There was an officer-involved shooting in Santa Ana last week. According to the Santa Ana Police Department, two officers conducted a mid-afternoon traffic stop on November 16. There were three adult males in the car. One of the subjects was armed with a handgun and “an officer-involved shooting occurred.” The armed suspect was shot several times in the torso and was pronounced at the local trauma center to which he was transported.
The suspect’s weapon was recovered at the scene. The officers weren’t injured, and neither were the other two men in the car.
Per standard procedure in officer-involved shootings, there will be an investigation by a team consisting of SAPD homicide detectives and Internal Affairs Division investigators, and OC District Attorney’s Office investigators.
Those are the publicly known facts. That’s what we know.
Maybe the use of deadly force was justified. Maybe it wasn’t. The reasonable thing – the prudent thing – the wise thing, is to wait for the facts to come out and the investigators to complete their work and announce their findings.
But reason, prudence and wisdom are not part of the toolkit of radical “social justice” groups like ChispaOC.
After news of the shooting broke, ChispaOC immediately jumped the gun, practically accusing the SAPD of a cover-up and “destroying community trust” with “its violence.”
ChispaOC presents itself as a group of scrappy, neighborhood-based activists that “engages with excluded peoples to uproot systems of oppression, and cultivate systems grounded in community accountability, solidarity, and self-determination.” Started five years ago, it’s a “grass roots” arm of Tides Advocacy, a deep-pocketed left-wing non-profit based in San Francisco with tens of millions in financial assets.
No reasonable person is against police accountability. What outbursts like this from ChispaOC demonstrate is that in the mindscape of the social justice Left – infused with racial identity politics and the conviction that American society is racist to its core (and denying those claims is simply proof of said racism) – “police accountability” really means weakening the ability of the police to protect the public.
ChispaOC’s ideological hostility toward the police fairly drips from the above tweets. And it’s that hostility driving its advocacy of a police “oversight” board in Santa Ana that – of ChispaOC and the ACLU get their way – will be more about hamstringing and demoralizing the SAPD than about ensuring public safety.
If their rhetoric about police accountability were sincere, the radicals at ChispaOC would withhold judgment until all the facts are known and expert investigators have issued their findings.
