Justin Phillips, the SF Chronicle’s race columnist, wrote an essay for the paper a few days ago that’s nothing short of a declaration of war against the police.
Actually, I didn’t know about his essay until I looked at Cat Brooks’ twitter feed, where she retweeted it. That’s because my paper boy didn’t deliver my Chronicle the day of Phillips’ essay. (Instead, he mistakenly gave me the East Bay Times.) Of course Cat Brooks loved Justin’s piece; he had interviewed her for it.
The topic was “three years after George Floyd’s murder” and predictably Justin was whining about police in his typically hyperbolic fashion: “Black and brown people are still being targeted by cops,” he wrote, “trigger-happy officers in the U.S. are killing more people, not fewer, and law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area are proving themselves to be hopelessly inept, corrupt or both.” He resorted to the stale old “racial disparities” red herring: “Nationally, Black people are 2.9 times more likely to be killed by police than White people…”. People like Justin never mention that Black people commit more violent crimes than White people, and so it only makes sense that they would have more confrontations with cops.
With inflammatory rhetoric like “trigger-happy officers,” “targeted by cops,” and “corrupt law enforcement,” Justin is happy to slur cops and incite violence against them. His implication is that, every time a cop straps on his gun to go to work, he can’t wait to find a Black person to shoot. This is grotesquely insulting and slanderous, and also completely ignores the fact that far, far more Black people are shot and killed by each other than by cops. But Justin Phillips can’t handle the truth. He’s a paid agitator for anti-cop propaganda; facts are of no importance to him, only political screeds—which is exactly why Cat Brooks so admires him.
The funny thing is that Phillips seems to allow for “just police killings.” I infer this from his statement: “Nothing short of an end to all unjust police killings will, or should, improve the way people of color feel about policing.” Unfortunately, from what I can tell by reading him every day, Justin has never perceived a police killing of a Black person he thought was “just.” They’re “unjust” by virtue of the fact that it was a cop who did it. Never mind that most cases of cop shootings of any race are dismissed because the evidence shows the cops acted in reasonable fear of their lives. As I’ve repeatedly written, if people of any race don’t wish to be shot by cops, they should follow some simple rules: don’t break the law. If you do and you’re pursued by cops, comply with their instructions. Do not resist arrest. Do not attempt to flee. Do not resort to a weapon and threaten the cops. Lay yourself down on the ground, peacefully, and let them handcuff you. You’ll have your day in court. And by the way, Justin Phillips has some nerve lecturing us about “the way people of color feel about policing.” If Black people don’t like the police, it’s because of agitators like Justin Phillips and Cat Brooks, who routinely serve them steaming piles of disinformation that feed their sense of grievance.
Incidentally, Brooks also retweeted an attack on Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco D.A. The tweet referred to the “Brooke Jenkins crime wave” in San Francisco, and mentioned that certain felonies (homicides, robberies, aggravated assaults) are up in 2023 in San Francisco compared to 2022. Is it fair to blame Brooke Jenkins for these modest increases? I don’t think so. But ad hoc attacks like this are all that the wokes have left in their rapidly-emptying arsenal. They want D.A.s like Pamela Price, who coddle criminals, and not law-and-order D.A.s like Brooke Jenkins, who indict them and send them to jail. Fortunately, the people aren’t buying this Phillips-Brooks nonsense. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Chronicle fired Phillips? But they won’t, because their Hearst ownership thinks that, in woke San Francisco, Phillips is well-regarded. The truth is the exact opposite, as more and more people cringe at his inaccuracies and wonder why the Chronicle publishes them.
Steve Heimoff