Two years later he followed it up with Don’t Make The Black Kids Angry, which has a similar, thematic subtitle: The Hoax Of Black Victimization And Those Who Enable It.
Colin also used to upload videos regularly to YouTube, but with the sudden war on “right wing” content prompted by the election of Donald Trump, he was kicked off that medium. Although his compilations old and new are still uploaded to the video hub of the world by fans, Colin can now be found at his own website, and also on podcast.
People like Colin are too easily branded bigots. In case you hadn’t guessed it, his thesis is that there is indeed a race war raging in the United States, but not the fantasy war waged by “white supremacists” and “Nazis” so beloved of Elizabeth Warren (the whitest woman in America) and fake Mexican “Beto” O’Rouke, rather it is a war waged by black Americans against whites and everybody else.
Colin Flaherty
Superficially, this thesis is very plausible. The crime statistics for black Americans are absolutely horrendous, and there is at times real animosity, some of it apparently racial. But not everything that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck really is a duck. The reality of this “black” crime wave is a lot more nuanced.
Firstly, violent crime the world over is committed primarily by males between the ages of about fifteen and forty-five. One must be careful using the word violent because slapping somebody’s face is a violent act, so is exploding a bomb in a crowded shopping mall. Let us though assume that violent crime with a capital V is indeed far more prevalent among American blacks than the rest of the population, is this really a racial phenomenon?
One person who disagrees is Thomas Sowell, who is clearly a Colin Flaherty fan. Sowell gives cogent reasons for this, in particular, there has been a literal explosion of crime among American blacks since the 1960s. When he was growing up in Harlem in the 1930s, street crime was all but unknown. Poverty among blacks at that time was a lot more prevalent than it is today when thugs playing the knockout game assault strangers in the street then upload videos of their handiwork for the world to marvel at. In short, there are social causes for this massively increased crime rate rather than racial ones.
One of these social causes is what Colin rightly identifies as the denial, deceit and delusion of the elites, including and especially the media. In order to fix a problem, we must first recognise what that problem is. Where Colin goes astray is his claim that black victimisation is a hoax, and especially with his oft’ repeated mantra that there is a “war on cops” in America, mostly by blacks. In short, the police are blameless, always, they are hated, despised, attacked, even murdered, for no good reason. This kind of selective amnesia and myopia is not unique to Colin, and he is old enough to know better, old enough to recall first hand the Rodney King incident, even if his only recollection is of the riots that followed the total acquittal of King’s assailants, the thugs who stood over him as he crawled on his hands and knees, who beat him 56 times in 81 seconds, laughing as they did so.
On the other side from Colin are the Black Lives Matter crowd who see only a war on blacks by the police. The reality is that in the United States, the police routinely kill unarmed civilians of all races; women as well as men, at times even the young are not spared.
In addition to shooting first and asking questions as an afterthought, the police have a disgraceful track record of gratuitous assaults on citizens, abuses of power, harassment, and lying about their misdeeds. The evidence for this is far more plentiful than the video clips Colin’s supporters send him of black mobs rioting in the streets.
Added to this is the fact that while we expect thugs to behave like thugs, whatever their race, the public has a right to expect professionals to behave like professionals when engaging with them.
A few examples will suffice:
In January 2016, an unarmed white man named Daniel Shaver was shot dead by the trigger happy Philip Brailsford at an hotel in Mesa, Arizona. The murder, for that is what it was, was filmed, but a jury refused to convict.
An even more outrageous violation was the 2014 murder of another white man, Dillon Taylor, in Utah. Taylor was wearing earphones and walking away from Officer Bron Knox, so it was hardly surprising he “ignored” the order to stop. Knox shot Taylor in the back, then immediately handcuffed him as he lay dying. The district attorney refused to indict, and to add insult to injury, a judge dismissed a suit by the victim’s family.
The bottom line is that in the United States, an unarmed citizen can be shot dead at any time by the police with total impunity. These and similar incidents tend to suggest it is not blacks who over-react to police brutality but whites who are far too tolerant of it.
In September 2016, the unarmed Terence Crutcher, a black man, was shot dead by Betty Shelby at Tulsa. As with the murders of Daniel Shaver and Dillon Taylor, the execution was captured on video. The shooting attracted the attention of then Presidential candidate Donald Trump, who said the victim did everything he was supposed to do. He went on to suggest that “people like that” should not be policing the streets.
