Ryan Nichols, Dodson, and Daniel DeGuardia were all white and killed a black man for no discernible reason, but they weren't cops; ergo, you could not blame systemic racism for his death.
It is truly sickening to see how the media will skew stories to fit their agendas.
