Jacob Blake Incident: Civil Rights versus Safety of Victims
I have been reading about the recent shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin, and it turns out that he had multiple outstanding warrants for his arrest when police were called – for having chocked and severely injured a woman, probably his girlfriend, and for assaults with a deadly weapon. Video footage from one side of the car shows him resisting arrest, and then walking around the car and try to enter on the other side. It has now reported that there was a knife in the car, which Mr. Blake would have been able to retrieve, and possibly use against the police or others, had he been allowed to get into the car. Does this information change any of your minds about the current media narrative, that this was one more example of systemic racism or police misconduct? This does not seem to me to be as cut-and-dry as the George Floyd incident. But I think this incident does highlight an ongoing dilemma in the field of domestic violence: How does law enforcement keep victims safe while honoring the constitutional rights of criminal suspect? Your thoughts?