Shelby was tried for manslaughter rather than murder, and acquitted. And, would you believe, she was given the task of training police officers to react to similar situations? Donald Trump appears to have had nothing more to say about the case.
Apologists for American police claim it is an extremely dangerous profession. Often we hear words to the effect that every time a police officer steps outside his front door he puts himself at risk. This is a gross exaggeration; most police work is routine and not dangerous in the slightest. Having said that, there are certain situations which can be potentially dangerous in a country that is more obsessed with guns than any other nation on Earth. Traffic stops at night are of particular concern, but citizens are always at far greater risk from the police than vice versa.
Returning to the subject of professionalism, the death of Sandra Bland highlights just how unprofessional the police can be, and how arrogant, because her encounter with State Trooper Brian Encinia was captured on video. And he didn’t care.
Miss Bland was clearly a young woman with an attitude about being black, and very likely about being a woman, but watch the video and decide for yourself who was in the wrong here, who was the professional, who was supposed to be the professional? The breaking point is where Encinia orders her to put out her cigarette. On what authority? She refuses, and he goes ballistic.
Obviously, whatever political or other issues Sandra Bland had, she was clearly a young woman with psychiatric problems, but Encinia must be held at least partly responsible for her later suicide. In effect, this woman died for nothing.
Examples of actual police brutality, including against women, are easy to find with a simple Google search, but here are a couple.
Last year, no fewer than six police officers manhandled a 65 year old female motorist in Georgia, as with Sandra Bland, over a triviality. This incident was likewise caught on video, and led to the resignation of Officer James Legg, who insisted he did nothing wrong. Do they ever?
The homeless Marlene Pinnock was walking barefoot alongside a main road when she was challenged by a police officer. Clearly there would have been a concern that she was either under the influence of alcohol or drugs, if not mentally impaired in some way. The video of her gratuitous beating by a thug in uniform can be found all over YouTube. The outcome of her civil suit against Los Angeles police was reported by a local CBS station.
Many more examples could be added to this list. Like most American adults, Colin Flaherty drives a car. If he has ever been stopped or challenged in other circumstances, he clearly hasn’t experienced this kind of treatment. If he had, he wouldn’t write such rubbish about America’s police.
We will not mention here the countless other examples of how the police bend and at times break the law to inflict misery on a broad demographic of innocent citizens, such as contrived stopping and searching of motor vehicles and grotesque seizures under Draconian civil asset forfeiture laws, but we will mention the recent murder trial of former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger.
The incident that led up to this case was simply remarkable. Guyger had finished a long shift, and was obviously on automatic pilot if not in a trance when she walked to her apartment in a multi-storey block, put her key in the door, then realised there was someone inside. Taking out her weapon, she walked into the living room and opened fire on the dude who was sitting on her sofa eating ice cream. It was only after mortally wounding Botham Jean she realised she was not in her own apartment, but in the corresponding apartment on the floor above.
Difficult though this is to believe, it is undoubtedly the truth, but so was what she said on the witness stand, namely that she intended to kill whoever was inside. Which might have been…a 10 year old juvenile delinquent burglarising the place; an authorised agent from the landlord making an emergency utility investigation; a police officer investigating a break-in…Castle doctrine or not, is it reasonable to kill an intruder on your property under any circumstances, especially when — as per her police training — she should have retreated and called for back up, by which time she would probably have realised her initial mistake?
The reader is invited to contrast the calm professionalism in the way the British police took down two dangerous terrorists with the way the American police routinely kill the innocent. That contrast is stark.
Returning to the Amber Guyger trial where on conviction she received the extremely lenient sentence of ten years, we witnessed the bizarre spectacle of the victim’s brother “hugging” the killer, and of the black trial judge actually giving Guyger her own Bible. Instead of commenting on these extreme acts of forgiveness and compassion by “the fellas and their lovely ladies”, Colin Flaherty chose to gloat over the recent murder of one of the prosecution witnesses in the case. Colin is no spring chicken, but if like not a few older men he should ever end up on the business end of American policing for the first time, he will realise both how wrong he is, and what an enormous apology he owes most American blacks.
[The above article was first published on Medium, October 18, 2019].
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