Latest in a series of posts responding to the George Floyd killing 
Gadfly can’t get this 47 seconds out of his mind.
We don’t know the full story. As I write this late Monday night there has been no press conference or even a promise of one.*** We don’t know the nature of the call that brought so many police to the scene (4? 5?). We hear that two girls were fighting, and Jacob Blake was trying to break it up. We hear he scuffled with the police. There is mention on one newscast of a knife, a story unverified. We hear that Blake was tazed. We see him walking around the car to the driver’s door followed by two officers, guns drawn. We watch him entering the car and shot 7 times in the back before he sits down. We learn Blake’s 3 children were in the car, children younger than 10. We hear that he had a run-in with the police in 2015. We don’t know what training the officers had. Not much is known for sure.
So much we don’t know. We’ll eventually get the full story.
But this is just hard to watch, to understand.
Listen to the 7 shots — 7 — and the horn blare from Blake’s slumping body.
Here, in a nutshell, is the problem calling for attention.
Much motivation here for our informed, thoughtful, and civil discussions, if motivation be needed.
*** One of Allentown’s draft resolutions — recognizing the need for quick transparency to forestall unrest and establish trust — mandated community meetings following use of force incidents, and I think a time frame close to the incident was proposed. Not a bad idea. Sounds like Kenosha is going to simmer troublingly from lack of knowledge.
I believe that many, if not most, of the people who, in this blog, oppose any form of defunding are searching for justification for the shooting, and probably finding some degree of it in their minds. It is probably true of other totally anti-defunding supporters.