Following this month’s violence in Memphis, it’s time for the to reopen the Ashli Babbitt case.
Friday night the Memphis, Tenn. police department released the video of five of the department’s officers punching, kicking and pepper spraying an apparently unarmed man they had just pulled over for an alleged reckless driving offense.
Most of the country waited with bated breath for the inevitable riots to break out during the planned peaceful protest. Thankfully, they didn’t.
Just the day before the five Black cops who beat 29-yer-old Tyre Nicols, who was also black, so severely he died later at a Memphis hospital, were fired and indicted on murder and a slew of other charges.
Perhaps since the cops weren’t white, perhaps since they were fired and indicted before the video was released, whatever the reason, the expected violence never came.
But the outrage still exists, and rightfully so. Clearly, those five police officers were poorly trained, in over their heads or just out of control. Whatever the reason, an unarmed man lost his life at the hands of overzealous police. It wasn’t the first time and probably won’t be the last. Many are calling for change that some say will never come.
Ben Crump, you may remember him from the months that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, is now representing the Nichols’ family. Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” he said he has called on Congress to pass federal police reform legislation in the wake of Floyd’s death.
“Shame on us if we don’t use his tragic death to finally get the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed,” Crump said. “We told President Biden that when he talked to us.”
On the same program, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said police reform is likely to stall in a divided congress.
“On the right, it’s all the sudden like we have to back the blue and not talk about any reforms and sometimes on the left it ends up being basically, you saw it to the extreme, defund the police,” Kinzinger said. “This may happen here at this moment too.”
As tragic as the deaths of Floyd and Nicols are, they share a commonality: accountability. All of the officers involved in Floyd’s death were fired and tried or took plea deals. All of the officers who killed Nicols have been fired and are very likely to spend time in prison. It won’t bring either man back, but at least someone was held accountable.
Not so for Ashli Babbitt.
We know who killed her. We know she was unarmed. She didn’t resist arrest or run or try to fight. The 35-year-old Air Force veteran tried to climb through a broken window and failed to stop when allegedly told to by a Capitol Police officer on Jan. 6, 2021. I say allegedly because, in the video that has been released of the shooting, you can’t hear him say anything to her.
The ‘he” in question is Lt. Michael Byrd, at the time a 28-year veteran of the Capitol Police force.
For months his identity was kept a secret, but then Byrd, who is Black, went into hiding after allegedly receiving several death threats following the leaking of his name to some so-called “right wing websites” for the killing of Babbit, who was white
But race was not and is not factor in the call for justice for Babbitt. The fact remains that the tiny, unarmed woman was shot and killed while posing no threat to the officer or the people he was protecting.
Byrd sees it differently of course, in an exclusive interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that fall, Byrd portrayed himself as a hero saying he has no doubt that he made the right decision in killing Babbit.
“I know that day I saved countless lives,” he said. “I know members of Congress, as well as my fellow officers and staff, were in jeopardy and in serious danger. And that’s my job.”
Unsurprisingly, Joe Biden’s Justice Department exonerated Byrd of all charges. Of course, this is the same Justice Department that levied felony charges on men and women walking into a building their tax dollars pay for and into which they were gleefully waved by uniformed Capitol Police officers.
Speaking to another reporter on another network, Crump said race was not the issue … this time.
“It is not the race of the police officer that is the determining factor, whether they’re going to engage in excessive use of force, but it is the race of the citizen, and oftentimes, it is the Black and brown citizens that bear the brunt of the brutality,” Crump told Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”
But then he fell back on one of the left’s usual talking points.
“You don’t see videos about our white brothers and sisters who are unarmed having this type of excessive force levied against them,” he said.
You don’t see them because the media have no interest in showing them. They don’t fit the narrative of cops being evil.
Perhaps some of the alleged hundreds of hours of Jan. 6 video that has yet to be released would shed more light on the killing. This is something the House’s new Republican majority should look into. The media should demand it like they do every other time there is police-involved killing.
I believe the case can and should be reopened.
There was no trial, so there’s no question of double jeopardy for Byrd. He should be fired immediately, and have the video shown to a grand jury. The case should be moved out of Washington DC where fair trials pitting the left and right can be a bit questionable. Just ask John Durham.
Perhaps Byrd goes to prison, perhaps he goes free, at the very least Ashli Babbitt’s friends and family should have their day in court.
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