While Black Lives Matter activists and celebrity athletes like LeBron James are vociferously condemning the Ohio police officer who fatally shot 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant to save another black teenage girl she was attempting to stab, CNN anchor Don Lemon is urging people to look at the situation in a more objective manner.
Both Lemon and his fellow network host Chris Cuomo agreed the officer involved in the incident did the right thing for that moment.
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“We’ve gotta be fair about what happens when police arrive at scenes,” said Lemon. “It is tragic that it’s a 16-year-old girl — just as tragic that it’s a 13-year-old in Chicago. When police are chasing people, they don’t know how hold they are. And they don’t run and say, ‘How old are you?’ ‘Oh, I’m 13.’ You don’t know that. Or, ‘I’m 16.’”
The only information that Ohio officer had, the anchor explained, was that people were “tussling around” and “someone has a knife.”
“Their job is to protect and serve every life on that scene,” Lemon said of the police. “And if they see someone who is in the process of taking a life, what is that decision? What decision do they have to make?”
Cuomo and Lemon then, in agreement, argued a Taser would not have been the appropriate or effective tool to use in this particular scenario.
“Tasers, they don’t always connect,” Lemon said. “So, you’ve got to get two prongs, or what have you, and it has to connect to whatever. I see it, if the woman in the pink was my sister, niece, wife, whatever, you have to make a decision. Is one life on that scene more valuable than another?”
“And if someone is trying to take a life, on that scene, do you protect the life of the person trying to take the life, or do you protect the life of the person whose life is in imminent danger at that point?” he asked.
Cuomo said he “feel[s] for the officer” involved in the incident.
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“When he said — the man on the side was saying — ‘You shot my baby, you shot my baby,’” Cuomo told Lemon, “and [the officer] said, ‘She had a knife. She went right at her.’ You know, this is something that he’s going to have to live with, also.”
He went on to say that, in service to the larger conversation, if people really wanted to get rid of police, parents would need to “learn how to control your kids” and people need to not “be so violent.”
“But that’s not our reality,” Cuomo noted.
For his part, Lemon made a similar argument in the wake of the fatal shooting of Adam Toledo. Of that case, he said, “not all police shootings are equal,” noting the officers involved took the right actions given what information was available to them at the time.
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