In a CNN segment on August 25, anchor Jake Tapper said, "Video shows police shoot unarmed black man." The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, Buzzfeed, Vogue, and several other outlets referred to Blake as "Unarmed." The day after the shooting, David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, asserted, "It's nearly impossible to imagine any way that his shooting was justified."
As Blake himself admitted in a television interview with ABC News last week, he was not unarmed.
Blake's astonishing admission came days after Kenosha County District Attorney Mike Graveley announced that his office would not charge Officer Sheskey, based on the results of an investigation by former Madison police chief Noble Wray.
His 25-page report definitively concluded that the shooting was "Justified" because Blake consistently did not comply with the officer's orders and motioned toward him with his knife.
Further, according to the report, Officer Sheskey did not retreat for reasonable fear of the children in the car being "Harmed, taken hostage, or abducted by Blake." For those who deemed the seven shots fired at Blake excessive, Wray's report clarified that officers are trained to shoot dangerous suspects until the threat to their safety has subsided, according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice's DAAT standards.
The tragic outcome of Blake's error in judgment is that he will likely never walk again.
The most damning detail in this story is that the victim himself, Blake, has expressed more honesty and remorse for his actions than the media and political elites who pushed an inflammatory, racialized narrative before all the facts were in.
https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-media-role-narrative-before-facts
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