Wisconsin: Another shooting of a black suspect; another media/protester leap to conclusions

It's happening again, in a mallet-hits-knee sort of way. Over the weekend, police in Madison, Wisconsin confronted an apparently violent and out-of-control suspect - a guy with a record that included armed robbery - and when the suspect attempted to assault one of the responding officers, the officer fired his weapon.

That is basically textbook police procedure, but don't tell that to the news media or to professional protesters. All they care about are two things: 1. The suspect was black. 2. The suspect was unarmed. In their make-believe world, nothing matters more than these two facts. In the real world, they don't matter much at all. But ignoring pertinent facts and hyping your own is how you create a "national narrative" about an epidemic of racist cops shooting black men for no good reason. Give CNN credit, though, for playing this one a little more straight:

The incident started when authorities got a call that a black male was yelling and jumping in front of cars, Madison Police Chief Mike Koval said. Dispatchers identified him as Tony Robinson, according to 911 audio obtained by WKOW.

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A little later, the dispatcher says, "Apparently Tony hit one of his friends. No weapons seen." About four minutes later, the dispatcher says, "I got another call for the same suspect at [the same address]. He tried to strangle another patron." About 30 seconds later, an unidentified officer says, "Shots fired, shots fired." When Officer Matt Kenny went to the apartment, he heard some commotion and forced his way in, Koval said. "Once inside the home the subject involved in this incident -- the same one allegedly out in traffic and that had battered someone -- assaulted my officer," Koval said. After that, according to the chief, "The officer did draw his revolver and subsequently shot the subject." Now this is only one side of the story, of course, and there will surely be an investigation by Internal Affairs to be sure this account is accurate and the use of deadly force really did need to be used. That is standard procedure and it should be. Killing a suspect is a serious matter. But if it happened the way Chief Koval and Officer Kenny say it happened, there is no issue here. People have gotten the impression from news reports that police are never supposed to shoot an unarmed suspect. That is simply not true. Court rulings in recent years have outlined the circumstances in which police are justified in using deadly force, and it's certainly not a matter of their simply firing whenever they feel like it. But police are armed to give them an advantage over suspects, and if suspects pose a threat - either to officers or others who are present - then officers have the right to use their weapons to defend themselves. And yes, that includes the use of deadly force.

Klinger, a former police officer, pointed to the 1985 U.S. Supreme Court case, Tennessee vs. Garner. In that case, two police officers responding to a burglary encountered a fleeing suspect and shot him dead as he tried to climb over a fence. The officer who fired had no reason to believe the suspect was armed. In a 6-3 opinion, the court held that “deadly force may not be used unless it is necessary to prevent the escape and the officer had probable cause to believe that the suspect posed a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” While the court ruled that the officer was wrong to shoot, because he was dealing with a nonviolent felon, the decision set out the circumstances by which deadly force is justified: when dealing with a violent felon who could harm the officer or others, Klinger said. Language from that case, in some variation, now appears in police manuals across the country.

When you think about it without a partisan political motive, this only makes sense. If police can't shoot a suspect who rushes them, lunges at them or otherwise attempts to assault them, you're basically telling the officer his only option is to fight the guy in hand-to-hand combat. You're also giving any suspect license to assault an armed police officer because he would have no fear of being shot. Not only that, but if the officer isn't allowed to fire his weapon at the suspect, then the weapon itself becomes a threat to the officer because it would give the suspect a greater opportunity to grab it during the course of the struggle and use it to kill the officer. This simply makes no sense. And all these headlines about cops "shooting unarmed suspects" - which are clearly written for the purpose of implying that's wrong - push a narrative that's completely false in the context of the real-world facts about police work. Of course, none of this stopped protesters from taking to the streets of Madison with the usual protests, just days after we learned definitively that Michael Brown never put up his hands in "don't shoot" mode, and that there was never any justification for charges against Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Let's pray that Madison doesn't turn into the new Riot Central, and that Officer Kenny doesn't turn into the new Officer Wilson, especially as a result of a bogus media narrative designed to feed racial strife - which is all these ignorant stories are ever designed to do.