Curiouser and curiouser.
We started out with a Facebook Live video that commenced recording from the passenger’s seat just after a black man driving the car had been shot dead. The video was being recorded by Diamond Reynolds, after her boyfriend Philando Castile had been shot in the driving seat of their car. The video shows him bleeding and dying. Then it shows her being ordered out of the car and being held.
Throughout the video, Ms Reynolds is repeating that they were stopped because of a busted tail light, and then when asked for his car’s registration and license, she repeats that Mr Castile told the officer he was a concealed carry gun carrier. According to Ms Reynolds, as he reached for his documents, the police officer shot through the window four times.
These are the bits of the ‘story’ that we don’t see, but we are repeatedly told on the harrowing video. So, we take them to be true. Because of the shocking nature of everything else on the video, we just accept what she is saying.
However, all is not as it seems. Maybe.
Firstly, according to recordings of the comms traffic between the two policemen and their dispatcher, they were going to stop the car Castile was driving because he looked like the suspect caught on cctv committing an armed robbery of a convenience store a few nights before. They were, according to the recordings, not stopping the car because of any tail light problem, unlike what the Reynolds narrative was repeatedly saying.
Secondly, she constantly insists that Castile held a concealed carry permit and communicated this to the officer before reaching for his car’s registration and license in his back pocket. However, Castile did not have a concealed carry permit. He had never even applied for one, according to the Ramsey County Sherrif department which deals with issuing the permits. In Ms Reynolds’ video a gun can be seen on his thigh. It looks identical to the gun used in the armed robbery.
We watch the video wondering why the officer doesn’t try to stop Castlie bleeding out. The officer even stops Reynolds from leaning over to Castile. It seems to us viewers that the officer is being cold and uncaring. Another officer shouts at Reynolds to slowly get out of the car and walk backwards to him, then kneel on the ground. Again this all seems uncaring and brutal.
Except it isn’t when you consider that Castile wasn’t shot for having a broken tail light and being black. It makes perfect sense if instead you consider that Castile had pulled a gun on the officer, or the officer had seen the gun and assumed his life was in danger. Remember, the officers were stopping an armed robbery suspect. It makes perfect sense if the officer was then concerned that Reynolds would reach across and grab the gun and kill him. That’s why they were methodically ‘neutralising’ the threat from Reynolds, rather than trying to aid the dying Castile, which might have allowed her access to the gun or any other weapons in the car.
With the addition of this information, re-watching Ms Reynolds’ video makes far more sense. It explains why she keeps repeating the false narrative rather than being hysterically upset. She doesn’t appear to be reacting as you would imagine a person would react had they just watched their other half being shot dead. Let alone being shot for being black. A lot of what she says and how she says it sounds quite calculated, and eerily calm. Ok, it’s possible that’s just how she is. But really?
Because of her video, 12 cops were then shot, 5 of them shot dead, and the streets were filled with marches and demonstrations from ‘Black Lives Matter’. Castile gets repainted as an innocent cop-on-black victim, and Reynolds as the poor innocent bystander.
It could be said that Reynolds’ carefully spoken ‘lies’ whipped up anti-cop feeling and contributed to cop murders in Dallas. It also shows how very easy it is to manipulate the public, who, it seems, only see and hear what they want to, rather than the real truth.
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