Last Sunday evening in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jacob Blake resisted arrest, fought with officers, refused to comply with lawful police orders, and went to his vehicle to retrieve a weapon, whereupon an officer shot at him seven times, striking him four times. He survived.
According to Blake’s ex-girlfriend’s statement to police, on May 3rd, Jacob Blake entered her home (which is also the home of their three children) without permission, sexually assaulted her, took the keys to her 2002 Ford Explorer, took her debit card out of her purse (later making two $500 withdrawals), and drove off with the vehicle. After further investigation, the Kenosha County District Attorney’s Office decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed on the vehicle theft (Blake returned the truck) or the ATM withdrawals (no video at the ATM machine), but did issue an arrest warrant on Blake for criminal trespass and domestic abuse.
Last Sunday evening, Blake’s ex-girlfriend called the police, saying that Blake, "was present and was not supposed to be on the premises." Officers arrived at the scene and attempted to arrest Blake on the July warrant, but Blake resisted arrest and officers were not able to subdue him. At one point, an officer fired his Taser at Blake but it was ineffective.
According to a statement released Wednesday by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, Blake told officers he had a knife in the car, and was going to retrieve it. A knife was recovered from the driver’s side floorboard.
A couple of observations are in order. First, almost everyone knows that domestic disturbance calls—fights between husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend—are by far the most dangerous situations for the police. The passions aroused in that type of conflict are the most intense and violent, and are frequently directed at intervening officers.
Second, police officers are trained not to let suspects get the drop on them. This is drilled into their minds beginning in police academy. A friend of mine was attending police academy a couple of years ago, and related to me that the cadets were shown body-cam video of an officer trying to arrest a suspect. The man resisted arrest, ignored officer warnings, retrieved a shotgun from his vehicle, then turned and shot the police officer. The officer died. My friend was very shaken by having watched the video and was reconsidering whether even to finish the academy.
For you misguided souls complaining that Blake was shot in the back, allow me to explain something: The police are not in the business of holding duels or “fair fights.” They are trained to win quick and dirty. They are under no obligation to allow you to retrieve a weapon from your vehicle and then turn and point it at them before they fire. Their obligation is to their families, to survive their shifts and go home to their spouses and children alive. If you’re a husband/boyfriend in a domestic disturbance situation, and you resist arrest and try to retrieve a weapon from your vehicle, you are either trying to commit suicide-by-cop or you’re just too stupid to survive. This was a justified shooting.
But despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that the Democratic governor of Wisconsin instantly sided with the suspect who was resisting arrest against a Wisconsin city’s police force, Black Lives Matter types have spent the last four nights burning down Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Into this volatile situation, the North American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church has inserted itself. They issued a statement yesterday, reading:
Racial tensions in the United States have been raised even further after the recent shooting of 29-year old Jacob Blake, a black man, by police officers in Wisconsin. This event, like countless others, has amplified the voices of Black Americans and others as they cry out seeking justice for the acts of violence perpetrated against their community.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America hears their voices and calls upon our churches and members to serve as conduits of peace and hope to our Black brothers and sisters. We recognize their pain and the injustice they face, and strive to serve as their voices when they are silenced by those seeking to quiet them. Let us call for changes in the way the Black community is treated by those put in positions of trust and protection.
When acts of racism and violence hurt the Black community, all of us are impacted. As God’s children we can and must do better in the way we equitably treat each other. Jesus Christ proclaimed, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand” (Matt. 12:25, NKJV).
First, there is no indication that this was a racial incident. The shooting appears to have been justified, but even assuming it was not, there is zero evidence that it was racially motivated. The only evidence we have so far is that officers feared that Blake, who was violently resisting arrest and had already shrugged off a Taser deployment, was retrieving a weapon—which he apparently was. Again, officers are trained starting in police academy that, in situations exactly like this, they cannot wait until they see the weapon, because by then it is too late.
Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who is black, found in a large-scale study published in 2017, that white officers are apparently more reluctant to use deadly force against black suspects than against white suspects. Controlling for all the variables, Fryer found that black civilians are 24% less likely to be shot by an officer than white suspects:
Including all controls available from the taser sample, Table 4 shows that black civilians are 30.7 percent less likely to be shot with a pistol (rather than a taser) relative to non-black suspects. Columns (6) and (7) pool the sample from hand coded arrest data and taser data. Results remain qualitatively the same. Controlling for all characteristics from incident reports, black suspects are 24.2 percent less likely to be shot than non-black suspects.
