Two years ago, a man named Deshawn Leeth was named a community engagement officer at the sheriff’s office in Washtenaw County, Michigan. This is a position that, according to the sheriff’s office, is something of a big deal:
Community Engagement is a foundational element of our ability to realize our organizational mission. … Community Engagement isn’t just a program. It is how we communicate, build trust, identify needs, and collaboratively work side by side with our partners to create interventions and provide solutions.
In other words, “community engagement officers” are representatives for the police force. Their job is to visit schools and prisons and other institutions, and try to find ways to make the community safer.
For 30-year-old Deshawn Leeth, the title of “community engagement officer” was just one line on a lengthy resume that — if you leave off his eight felony convictions for home invasion and two convictions for larceny — really reflected his passion for serving the people of Michigan.
When he wasn’t going on crime sprees, he was a true model citizen. In his spare time, for example, Leeth was the executive director of an organization called “Underdawg Nation,” which states that its mission is to “Help At-Risk Kids who lack resources and help prevent Teen Violence and disengagement from school.” To that end, the Underdawg Nation hosted video game tournaments in local schools and encouraged students to pursue BLM activism — because as we all know, video games and activism are how you make sure kids keep their grades up. Underdawg Nation also claims to be a public-interest nonprofit, even though local journalists can’t find any record that they’re actually registered as a nonprofit. But that’s not the point. The point is that Deshawn Leeth, whether he started a legal nonprofit or not, is a beacon of light in Washtenaw County, Michigan.
Or at least, Deshawn Leeth *was* a beacon of light in Washtenaw County, Michigan — right up until his light was extinguished on April 4. That’s the day when, while he was totally unarmed, Leeth was gunned down by several Neo Nazi police officers. What was Leeth’s crime, you ask? Well, there wasn’t one, of course. He got into a car accident, and then he calmly approached a state trooper for help. And then, as he approached the officer, he was brutally murdered in a flagrant act of white supremacy. Yes, police executed a committed black community servant simply because he’s black. And then the police stuffed his body in a squad car and pretended he stole it. Can you imagine? It’s too terrifying to think about, so don’t think about it. Just start rioting.
Everything I have just stated up until this point is the narrative you would have heard in the press, 24-hours a day, if it weren’t for police body cameras. There is no doubt whatsoever that, in the absence of video evidence of the crimes he was committing before his death, Deshawn Leeth would have been BLM’s next Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin. They would have flooded every website with relentless propaganda about what a great person DeShawn was, and how horrible it is that the police killed him.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
In fact, they were already doing that, before the body camera footage was released. The sheriff of Washtenaw County, a woman named Alyshia Dyer, posted this message on Facebook for example:
Like so many in the community, we are left in shock, with unanswered questions and profound sorrow. His loss will be deeply felt by the young people across our county whose lives he touched. No matter who you were or what you had been through, Deshawn showed unwavering compassion and care to everyone he worked with.
Another public official, district commissioner Annie Somerville, posted a similar message:
[We] lost a great one. May the memory of Deshawn Leeth keep us grounded on supporting young people in our community. That’s what he would want.
In part because of comments like this, a GoFundMe for Deshawn Leeth has already raised around $15,000.
Yes, he was a “great one.” He really “keeps us grounded.” He showed “compassion and care” to literally everyone. His loss is “deeply felt.” This is the propaganda that spread within days of Leeth’s death. And it’s the kind of propaganda that we would have been subjected to, on endless repeat for months on end, if we didn’t have the footage I’m about to show you. Here’s the body camera footage from the Ohio State Police, showing a state trooper’s first encounter with Deshawn Leeth near the border with Pennsylvania:
There are two points that need to be made, right off the bat. First of all, every single government official who put out a statement mourning this psychotic criminal needs to be removed from office as quickly as possible. There is no conceivable narrative of police misconduct here. There’s also no narrative in which Deshawn Leeth is a well adjusted human being and an asset to his community. He was dangerous and violent right up until the end. He died doing what he loved, which was stealing other people’s property and terrorizing the local community. Keep in mind, this was not an otherwise law abiding citizen who just snapped one day and lost his mind. He had a long history of criminal activity. He had already spent time in prison for home invasion.
The other takeaway from the footage is that the officer would have been justified in shooting Deshawn Leeth about a dozen times during this encounter. This would’ve been a good moment, for example. Take a look at this still frame:
Screenshot: Ohio State Police.
Anyone looking at this image can tell, immediately, that the officer should not be holding a taser at this point. He should be holding a gun. And he should be using it. But instead of using his gun, he discards the Taser and engages in a protracted fistfight with Leeth — a fistfight that the officer loses. And because the officer loses this fight, Leeth is able to drive away in the officer’s squad car, which he then used to lead police on a 10-minute-long chase at high speeds. In other words, the officer’s decision not to use lethal force ultimately endangered his life, as well as the life of everyone on the highway. This is the footage from the police cruiser’s dash cam after Leeth stole it. Watch:
We all know why the officer allowed this chase to happen, instead of neutralizing Leeth immediately. He didn’t want to end up like Derek Chauvin. He didn’t want his life to be destroyed in the service of a fraudulent BLM narrative. So instead, the officer allowed this psychotic criminal to beat him up on the side of the road and then take his squad car.
These are the incentives that BLM has created. They have made policing far more dangerous in every respect. The irony is that, in their rush to vilify police officers, BLM also helped provide police officers with a tool that’s now vindicating them, with increasing frequency. It was BLM, as you might remember, that led the charge for mandatory body cams just a few years ago.
