‘Watch the show, folks’: Va. trooper no longer employed after playing to camera in violent stop of Black driver

A Virginia State Police trooper who is seen in a viral video telling a Black driver “you are going to get your a-- whooped” before violently removing the man from his car in 2019 is no longer with the agency, a spokeswoman said.
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The video, which Erlich first posted on Twitter last summer, has been retweeted thousands of times and was featured widely in news reports, begins after Thompson, 29, of Woodbridge was pulled over on the Beltway in Fairfax County in April 2019 for an expired inspection decal. A trooper who initiated the stop said she could smell marijuana wafting from Thompson’s car, but Erlich said no drugs were found in the vehicle.

Hewitt was one of three troopers at the scene and did all of the talking in the video

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/watch-the-show-folks-va-trooper-no-longer-employed-after-playing-to-camera-in-violent-stop-of-black-driver/2021/04/23/21dd1b36-a3a6-11eb-85fc-06664ff4489d_story.html

By Connie Schultz

ut this Wednesday morning is worse, so much worse, because minutes before the Chauvin verdict was announced, a 16-year-old Black girl named Ma'Khia Bryant was shot and killed in the street by a white police officer in Columbus, Ohio. An investigation is pending, but surely, I don't have to tell you how that sounds to my student less than 24 hours later.

It's too much on top of more than one can bear. My student, this talented and spirited young woman who has been such a fierce presence in my class, has no energy left to talk about what's due by the end of the semester. She is the first of several Black women, current and former students, who tell me that day, without hesitation or doubt, "That girl could be me."

I am a white woman who has never had a minute's worry that the color of my skin would lead to the cause of my death. What is my role in this moment as a professor, a colleague, a friend?

I try to take guidance from Black friends, students and colleagues. The instruction is pretty simple: Shut up. For the sake of all that is right and holy, just shut up for a while and listen. To ignore their pain is to magnify our indifference, and filling this space with our words, our feelings, is just another way to say, "I don't see you."

https://www.creators.com/read/connie-schultz/04/21/this-whiteness-of-being

We saw two Americas in a single day.

As Officer Derek Chauvin’s fate was being decided by a jury in a Minneapolis courtroom, Columbus, Ohio Police were deciding 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant’s in front of her house. Unlike him, for her there was no careful deliberation, no meticulous processing of information, no measured and sober judgment, no beyond a shadow of a doubt certainty, no prolonged time of waiting—only an immediate death sentence.
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This prolific violence isn’t fundamentally about funding or training or a broken system needing repair or a national reckoning white privilege and white supremacy (those things are all certainly true and need to be addressed with ferocity and creativity). But at its core, this is about a collective heart sickness that so dehumanizes black and brown human beings in the eyes of law enforcement, that it allows them to act in haste and with recklessness and without hesitation, because they believe no accountability will come—because it so rarely has.
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From the moment he slowly and deliberately murdered George Floyd in the street in May of 2020, Derek Chauvin received every benefit of an America designed to protect people like him: a heavily redacted initial police report, steady political resistance to charges even being filed, fierce legal representation afterward, and a small army of conservative white Americans who repeatedly assassinated Floyd’s character postmortem and tried to make a nation believe a white officer over their own eyes.

In a few minutes yesterday, Ma’Khia Bryant received what young people of color have so often received since America’s inception: total disregard by those charged with protecting her (those she trusted to keep her safe)—and now in the aftermath of their failure, the salivating partisan television hosts and neighborhood bigots, who will engage in the wildest of intellectual gymnastics and desperate story-spin in order to make this radiant, fully alive 16-year-old honor student somehow responsible for her own termination.

Two nations are not sustainable and should not be acceptable for us.

https://johnpavlovitz.com/2021/04/21/one-day-in-two-americas-the-life-of-dererk-chauvin-and-the-death-of-makhia-bryant/