‘Hands Up’ ‘cops’ threatened bad guys with ‘pistol-whipping’ and shot ‘unarmed’ suspect in the back.

Hands Up, Don’t Shoot/Black Lives Matter/Occupy activists Fahyim Accuay and Jesse Sponberg took on KXL’s challenge to undergo police training at the Clackamas County Sheriff’s training center to get a taste of what it’s like to be a cop. Sadly, they ‘died’.

Don’t feel bad, fellas, when I took some of that same training, I ‘died’ too. But, unlike Sponberg, I came away from the experience with a bunch more respect for a cop’s job.

KXL reporter Jim Ferretti posted his well done and exclusive report Life and Death Decisions here.  He ‘died’ a couple of times too.

Ferretti posted video of both activists in their scenario training.

First up: Fahyim Accuay:

Then Sponberg showed his prowess which included trying to grab a perp when he was beating a victim with a crowbar shouting death threats. After the bad guy chased and hit Sponberg with the crowbar, the perp began running away and Jesse shot him in the back (2:43 in the video).

In the after action meeting with the Clackamas County Deputies, Sponberg made a good point about cops having too few options to subdue bad guys. Often, they have only the choice of life and death, complained Sponberg, who, during his training tried to scare would be killers with his fists (yeah, doesn’t work), threats of a taser which was deployed (and ripped out ) but didn’t use his ‘gun’. 

Cops don’t have four hands. They can’t simultaneously deploy a night stick, pepper spray, taser and a gun. They have to choose which one will keep them safe. Yes, that’s right, cops lives are worth more because they’re under the color of authority and have been authorized with state police powers. 

But he also repeated the canard about how every ‘couple of days’ an unarmed black person is killed by a police officer.

Sponberg is wrong. Instead of doing his own homework (and while you’re at it, Jesse, check out the whole lie about Hands Up, Don’t Shoot) he would have known the claim has been debunked multiple times. It was first uttered by activists–one prominently featured in a debate with Larry Elder on CNN– and based on a ‘study’ if you can call it that, by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

I have little use for Politi’fact’ but here’s what the fact check outfit found:

The report is not an academic, unbiased representation of these deaths. It was put together by one volunteer researcher and details 313 deaths based on news clips and police reports. It arrives at one death “every 28 hours” by dividing the number of hours in a year, 8,760, by the number of deaths, 313.

[N]ot all of the “unarmed” people are analogous to Brown’s case or were killed by police.

Included in the unarmed tally, for instance, is Trayvon Martin, the Miami Gardens teen who was killed by a neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman. In other cases, whether someone was really “unarmed” may depend on your definition. In nine cases, police said they shot at suspects because they were charging at them from behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Another case to make the list is Rudy Eugene, the Miami man who attacked a homeless man and gnawed his face before police shot him to death.

We also found several “unarmed” deaths that were due to accidents, many car crashes as officers sped to a scene. In another example, one woman was killed at her birthday party, hosted by an off-duty police officer, when she hugged the officer from behind and somehow set off his gun.

To those people like our, uh, ‘friend’ who flipped off Citizen Journalist Daylight Disinfectant for simply asking these folks a few on-point questions about cop killing chants, these facts will be ignored.

But my message to these cause du jour protesters is this: You’re less like iconoclasts and rebels and more like sheep. You’re being used by professional protester organizers and big money backers. See my piece for IJReview about it here. 

Do you know how unarmed blacks can stop being killed by cops? Stop attacking police officers. Let’s start there.

I’ll give them one thing: These protesters were willing to at least try to find out what it’s like to be in the shoes of the people they consider the enemy.