A former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Cornell Brooks likened the Tuesday knife-wielding incident, which resulted in the teenage assailant being shot by a police officer, to a “schoolyard fight.”
“Not everything that you’re permitted to do is something that you should in fact do,” Brooks said of the officer’s actions, appearing Wednesday on CNN. “What if it were your daughter? What if it were your child? What if it were a member of your family … in essentially a teenage fight, a schoolyard fight?”
Ma’Khia Bryant, 16, was shot by Columbus police officer Nicholas Reardon Tuesday afternoon. Reardon’s bodycam footage showed the teenager pushing one woman down on the sidewalk before swinging a knife at a different woman.
A number of public figures and media outlets have attempted to depict the killing as a case of gratuitous police brutality, claiming that Bryant was unarmed during the incident. (RELATED: LeBron James Tweets Picture Of Officer Involved In Ma’Khia Bryant Shooting, Says ‘YOU’RE NEXT’)
Brooks also made a series of tweets on Bryant’s story. “As we waited for the #DerekChauvin verdict, 15 yr old #MakiaBryant was killed by police—AFTER she called them to break up a fight, according to family,” he wrote.
Additionally, the lawyer contrasted the way “white mass shooters” get arrested with how black children wielding knives are treated by law enforcement.
“White mass shooters are arrested without scratch— but we’re wrong to ask ‘why is a Black child with a knife dead?’,” he tweeted, posting a two-box of Bryant and Dylann Roof who was sentenced to death after shooting nine people in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
*story by The Daily Caller
