National Review
Jacob Blake himself explodes the ‘unarmed’ media narrative
In his first television interview since being shot in the back by the police, Jacob Blake admitted that he not only had a knife in his possession at the time of the shooting, but also “dropped it” before picking it up again. “I realized I had dropped my knife, I had a pocketknife. So I took it after I got off him because they shocked me and I fell on him, ”Blake told Michael Strahan in an interview that aired on Thursday on ABC’s Good Morning America (GMA). “I shouldn’t have caught it, just considering what was going on,” he continued. “At that time, I wasn’t thinking clearly.” Earlier this month, Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley said he would not file charges against Officer Rusten Sheskey, who shot Blake seven times, as the officer was acting in self-defense against an armed attacker. Blake was also arrested for resisting the police with a knife. Blake’s admission contradicts previous statements by his family and lawyers, who denied that he had a knife in his possession when the police shot him on August 23 in an incident that resulted from a 911 call made by the mother of the children of Blake, who told police that Blake was trying to escape in his rental car with two of his children. “My son had no gun,” Blake’s father told the Chicago Sun-Times for an August 25 story. Patrick Salvi Jr., a lawyer for the Blake family, told CNN on August 26 that Blake did not have a knife in the car. “Witnesses confirm that he did not have a knife and did not threaten the police in any way,” Blake’s lawyer, Ben Crump, said in a statement released on August 27. At the time, Blake had an arrest warrant against him on charges of trespassing, disorderly conduct and third-degree sexual assault, which the operator relayed to responding officers. With criminal charges pending, the police were required by law to take Blake into custody. In the interview with GMA, Blake also stated that “I hadn’t done anything, so I didn’t feel like they were there for me”, although investigators later found out that, prior to his arrest, Blake had sought his own warrant from a GMA website. police and sent a text mentioning the warrant. ABC did not mention any of the facts in the interview. The shooting went viral on social media after being videotaped, showing police officers shouting at Blake “drop the knife”. In subsequent days – which included deadly violence, riots and looting – the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Criminal Investigation Division revealed that Blake admitted to having “a knife in his possession”. But much of the mainstream press published the initial statement that he was “unarmed”. “The Wisconsin governor on Monday called on the National Guard to help contain the unrest after police shot an unarmed black man in the last incident this summer to provoke cries of injustice and divide a nation over the urgency of bringing about fundamental changes. for law enforcement, ”read the Lede of the Washington Post’s five-person signature on August 24. Earlier this month, the Post stepped back after maintaining Blake’s “unarmed” description in reporting the authorities’ decision not to pursue police charges. Although the newspaper corrected the narrative, a story published on January 5 still refers to Blake as “unarmed”. The Post did not return a request for comment on the discrepancy. In the days after the shooting, CNN published several articles describing Blake as “unarmed”, which have not yet been corrected. “Video shows police shooting unarmed black man” is a current link to an August 24 segment presented by CNN anchor Jake Tapper. A USA Today August 28 “fact check” entitled “Jacob Blake did not ‘brandish’ the knife, took the gun before the Kenosha police fired” argued that “Blake was not ‘branding’ anything in the video by passersby “, even noting that the clip” shows something in Blake’s hand, but the resolution is low, so it could be a knife “. But instead of issuing a correction or retraction on January 5, PolitiFact just updated the post with a note from the editor stating that prosecutors had revealed “Blake was armed with a ‘razor blade knife’ when he was shot by the police “. The explanation? “It does not affect the rating of this item because the ratings are based on what is currently known.” In other words, it used to be true.