The latest white-cop-murders-innocent-black-man hoax is just like the rest. The white cop stopped a “black motorist,” who resisted arrest until the cop was forced to shoot. It was an “execution,” we’re told, by Michael Tomasky [Tweet him] below, and also the perp's family, and the usual suspects, including race-hustling, Hate Hoax black lawyer Benjamin Crump, want the cop fired and prosecuted. That hasn’t happened, but don’t be surprised if and when it does. Patrick Lyoya is another George Floyd, we are to believe; Grand Rapids policeman Christopher Schurr, another Derek Chauvin. Well, he will be if prosecutors stage another show trial and punish him for doing his job!
The trouble for the 31-year-old Schurr began on April 4 when he pulled over Lyoya, a 26-year-old criminal, because the license plate did not belong to the car. A second black man was a passenger. Lyoya either didn’t have or refused to produce his driver’s license and registration, and instead tried to run. Schurr caught him; Lyoya resisted—as black thugs always do. During the struggle, he grabbed Schurr’s taser and refused to let go. When Schurr pinned him to the ground, Lyoya continued resisting arrest, despite Schurr’s repeated, lawful commands. Then…boom. Schurr had no choice.
In the usual rerun, the Democrat Party–Mainstream Media Combine trying to railroad Schurr, boost its Defund the Police movement, get out the vote for 2022’s midterms in November, and, of course, continue its longtime terror campaign against whites in general and white cops in particular.
Let’s talk a little about Lyoya. He was a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who landed in the United States in 2014, undoubtedly without the knowledge of 99 percent of the good people of Grand Rapids. The refugee racketeers who imported him surely told everyone that Lyoya and his large family would “culturally enrich” the city because “diversity is our strength.”
Lyoya was driving on a revoked license and, like Jacob Blake, had a warrant for his arrest on a domestic violence charge when Schurr stopped him. That warrant was filed on April 1 [Patrick Lyoya’s troubles with police may have prompted his resistance to officer, by John Agar, Mlive.com, April 28, 2022].
As well, reporter Agar revealed, “Lyoya had three convictions for operating while intoxicated, unlawful use of a motor vehicle, domestic violence and driving while license is suspended or revoked.”
Lyoya clobbered his girlfriend during a fight about bedsheets three days before Schurr shot him:
Lyoya was accused of hitting her four times in the face with a closed fist, grabbing the back of her neck and slamming her head into a car before fleeing. ....
In 2017, Lyoya was accused of assaulting his then-girlfriend. A police report says he punched her in the stomach repeatedly, choked her for three to four seconds as she struggled to get away and scratched the back of her neck with his fingernails.
The police report described Lyoya as “highly intoxicated.”
[Records, interviews reveal Patrick Lyoya's complicated life before Grand Rapids shooting, by Tresa Baldas and Elisha Anderson, Detroit Free Press, April 24, 2022]
Michigan court records reveal more detail about his criminal career: receiving and concealing a stolen vehicle, unlawful possession of an automobile master key, and so on.
So he’s not exactly Rotarian of the Year. That makes no difference to Crump and his white sidekick, Ven Johnson. They “represent” Lyoya’s “refugee” parents, Peter and Dorcas, who have failed to learn English, and his five surviving brothers and one sister.
That’s right. The Refugee Racketeers gave us the whole kit and kaboodle of Lyoyas to culturally enrich us!
Crump usually lets the Leftist media litigate his cases in court of public opinion, which intimidates jurisdictions into surrendering millions of dollars to him and his clients.
Said Crump:
The video clearly shows that this was an unnecessary, excessive, and fatal use of force against an unarmed Black man who was confused by the encounter and terrified for his life,’ Crump said…Patrick never used violence against this officer even though the officer used violence against him.
[Grand Rapids police release video of officer fatally shooting Patrick Lyoya, by Emma Stein and Arpan Lobo, Detroit Free Press, April 13, 2022]
That’s a lie. The video shows no such thing.
As expected, the local NAACP wants Schurr fired and ruined [Additional calls from NAACP for GRPD to fire officer who killed Patrick Lyoya, by Matt Witkos, Fox17, April 26].
