Bystander footage shows an Ohio police officer allegedly telling outraged neighborhood residents that “Blue lives matter” at the scene of a police-involved shooting of a black teenage girl on Tuesday afternoon.
The video: In a Facebook Live video which captured the aftermath of the incident, the Columbus police officer appears to say “Blue lives matter” to a small crowd of people criticizing law enforcement’s actions and protesting the shooting.
- “Blue lives matter?” one man seen in the video shouts, apparently repeating the officer’s words. “Crazy. That’s an insult, especially at this place right now.”
The shooting: Hours after the incident, the Columbus Division of Police released bodycam footage which showed an officer fatally shooting 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, who was armed with a knife and appeared to be in the process of attempting to stab another girl.
- “She came at her with a knife,” an officer can be heard saying on camera.
- Interim Police Chief Michael Woods said officers were initially on the scene in response to a caller claiming someone had tried to stab them.
- According to the girl’s family, Bryant had been the one to call police for help.
The culture war: The shooting took place around the same time the guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, a lightning rod for the fractious political debate surrounding policing and race, was announced.
- Police reform activists have already symbolically linked Bryant’s death to that of George Floyd, the Minneapolis man whom Chauvin was convicted of murdering, and to what they characterize as a systemic issue of police brutality against black people.
- Meanwhile, conservatives and pro-police advocates have fiercely pushed back against what they deem a false narrative promoted by biased and corrupted media and politicians.
- Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday evening expressed outrage at Chauvin’s conviction, saying, “I’m kind of more worried about the rest of the country, which thanks to police inaction, in case you haven’t noticed, is, like, boarded up.”
