Just 4 days after a Ferguson, Mo. police officer gunned downed an unarmed black kid, a much different story emerged from St. Louis:
Authorities said two police officers were assaulted in their attempt to catch a wanted man in the Carondelet neighborhood of south St. Louis.
Police said they conducted a search for more than one hour Monday, an effort to find Kevin Miner, 25. Miner was wanted for burglary. Officers said he tried hide one resident’s home.
“I saw the basement door was open, the cellar door was open, and I said ‘did you look down there?,” said resident Christina Freed
Officers went down the cellar steps of Freed’s home and tried to open the basement door, but Miner allegedly slammed it back shut, breaking an officer’s hand in the process.
Officers said they forced the door open, causing Miner to fight back. Miner then allegedly kicked an officer.
So this guy actually fought with police, who really had no idea of knowing if Miner was armed or not. If we were looking for a justification for shooting a suspect, this case would have 100 times more justification than the case of Michael Brown, but that wasn’t the outcome. Instead Miner will now get his day in court and our justice system will have a chance to do its job.
But why was Miner’s life spared, when Michael Brown was gunned down? There could be a ton of reasons for that, but I can’t help but look at Miner and believe we might know the main reason:
That is a picture of Kevin Miner. Notice a difference between him and Michael Brown? Yeah, it’s pretty obvious. But the differences don’t stop there.
On Friday Ferguson police engaged in a smear campaign against Michael Brown by releasing a video of a robbery that occurred not long before Brown was gunned down. The video allegedly shows Brown shoving a store owner after taking a pack of Cigarillos. But that smear campaign was quickly debunked when Ferguson’s police chief was force to admit that the robbery had nothing to do with the altercation that occurred between Brown and officer Darren Wilson. Still, the intent was there to paint Brown as some violent thief that needed subdued with any force necessary; an attempt to justify the officer acting as judge, jury and executioner.
And what about the history of these two? Michael Brown’s parents have admitted that he was in some trouble growing up, but Brown was just 18. That means what happened before his last birthday didn’t matter and wasn’t out there. Even if Wilson was able to run a background on Brown, he wouldn’t have seen any legal trouble Brown may have been in. Compare that to Miner, who was arrested not once, but twice in the past month, not including his arrest last Tuesday. One arrest was for trespassing and another for robbery.
People keep saying we need to wait for the facts to come out, but we already have some very disturbing facts.
Michael Brown was an unarmed black kid, walking down the streets in a St. Louis suburb with no real known criminal history. He was murdered in the streets by a police officer, shot 6 times, including once in the palm, indicating his hands were up. From the preliminary coroner’s report the shots were not fired at close range either.
Kevin Miner was hiding from police in a basement. He had been arrested two other times in the past month alone. He engaged police officers physically, breaking the hand of one. Now he is sitting in jail, facing new charges of assault for what he did to the police officers, along with the original robbery charges. But unlike Michael Brown, Kevin Miner will get his day in court. He will probably do some time, but in the end he will eventually be a free man again, able to go on with his life of thuggery.
If anyone tries to say race was not an issue with what happened in St. Louis, then they are lying to themselves. The fact that a white, repeat offender, can physically assault police in closed quarters and live to tell about it, while a black teen, walking down the street, is gunned down from a distance speaks volumes.
This doesn’t excuse the violence and crime that is happening late nights in Ferguson right now, but it does justify the outrage the black community is showing and it’s something we, as a society, must remedy.