The Amber Guyger murder trial was quite prominent in both the local and national news. I would guess that it was so heavily reported because it tied in to the overall media narrative concerning black men being shot by cops as a major problem.
Whether the shooting was justified or not, and whether the jury arrived at the correct decision, I have no idea. I didn’t watch most of the trial because of time constraints. I generally operate on the assumption that I trust the court system to arrive at the correct conclusion, absent some evidence to the contrary in a specific case. So, I won’t comment on the verdict at this point.
After the verdict, I assumed news reporting would slowly fade on this subject, and the media would move on to something else. Then, something “unexpected” happened. One of the witnesses, Joshua brown, was found shot to death, an apparent homicide victim. (I use quotation marks on the word “unexpected”, because what happened is actually quite common.)
Joshua Brown was a State’s witness, and a neighbor of the decedent. Mr. Brown overheard parts of the confrontation between the Defendant, Ms. Guyger, and the decedent in the case. His testimony was generally not favorable for the Defense. My understanding is that he testified Ms. Guyger did not issue verbal commands to the decedent prior to using deadly force.
About a week after the trial, Mr. Brown, was, coincidentally, shot to death. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2019/10/08/dallas-police-name-three-suspects-joshua-brown-murder-investigation/
I suspected I knew what the race of whoever shot Mr. Brown would be, and it looks like I wasn’t wrong. Two of the three suspects in the shooting were black. The shooting appears to have arisen out of a dispute over drugs.
Normally, I doubt Mr. Brown’s death would have made the news. Why not? Because it happens all the time. It’s the same reason the news reports airplane crashes, but typically doesn’t report car wrecks. Car wrecks happen too often. It also doesn’t fit the narrative the media wants you to believe, which is that the number one concern for black people in America is police shootings, not homicides committed by other black people.
In some years, black people are the primary perpetrators of murder. They’re also the primary victims. The Bureau of Justice Statistics sets forth the percentage of homicides committed by blacks and the percentage of homicides committed by whites between 1980 and 2009. These figures can be found at page 12, Table 7 of “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008”, where it said that of all homicides committed in the US, 45.3% of offenders were white and 52.5% were black. (See http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf, last accessed on 10-9-2019.)
So, Mr. Brown’s apparent homicide at the hands of other black people would normally not be a newsworthy event. It’s too frequent to merit much attention.