Walking point for the Crump-Johnson-NAACP team is the Leftist MSM.
Thus New Republic Editor-in-Chief Michael Tomasky in his April 15th weekly email, which I received and posted on my web page, wrote:
This police execution, and it can only be called that, of Patrick Lyoya of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is beyond belief. Lyoya, who was on his hands and knees with the cop on his back, had apparently reached for the cop’s Taser, but for God’s sakes, doing so doesn’t invite a cop to put a bullet in the back of a human being’s head—”like an animal,” as Lyoya’s father said. What kind of depraved mind thinks that is an appropriate use of force? If this is ultimately acquitted, God help us.
Tomasky apparently believes that Lyoya had the right to incapacitate Schurr with his Taser, the logical inference from which is that Lyoya had the right to seize Schurr’s pistol and murder him in “self-defense.” Note that Tomasky said nothing about Lyoya’s refusing to obey Schurr’s lawful commands.
Speaking like the typical Leftist who knows nothing about police work, Tomasky averred that the real problem isn’t angry, out-of-control blacks who refuse to obey police. Rather, it’s traffic stops. Thus, he ludicrously suggested that only unarmed policemen stop “black motorists”:
Even if the motorist has a gun, how likely is he to use it on a uniformed officer who is unarmed? I’d say extremely unlikely. The armed motorist will know that shooting an unarmed peace officer is a really bad idea and will likely land him in prison for many years. The presence of the cop’s gun serves only to escalate matters.
Even more ludicrously, Tomasky wants most traffic stops abolished. To steal from William F. Buckley, I am not going to insult Tomasky’s intelligence by suggesting that he believes what he wrote.
The New York Times delivered a treacly, lachrymose tale about Lyoya’s “struggle to find his place,” and even took us back to his refugee camp in Malawi, where his family survived on “rations of oil, legumes and maize, and raised crops including pumpkin, cassava and sweet potatoes in small plots” [The Driver, the Officer and the Deadly Traffic Stop in Grand Rapids, by Kim Barker, Steve Eder, and Julie Tate, April 29, 2022].
What that has to do with Lyoya’s disobeying a cop’s lawful command, or his record as a car thief, drunk driver, and woman beater, is unknown. Come to think of it, the NYT’s sleuths didn’t tell us much about that criminal history.
To their credit, the writers detailed Officer Schurr’s time with his fiancée when they were Christian missionaries in AIDs-devastated Kawiti, Kenya, where a black pastor performed their marriage ceremony. Schurr’s nickname was Okebe, or “largehearted.” Yet in reporting his career as a track star, the Times’s operatives found former teammates to say he didn’t have the disposition to be a police officer. Schurr would “freak out, like punch walls or snap pole vault sticks.”
Implication: He shot Lyoya in an out-of-control rage.
But that’s not credible given Schurr’s personnel file. It shows more than a dozen commendations for “meritorious and professional” police work and only a few insignificant complaints. One was for backing up his police cruiser unsafely.
As well, former Detroit Chief of Police Ike McKinnon, who is black, reviewed that file. He concluded that nothing in it said Schurr’s traffic stops were “egregious” or ”unwarranted” [Personnel file of officer who shot Lyoya released, by Rachel Van Gilder, Whitney Burney, WOODTV, April 29, 2002].
Needless to say, McKinnon’s evaluation probably won’t help Schurr, particularly given the mad rush to convict him for policing while white in a city with a street named for black drug queenpin Breonna Taylor.
Also typical of the anti-Schurr spin: the spiel from Charlie Langton, a legal analyst for Fox 2 in Detroit. “Why was he stopped? He was stopped for a bad license plate,” Langton said:
At best that’s a misdemeanor. Even if he’s guilty of that - it’s a misdemeanor. It’s not that big a deal, OK? If that’s the case, I found—in the Michigan State Police officers’ guide specifically—you do not ever use lethal force in that situation, even if the guy runs. You let him run, Langton said.
