Top Three Takeaways – April 22nd, 2021
- Perception vs reality. 35%.That’s the percentage of decline in deaths resulting from officer involved shootings this year compared to the past decade. Would you know that to be the case based on reporting? Or would you be led to think there’s a significant increase? News media in conjunction with political operatives are actively engaged in a potentially deadly game of manipulation. What’s happening with the reporting of officer involved shootings is a different version of a similar thing to human trafficking. According to the Human Trafficking Hotline, an average of 32 people per day are lost to human trafficking in the United States. There’s never a shortage of victim's news media could choose to cover. It’s just that they don’t choose to cover them. That is unless a victim fits the profile they feel fits their objectives for clicks and views (commonly a blond-haired blue-eyed girl). Human trafficking is worse than ever in the United States, aided by Biden’s border policy, news media generally just doesn’t care about those victims. But they do care about furthering President Biden’s narrative of systemic racism in policing and in society generally. This while they ignore, this...
- 27%. That’s the percentage increase in deaths of law enforcement professionals in the line-of-duty this year. We’re not only seeing a spike in LOD’s this year, we’re pacing a record number of law enforcement deaths. This after last year was the deadliest since at least 1932. So, there’s a 35% decline in officer involved shooting deaths at the same time there’s a 27% increase in law enforcement deaths. How many news reports are there about that reality? If anything, it’s possible we’re experiencing a record number of law enforcement deaths in part due to a general reluctance by law enforcement to take decisive action in light of how they’ve been politicized. Historically we average more than one officer involved shooting death per day in this country, so if news media is looking for stories they can find them, because they’ve always been there. It’s just that they’re now using them to advance a narrative. How much safer and better off would society be if news media focused as much attention on say, human trafficking, as they do into attempting to make law enforcement professionals out to be racists? Surely, we can at least agree that the average human trafficker is more dangerous than the average police officer... Not that you’d know it based on news coverage.
- That escalated quickly. Talk about the unraveling of affairs within the Broward School District. First, we learned the district was the victim of a ransomware attack by the notorious Conti hacker group. After refusing to pay a $40 million ransom nearly 26,000 files were released. But wait. There was more. Much more. Less than a day later Broward school Superintendent Robert Runcie was arrested for perjury and General Counsel for the School District Barbara Myrick was arrested for unlawful disclosure of grand jury proceedings. Both, by the FDLE. While we don’t know the details because they’re part of an ongoing grand jury investigation, we do know that in January, the School District’s Chief Information Officer was arrested for bid rigging and bribery regarding a $17 million technology contract. There are more questions than answers at this point but is this all a coincidence or is it all related? And by that, I mean right down to the ransomware hack. Was the District operating with inferior technology because of a kickback scheme that was known to Runcie and Myrick? Or are all of the alleged offenses offshoots of a potentially of corrupted culture at the School District?
Photo Credit: Broward County