Here are just a few examples, from Jacksonville, Kansas City and New York:
Well, this didn’t work out as intended. In fact, it’s not unreasonable to say that ultimately, body cameras may have put the final nail in BLM’s coffin. If not for body cameras, there would’ve been ten more George Floyds after George Floyd.
Late last year, to give another example, a black Georgetown University graduate was shot to death by police in her apartment complex. Very quickly, Georgetown put out this tweet, which is still up:
Georgetown women’s basketball mourns the tragic loss of Sydney Wilson (College ’13). Forever a Hoya.
In other words, Sydney Wilson was the victim. They’re implying she’s yet another casualty of police violence. A lot of people on Facebook agreed. For example, someone wrote:
Sydney Wilson should have been tazed, instead, but of course, she was black, so they took her out.
Then the body camera footage was released, and everyone saw the truth, which is that Sydney Wilson very nearly murdered a police officer while charging at him like a demon from hell. And once again, this officer allowed the situation to spiral out of control, probably because he understood that his life would be destroyed if he defended himself. Watch:
This woman would have her own murals by now, if it weren’t for body cams. The story would have gone something like this: an officer showed up to help a distressed woman in the middle of a mental health crisis. The racist officer then executed the woman in cold blood outside of her own apartment despite the fact that she was unarmed. The fact that she had a knife would not be mentioned until the riots were well underway. But because of body cams, this is the image everyone remembers from this encounter:
It’s enough to make you wonder how much damage to this country could have been avoided if Darren Wilson had a body cam in Ferguson. It probably would’ve shown an image a lot like that one. And we may have been spared a lot of chaos, death, and property damage as a result. Activists were able to lie blatantly (hands up don’t shoot) because there were no cameras. Then when the truth came out that Brown charged Wilson and tried to kill him, activists scoffed at it and claimed that nobody would go charging at a cop like that. Well we now know from body cams that in fact that happens all the time. The image of a crazed, blood thirsty Michael Brown bum rushing an armed cop is not at all far fetched based on what we’ve now seen in these interactions. (Nor is it far-fetched based on the investigation from Obama’s Justice Department, which corroborated everything Darren Wilson said.)
At this point, we know where this will lead. The same movement that demanded body cams, and then was destroyed when their demands were met, will now decide that actually body cams aren’t so great after all. They’ll say that body cams are a tool of white supremacy. In fact, that’s already starting to happen. We’re seeing the shift in real time.
Last summer for example, the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation published an article that discusses all of the problems that are supposedly caused by police body cams.
Here’s how an outlet called Prism wrote up Yale’s findings.
The promises made by proponents of body cameras don’t always align closely with the data on their efficacy or the degree to which they actually increase public transparency. In the U.S., the number of civilians whom police have killed annually has only increased each year since the widespread adoption of body camera equipment.
So let’s sort through this. Their first contention is that police body cams aren’t working because they haven’t decreased the number of police shootings. But that’s not the point of policy body cams. The point of the cameras, for the most part, is to determine whether police officers are justified in using force when they choose to do so. Body cams cannot mind-control the population, and force them to stop attacking police officers.
What’s happening here is that, at Yale, long ago, they came to the conclusion that the police must be shooting black people for no reason. And therefore, they determined that the number of police shootings would inevitably decline once police officers were recorded while they were on the job. And now that the number of police shootings hasn’t declined, they’re not revisiting their flawed premise. They’re not going back and checking whether the police were ever shooting black people for no reason. They’re also not even claiming that police officers are indeed shooting people for no reason, because they know the body cams would disprove that claim. So instead, they’re attacking body cams, which until very recently, they supported.
Let’s read on from this Prism article, because it gets worse as it goes:
With body cameras, law enforcement agencies could expand their surveillance capacity, mitigate police brutality lawsuits, create ‘highly controllable evidence’ against the largely poor, largely Black citizens of whom police often seek to capture footage, and quell social unrest by creating ‘comprehensive digital archives’ of attendees at protests for social change. A 2016 George Mason University study of prosecutors’ offices across the U.S. in jurisdictions with body cameras found that just 8.3% had used the footage to prosecute a police officer, while 92.6% had used it to prosecute private individuals.
Again, there is nothing unusual about this statistic. Of course body cams are going to be used, in the vast majority of situations, to prosecute people who are not police officers. That’s completely consistent with the outcome you’d expect. What did they think would happen? That 50% of body camera footage would be used to prosecute the police? How deluded do you have to be in order to think half the police force is committing crimes with their body cams on?
And by the way, notice what they’re *not* saying with this paragraph. They’re not claiming that these prosecutions of “largely poor, largely black citizens” are unjust or unlawful. They’re not claiming that the police are making up charges or anything like that. They can’t make that claim, because it’s all on camera. Instead, they’re simply concerned with outcomes. They don’t want black people to go to prison, even when they commit crimes. And so now — rather than address the obvious and persistent problems in black neighborhoods and black families — they want to get rid of the cameras. It’s the same reason you’ll find a bunch of hot takes about why Ring doorbell cameras are dystopian. Criminals don’t like it when you expose what they’re doing.
But at this point, it’s too late. BLM’s body cam gamble has clearly failed, and everyone understands why. It turns out that, like every other radical Left-wing protest movement in history, BLM was a little too quick to make demands. They were reckless. And in the end, all they accomplished was proving, beyond any doubt, what reasonable people already knew — which is that the police are not in fact the problem. In reality, violent thugs like Deshawn Leeth are the problem. And thanks in part to BLM’s tireless advocacy for body cameras, the rest of society no longer has to suffer months’ worth of rioting and civil unrest because of their crimes.
