Black Lives Matter Hits Charlotte; Burning, Looting, 18 Cops Injured

Violent protests spearheaded by the BlackLivesMatter movement broke out in Charlotte, North Carolina last night.

The rioters (I’m not going to call them ‘protestors’, thank you) shut down I-85 and had a jolly time throwing rocks down on motorists from overpasses, which resulted in a number of accidents and 85 people being injured. Lots of videos at the link showing the mob cheering every time they hit a car.

They eventually set fire to the freeway and got busy breaking into trucks”:

Then they moved on to a Wal-Mart on N. Tryon in the University area to loot and pick up some more goodies as part of the night’s festivities. That store was closed today, with wooden pallets piled in front of the doors and shopping carts blocking the driveway into the lot. Anyone want to bet it doesn’t reopen and takes a lot of badly needed jbs away when it closes its doors?

Something like a dozen police officers have been hurt today as the riots continue.

Charlotte has a white, uber-progressive Democrat female mayor in Jennifer Roberts who got elected by a very narrow margin and depends on the black vote to stay in office. So it’s reasonable to imagine that she’s followed the example of the mayor of Baltimore in ordering the police to make a minimum of arrests, sit there and take it and allow part of the city to be destroyed in the interest of ‘peace.’

And in fact, there have been very few arrests made.

So, what was this all about?

Keith Lamont Scott, 43 was sitting in a parked car in the parking lot of a University City apartment complex. Three police officers approached him, one in plain clothes and two in uniform.

Police said they had been searching for someone who had an outstanding warrant at College Downs complex on Old Concord Road when they saw Scott leave his car holding a gun.

The police approached the car, Scott exited the car again armed with a firearm “and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers, who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject,” police said in a statement. “The officers immediately requested Medic and began performing CPR.”

The officer who fired the fatal shot was CMPD Officer Brentley Vinson, who is black.

A woman who said she is Scott’s daughter claimed on a live-streamed video on Facebook that Scott was unarmed when he was shot. The video went viral, with more than 521,000 views by 9:30 p.m.

In the video, the woman said her father was sitting in his car reading a book and waiting for the school bus to drop off his son. She claimed that her father was Tasered and then shot four times, and that he was disabled.

I think we’ll find out later that this part is sheer fantasy. Someone who’s been tasered isn’t in any condition to pickup a gun.Not only that, but if he was tasered and that didn’t subdue him (say, if like Rodney King he was high out of his mind on PCP), the police have been trained in other methods to subdue him.

The police claim that they recovered King’s gun but did not recover a book and that they have witnesses and video backing up their version of things. So we’ll see.

I’d also like to know what the warrant was for. I have a feeling it wasn’t for an overdue traffic ticket.

The police have admitted that Scott was not the person they were looking for, so his death, if their version is correct, was solely due to his being stupid enough to get out of a parked car and advance towards police carrying a gun. If that’s the case and Scott was a fan, BlackLivesMatter and their fairy tales might be the real villains responsible for Scott’s death.

Meanwhile, Mayor Roberts says she has been in contact with the governor’s office, the White House and the NAACP. So no matter how this goes, expect the Obama DOJ to come down heavy on the Charlotte PD.