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National review
Why Kenosha’s cop won’t be prosecuted
Authorities in Wisconsin said on Tuesday they would not prosecute Rusten Sheskey, the officer who shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake in August last year – an incident that sparked protests and riots in Kenosha, a town near the Illinois border. To justify this decision, they released two reports, one from the Kenosha County District Attorney’s Office and another from Noble Wray, a retired police chief and police reformer in the Obama administration who had been told. asked to make an independent assessment. shots remain unclear, in large part because Kenosha Police did not have body cameras at the time. The incident was only captured on spectators’ cellphones, whose videos do not show the whole situation. But when it comes to the issue of a criminal prosecution, the documents are very convincing: there is no way to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Sheskey fired without justification. If anything, the evidence points in the opposite direction: Agent Sheskey and two other cops showed up in response to a call from Laquisha Booker, the mother of Blake’s children. She said Blake took the keys to his rental vehicle and that he has borrowed vehicles from her and run over them in the past. She added that Blake was “not supposed to be here” but would let him visit on her son’s birthday. Police dispatchers told officers Blake had an arrest warrant for the felony of domestic violence and sexual assault, meaning they should arrest him if they find him, per department policy. Kenosha Police Station. witness, Booker said Blake was trying to pick up his car and kids – and Blake was seen putting a child in a gray SUV. Sheskey said he wasn’t sure whether the child belonged to Blake or not. In truth, there were three children in the SUV, all of Blake’s. The cops tried to stop Blake. He resisted. Two different officers shot him down with Tasers, but he ripped off the probes. And to make matters worse, Blake produced a knife. Despite some claims in the media that Blake was “unarmed” he admitted to having the knife himself, there is video of officers telling him to drop it, and the weapon was found open in the SUV after the incident. According to the DA office report, Blake also resisted arrest with a knife in a 2010 incident and then came a series of fateful decisions. As seen in the video widely played on the cell phone, Blake walked around the SUV and opened the door. Sheskey followed him and grabbed Blake’s shirt, then pulled seven times. He says he stopped shooting when Blake dropped the knife, in accordance with his training to shoot until the threat ceased. The key question is whether Sheskey reasonably believed that lethal force was necessary to put an end to an imminent threat of “death or grievous bodily harm”, whether to himself or to someone else. before the shots rang out, which would have moved the knife towards the officer. According to the district attorney’s office, “Constable Sheskey stated that for the first time Jacob Blake had shown an intention to harm [as opposed to just resisting arrest] pushing the knife towards Officer Sheskey’s chest. Such an action would clearly justify deadly force, but that gesture isn’t obvious in the video, at least not to me. (You can view the recording on YouTube and move frame by frame using the “<» et «>On your keyboard.) That said, I wouldn’t say the video disproves those claims either – the most important issue in court, where the onus is on the prosecution – because the SUV door and the bodies of the cops obscure some of Blake’s moves. the officer could consider himself to be in imminent danger. PO Sheskey was literally clinging to Blake’s shirt, and Blake had a knife in his hand, actively resisting, trying to get into the vehicle. This situation only compounds the fact that the children are in the vehicle. Of course, it was Sheskey’s decision to grab Blake’s shirt, and there are several ways to question the actions of the agents even. if we don’t pursue them. But when it comes to those crucial final moments, the truth is, Blake put them in an impossible situation. They could have stood a safe distance from the guy with a knife-wielding sexual assault warrant, but that would have meant letting this guy get into a vehicle they knew was holding at least one child – an option that could lead to a high-speed chase or hostage-taking, two possibilities that Sheskey said he feared at the time. On the flip side, once Sheskey gets close to a knife-wielding suspect, the chance he needs to use lethal force increases, as knives are incredibly deadly at that distance and he doesn’t there is not much time to check and react. Or, as Wray put it:> Agent Sheskey had determined that it was dangerous for the public and the child in the car to let Blake go. PO Sheskey felt that he could not retreat once he made the decision that harm could befall the children or the public. I have concluded that Constable Sheskey’s analysis was reasonable given the limited information available to him at the time. Agent Sheskey did not know the relationship between Blake and the child. I don’t know if that makes a big difference. The US Department of Justice reported in 2010 that 200,000 children were abducted mostly by a family friend or relative. Blake’s stern resistance to being taken into custody would lead a reasonable officer to believe he would engage in a high-speed chase. I have no idea what really would have happened if Sheskey hadn’t drawn. I’m glad I didn’t have to make this decision myself. And I’m glad the prosecutors aren’t dragging this out by pursuing a case they could never win.
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