Sterling Brown: Another Ridiculous Installment in the Sad and Stupid Saga of #BlackLivesMatter

by Alexander Zubatov

Police bodycam footage of a January 26, 2018 encounter between Milwaukee Bucks player Sterling Brown and Milwaukee police, during which Brown was tased and arrested after a parking violation, has just been released. The full 30-minute video is available here:

Be careful about watching deliberately distorted cut-ups of this video from certain politicized media outlets that have made it look like the cop at issue asked for the player’s i.d. and then immediately, along with fellow cops, jumped the player and started going for the taser. If you’re interested, take a look at the video the mainstream media manipulation machine, through its organ at the Washington Post, gives us in this article, after first priming us by telling us that the video is going to be “disturbing”:

Milwaukee braces for release of 'disturbing' video of Bucks player's arrest

If you watched the first video and then the second, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Washington Post is doing its best to con you into thinking the cops suddenly went nuts (and then these people wonder why we don’t trust mainstream media sources anymore!).

So, to save you the trouble of watching a 30-minute video, much of which consists of people standing around, I’ll give you the important details. What actually happens in the full video is this:

1. A police officer is standing by Brown’s car that is parked across several spots in a Walgreens parking lot. Brown comes out of the store and approaches the car, coming very close to the police officer.
2. When the cop asks for Brown’s license, Brown almost immediately becomes confrontational, getting in the cop’s face, refusing to abide by several requests to back up, refusing to tell the cop his name or explain why he’d parked across several spaces in the lot (the cop later describes to a fellow officer, just before the 15-minute mark in the full video, that he was asking that question to make sure there was no medical emergency at issue that would’ve prompted Brown to park in the manner he did).
3. During this process, as a result of Brown’s refusing to take a step back, the cop gives Brown a light push (though this is not clearly visible from the video, it can be assumed from Brown’s reaction), whereupon Brown argues about that. The cop calls for backup, and instead of getting the one additional car he was looking for, he gets a team of cops coming in response. Meanwhile, Brown continues arguing about the details of the incident.
4. In a discussion with the cops shortly after the 8-minute mark, Brown reaches his hands into his pockets, and when a cop asks that he remove his hands from his pockets, he refuses to do so, saying he has “stuff” in his hands.
5. The cops then attempt to handcuff him, but he forcibly resists, prompting them to jump him to try to force him to the ground, while he continues resisting, whereupon a cop calls for the taser, which, as best as I can make it out, appears to have been used once to subdue Brown, prompting two groans from him.
6. The cops proceed to do a background check.
7. Later, by around the 21-minute mark, Brown, now handcuffed, is back on his feet along with cops standing by his side.
8. At around the 24-minute mark, we see Brown continue to argue about the incident with police and then, a minute or two later, tell the cop that he’s famous, and the cop should “look [him] up.” The cop keeps telling Brown to tell him who he is, but he refuses to do so.
9. The video concludes shortly thereafter.
10. We know he played in a basketball game later that evening.

I’ve just recently detailed a bunch of the more ridiculous recent incidents in the out-of-control #BlackLivesMatter narrative here:

#BlackLivesMatter Has Officially Jumped the Shark

This one is yet another installment. While mainstream media outlets are making it look like another racist incident, forcing an apology from the Milwaukee police department, there is, of course, no indication that race was an issue in any way. While I am not claiming that the cops involved couldn’t have done a better job handling the incident in a more restrained fashioned, the reality is that they were dealing with someone who was unnecessarily giving them a hard time. To put it another way, the only pattern in some of these recent incidents, including this one, that I see is black people turning what should be a routine parking or speeding ticket into a crazy standoff by repeatedly mouthing off, refusing to abide by police instructions and otherwise exhibiting defiance. If #BlackLivesMatter and the mainstream media want to be of actual service to the black community (and, really, to all of us), what they need to do is stop irresponsibly distorting these incidents to rake in dough, stop inflaming the relationship between blacks and cops and, instead, make crystal clear how to behave in interactions with police, stressing the obvious need to remain calm and compliant rather than aggressive and defiant. As best as I can tell, if more black people made that one simple change in the way they behaved with regard to cops, these entirely avoidable incidents would stop happening overnight.

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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”

Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, Quillette, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, Republic Standard, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.

He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).