The original draft of this email was sent to Washington Post reporters John Cox, Mike Rosenwald and Julie Tate. It was also copied to several of their Post colleagues, Seattle Times political cartoonist David Horsey, and the once widely respected civil rights attorney who’s sadly fast becoming known as just another race hustler, Ben Crump.
Dear John, Mike and Julie,
No one is surprised, of course, but you and your Post editors have again cravenly chosen to manipulate and withhold facts in order to stir up still more dangerous division and thereby sell more papers and clicks [“Soldier’s family again shaken by a violent arrest,” A1, Apr. 15].
Other, less willfully incendiary media outlets have reported that what your story today calls a “brief stretch” during which U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario ignored flashing police car lights behind him and kept driving to “a well-lit” gas station was in fact about a minute and 40 seconds, according to dash-cam time stamps. Even if he were traveling well under 60 mph, he’d have likely covered more than a mile.
So, tell me, what do you think was or should have been going through the patrol officer’s mind when a driver ignored his flashing lights — a universally understood command to pull over — and instead drove on and on?
Contrary to the media’s “racist cops” narrative, had Mr. Nazario just pulled over he likely would have endured nothing worse than a brief roadside lecture about his alleged failure to display his temporary tags properly, followed by a firm but friendly warning to “get it taken care of.” Instead, he chose to flee and set off a mysterious, anxiety-building chase.
One needn’t defend any of the officer’s subsequent conduct at the gas station. I certainly don’t. But surely, if one is to be fair-minded, one must soberly consider the fact that police are just as vulnerable to frustration and anger as any other imperfectly emotional human being. And one needn’t be a conspiracy theorist to imagine that some young men of color, if not necessarily Mr. Nazario, have now been emboldened and enabled by recklessly misleading media coverage like yours to orchestrate dangerous scenarios which lend themselves readily to the nearly ubiquitous Ben Crump-style extortion, er, I mean litigation. None of us can know what was in Mr. Nazario’s mind before he precipitated the low-speed O.J. chase, but his attorneys have filed a lawsuit seeking more than $1 million in damages.
So listen to the police body-cam audio carefully. Mr. Nazario sounds a lot like an aspiring young actor with a Law & Order cameo, playing his moment in the spotlight like Jusse Smollett on GMA. Again, no one’s defending cops who overreact when they’ve had their strings plucked. But you’re lying to yourselves and Post readers if you deny the obvious: namely that some folks are now baiting police in hopes of scoring fat lawsuit settlements at taxpayers’ expense. Honest reporting would reflect this.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.