So why does the NAD leap to the conclusion that this was a racial incident? Does the fact that the police officer was white and the suspect resisting arrest was black make it a racial incident? As we have noted before, if every interracial crime was a proof of racism, it would indicate that the black race exhibits horrendous race hatred toward whites, because over one recent 3-year period, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white violent crimes, and a black was the killer in 70% of black-white interracial homicides.
If racial tensions were elevated by the George Floyd narrative, why would the NAD think it appropriate to throw gasoline on the fire by characterizing the Jacob Blake shooting as a racial incident when there is no evidence that it was?
But the NAD goes further, characterizing the incident as among “the acts of violence perpetrated against [the black] community.” This was not an act committed against “a community,” as though all blacks were required to report to a train station to be transported to a concentration camp. This was an individual case that must be judged on its own merits, as each case must be.
We recognize their pain and the injustice they face, and strive to serve as their voices when they are silenced by those seeking to quiet them. Let us call for changes in the way the Black community is treated by those put in positions of trust and protection.
This is what lawyers object to as “assuming facts not in evidence.” There is talk about “the injustice they face,” but Blake’s case is not a case of injustice, nor is George Floyd’s case—Floyd killed himself with a massive Fentanyl overdose; he would still have died had he never come within a mile of a Minneapolis police officer—nor is Michael Brown’s case (“hands up, don’t shoot”), nor any of the other cases that are held up as evidence of police brutality. When you examine them closely, they don’t bear scrutiny. So where is “the injustice they face”?
And just exactly what changes are we to call for “in the way the black community is treated by those put in positions of trust and protection”? How does this shooting in any way suggest changes that need to be made? You cannot make it the law that police officers must allow themselves to be killed or injured in the course of making lawful arrests. Suspects have to comply with lawful police directives or we have chaos. If you ignore the repeated orders of a police officer who has his firearm trained on you and go try to retrieve a weapon from your vehicle to bring to the fight, you take your life in your hands, and whatever happens to you is your fault.
When acts of racism and violence hurt the Black community, all of us are impacted. As God’s children we can and must do better in the way we equitably treat each other.
Again, it hasn’t been shown that this was an act of racism. The NAD just assumes it was because they have accepted the false and vicious political narrative promoted by Marxist radicals such as those behind Black Lives Matter.
Yes, we must do better in the way we treat each other, but in this situation, that means that the Jacob Blakes of the world need to do better in the way they treat police officers who are just trying to do their jobs and return home alive at the end of their shifts.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America hears their voices and calls upon our churches and members to serve as conduits of peace and hope to our Black brothers and sisters.
As Paul explains in Romans 13, one of the ways we serve as conduits of God’s peace is to fund the police with our taxes, because the police are God’s “ministers” (KJV) for good:
Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2 Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. 4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience. 6 This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing.
The NAD needs to give up social justice posturing and return to basic Christianity, as set out by Paul in the book of Romans.
Surely, the Blake tragedy is the tip of an iceberg, but the massive below-the-surface element is not racism. Rather, it is the dysfunctional matriarchy and paternal irresponsibility—each feeding off of and aggravating the other—that characterizes so much of black life in America. I can understand how a situation in which a man’s three children effectively belong to a woman who has kicked him out of the house and is having him arrested—using the civil authorities to enforce her matriarchal prerogatives—would tend to send the man into a blind rage, causing him to suicidally provoke the police, but to blame this on the police or on racism, as the NAD has done, shows a stupendous lack of discernment. It is spiritual blindness that is caused, among other factors, by the NAD’s unhealthy interest in replacing the real gospel with the social justice gospel, and by its failure to acknowledge God’s directives (and the larger SDA Church’s votes) regarding male headship in the home and in the church.
Jacob Blake has thus far survived his wounds and we pray that he makes a full recovery. But more importantly, we pray that he will take this opportunity to accept Christ and allow God to lead his life in a different direction, because that is the only way he will find peace and joy. But the racial grievance thoughtlessly promoted by the NAD is not the path to peace. It is the path to ruin, and wasted lives.