Panderin’ Sanders and the Great Philadelphia Victim Fest and Riot

The latest riot du jour at this writing comes to us from the City of Brotherly Love in the wake of the fatal police shooting of a knife-wielding, mentally disturbed, unemployed aspiring rapper with nine children, one Walter Wallace, Jr., age 27. Police responded to a call about a man with a knife, and no sooner had the two officers arrived, Wallace advanced on them in the street brandishing that very knife. The officers backpedaled, guns drawn, repeatedly ordering Wallace to drop the knife. When he refused to drop the knife and kept coming at them, they opened fire.

Although this was a perfectly justified shooting, Bernie Sanders tweeted:

The police responsible for murdering him in front of his mother instead of getting him the medical attention he needed should be arrested, investigated, and prosecuted by the justice department.

Yes, Bernie, when a maniac with a knife is closing the distance on you, you’ve got all the time in the world to get medical attention for him, right? And no, the officers couldn’t have used Tasers on him because they were not equipped with Tasers. The War on Cops: How t... Mac Donald, Heather Best Price: $16.73 Buy New $16.61 (as of 05:30 UTC - Details)

As one who has actually been in a situation where a mentally disturbed person pulled a knife, I know what I’m talking about. I used to work in the Safety/Security department of an inner-city hospital complex that had a secure psychiatric unit. We had to take courses with titles such as Prevention and Management of Aggressive Behavior and Crisis Intervention Training to learn how to de-escalate volatile situations involving mentally disturbed people. We were unarmed, and even the Houston Police Department officers who worked extra jobs in the Safety/Security department with us were required to secure their guns in lock boxes provided for that purpose before entering the psychiatric unit. (One of those officers was an Asian-American who worked undercover and later rose to prominence in the HPD hierarchy; a little more about him later.)

We once got a call about a patient acting out in the lobby of a psychiatric floor and refusing to go to his room. When I and a couple of my coworkers arrived, the patient—a big, agitated, shaggy-haired white lout in his twenties—pulled out and opened up an enormous folding knife. He shouldn’t have had the thing on him in the first place, but whoever inventoried his property screwed up and let the knife slip by instead of placing it in a property bag for storage. Among the sparse furnishings in the lobby where this drama was unfolding was a sturdy wooden chair. I casually sidled behind the chair and took hold of the back as if I were just leaning on it. Should our man come at any of us with the knife, I would lift the chair, rush him with it, and pin him against the wall with the four legs of the chair so my partners could move in and attempt to gain control of the arm with the knife.

The War on Police: How... Roorda, Jeff Best Price: $6.83 Buy New $14.49 (as of 04:58 UTC - Details) It turned out, fortunately, that one of my partners had previous dealings of a positive nature with this particular patient, and he called that to the patient’s attention and began to engage him in conversation. This de-escalated the patient, who then surrendered the knife, apologized to us, and behaved for the duration of his stay. What made this work was that the patient kept his distance, defensively brandishing the knife, while we kept our distance as well so as not to make the patient feel intimidated. This facilitated my partner’s being able to establish a rapport with the patient and de-escalate him. Now if the patient already had his knife out and open and came at us as soon as we stepped out of the elevator and into the lobby, things would have gone a whole lot differently. Although the aforementioned courses we took did include physical restraint techniques for when de-escalation didn’t work, they didn’t include knife disarm techniques, because, after all, mental patients shouldn’t have knives to begin with.

The cell phone video of Wallace’s shooting shows a volatile situation blowing up in mere seconds. Now after viewing the video, imagine that the two police officers were instead unarmed social workers sent out to de-escalate Wallace. There’s simply no kind of de-escalation magic that can be worked on someone who’s quickly closing the distance on you with a knife. The social workers would have ended up being stabbed or running for their lives to avoid being stabbed.

Okay, so the shooting was justified. But why did they have to shoot him so many times? In stressful “fight or flight” situations, people get an adrenaline dump that can affect their fine motor skills, which, in the case of police officers, means their ability to put shots on target may be adversely affected. They try to put shots on “center mass”—the torso—but they may miss, and even if they score a hit, the effects may not be immediately evident. So they continue to fire until the threat is stopped, which in this case meant when Wallace finally hit the pavement. The Courageous Police ... Chaix, JC Best Price: $35.81 Buy New $18.99 (as of 04:27 UTC - Details)

Apropos of missed shots, the Asian-American HPD officer I mentioned earlier mirthfully related the following incident to me: He was working undercover behind the counter at some business when a man walked in, pulled a gun, and demanded money. Our undercover man pulled his own gun from under the counter and began firing at the robber while ducking down behind the counter for cover. Not hearing any return fire, he cautiously stood back up. The robber—completely unscathed—was standing with his hands in the air, his gun on the floor. Police officers all over the country can relate similar incidents. That the police should have shot Wallace in the leg or shot the knife out of his hand is Hollywood nonsense.

Even officers who put rounds on target may have to keep on firing if the rounds don’t have the immediate effect of ending the threat. In one instance, an officer who got into a gunfight with a bank robber had to shoot him 17 times before he finally went down.

Back to Wallace: Having a mental disorder and being a thug are not mutually exclusive. An Infowars article shows 13 different mug shots of Wallace. These were for such charges as terroristic threat, aggravated assault with knife or cutting instrument, vandalism, robbery of a residence with a handgun, assault on a police officer, aggravated assault with a handgun, resisting arrest, and assault with other dangerous weapon.

Wallace’s rap video shows him and his homeboys brandishing guns. Now for someone with a police record like that cited above, and for someone with a mental disorder who has been put on psychiatric meds, how smart is it for him to be filmed brandishing guns? Why didn’t his family and friends dissuade him from such behavior?

Walter Wallace was not a victim or a martyr; he was a thug, and he died like one. What if he had come at a homeboy with that knife, and the homeboy pulled from the waistband of his sagging pants a firearm and blasted Wallace to kingdom come; would his black life have mattered then? Or what if Wallace had fatally stabbed a homeboy? Would his black life have mattered?