[Patrick Lyoya shooting: What charges the Grand Rapids police officer could face, FOX 2, Detroit, April 14, 2022]
Langton admitted that a policeman has the right to use deadly force to save his life, but that aside, note how Langton portrayed the event: Schurr shot Lyoya because he ran after a misdemeanor traffic stop for a “bad license plate.” Wrong. Schurr undoubtedly thought car thief Lyoya was driving a stolen car. The cop shot Lyoya because Lyoya resisted arrest, struggled with Schurr, and grabbed Schurr’s Taser.
And even if Schurr had shot Lyoya as he fled, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled long ago that an officer can lawfully shoot a dangerous fleeing prisoner. That ruling went out the window in the case of unjustly convicted Officer Michael Slager.
Observing that race hustler Crump is “a very notable Civil Rights attorney,” Langton sounded as if he were on Lyoya’s defense team. So do all the television lawyers who declare whites or white cops guilty of murder when they kill blacks in obvious cases of self-defense.
Another example: Associated Press operatives Corey Williams and Aaron Morrison contributed to the hoax with a veritable landfill of lies about the death of black thugs who, again, refused to obey lawful commands.
“George Floyd’s 2020 slaying by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin, the 2014 strangulation death of Eric Garner by a New York City officer and the shooting death of Michael Brown that same year by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, are among high-profile encounters that proved deadly for Black men,” the pair wrote:
Police stopped Garner on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes. An officer confronted Brown and a companion as they walked to Brown’s home from a convenience store. Brown was shot after scuffling with the officer. All three men were unarmed.
[Police stops of Black people often filled with fear, anxiety, Associated Press, April 16, 2022]
For the record, the AP’s Morrison has priors when it comes to race-grievance propaganda. In 2020, he suggested that whites were to blame for blacks dying at higher rates than whites from the Covid-19 virus [Amid coronavirus pandemic, black mistrust of medicine looms, April 5, 2020].
But let’s reprise the facts on those cases, beginning with the observation that “minor traffic stop” is an oxymoron when dealing with “black motorists”:
For good measure, England’s Sun tabloid denied that Lyoya even had a criminal past[COP KILLING What was Patrick Lyoya’s criminal history?, by Tom Hussey, Sun, April 14, 2022].
It’s time to stop calling these admittedly unfortunate events “officer-involved shootings.” They are black felon-involved shootings.
We must also stop calling the black thugs “victims.” The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial did not permit prosecutors to call the criminals whom Rittenhouse shot and killed “victims” for good reason. “Victim” assumes the defendant—in Schurr’s case, possibly, a cop—is a murderer [Judge bars prosecutors from referring to men Kyle Rittenhouse shot as ‘victims,’ but will allow defense to use ‘looters,’ by Bruce Vielmetti, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 26, 2022].
If you want to know what Schurr faces, consider this: Former $PLC staffer Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson tried to suppress Lyoya’s dangerous criminal driving record because he was a “victim of violence.” Within hours, she reversed herself, mostly likely because she knew either a newspaper or conservative legal group was preparing a freedom of information lawsuit [State moves to block release of certain driver records, then reverses itself, by Paul Egan, Detroit Free Press, April 15, 2022].
One must wonder what else authorities will try to suppress if Schurr is charged with murder or another crime.
Recall what happened to Derek Chauvin. The judge refused to sequester the jury. A key witness in the car with Floyd did not testify. The autopsy showed that Floyd died of an overdose. But Chauvin is in prison [Derek Chauvin Files Appeal Cataloguing Pervasive Trial Misconduct and Irregularities, by William Jacobsen, Legal Insurrection, April 28, 2022].
It’s all extremely detailed with evidence images and testimony. And none of it is likely to make a difference.https://t.co/KQoR8kLaRz
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) April 29, 2022
If it isn’t already, law and order will be doomed if cops are to be forever persecuted—and prosecuted—for policing while white; i.e., doing what they are paid to do.
Every white cop who does his job faces the grim reality that he might become another Derek Chauvin. We can only hope and pray that doesn’t happen to Christopher Schurr.
Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.
