“Judiciously condemning his violence isn’t some kind of conspiracy created by white people to destroy brown or black families, but simply one of many standards of conduct that lead to a successful and productive life.”
Salt Lake City officials revealed new video this week that sheds light on a deadly shooting in a court room several years ago. It took this long to come out because officials worried it might inspire more gang violence, and there was a pending wrongful death lawsuit against the federal marshal (which was dismissed this week.)
The video shows the defendant, Siale Angilau, a 25-year-old member of the Tongan Crip gang, grab a pen from his lawyer’s desk and then charge at a witness testifying against him. The video shows him lunging over the barrier before a US marshal confronts him and fires. This video is important, as it clearly undermines the Black Lives Matter-style narrative that used this shooting as an attack against the white and conservative justice system.
One of the loudest critics was Gina Colvin, who lives in New Zealand but cares about the large Polynesian community that immigrated to Utah. She called the gangs tribes and excused their behavior as resulting from a “cocktail of poverty, social, cultural and linguistic alienation, and institutional racism.” She begrudgingly admits “their methods are crude and anti-social,” then excused their behavior again by saying, “That’s what happens when you fail to give minority kids the language they need to make sense of the broader reality of their lives, you strip away their cultural and economic capital and you make their material presence a matter of loathing. They get pissed off.”
Then she posted a letter from a Harvard student (with a BS in social justice from what I can gather) who added that the marshal’s “bullets [were] guided by the narrative that brought you down” and “it’s the pen that killed you.” The open letter is filled with bromides about social justice but fails to confront the simple facts that people have choices, there is not a cosmic conspiracy against dark-skinned people, and people of every color are responsible for their heinous choices; it’s not the fault of a “pathology [against] brown bodies.”
The evidence is right there in the video. It goes so quickly I can hardly see the color of the skin of the person jumping over the railing with an object designed to slash and stab. But if it were a white person sprinting across court with a weapon, they wouldn’t sit down to have tea with the federal marshal. The video wasn’t released until this week, but even back then, I found the narrative of those like Colvin incredibly one-sided, to the point that they were probably still looking for the Tawana Brawley rapists.
The video settled it in my mind, as the person was clearly violent and out of control. They were a known member of a gang and were not simply reaching for a pen but charging a witness in a courtroom. If the person would do this in front of a judge and armed deputies, I can only imagine their impulse control in a dark alley armed with a gun.
Judiciously condemning his violence isn’t some kind of conspiracy created by white people to destroy brown or black families, but simply one of many standards of conduct that lead to a successful and productive life. People, no matter their color, are responsible for their behavior, especially when it is violent and criminal.
Social justice warriors like to blame it on poverty, systematic injustice, and all sorts of things, but they seem to blame everybody and everything except the person who committed the crime!
