Say what, now?
Dallas Police Chief Renee Hall says her heart goes out to L’Daijonique Lee, the black woman brutally beaten in a racially motivated attack last month, but that it was the right call for police to charge Lee with a felony for breaking a window on her alleged attacker’s truck.
“In law enforcement to see a woman—I’m a woman—get beaten by a man so violently, we’re angry. I’m angry,” Lee explained to Fox 4. But Hall says Lee confessed to breaking the window on Austin Shuffield’s truck, and Shuffield demanded that Lee be arrested too.
“He wanted to press charges, and that is our responsibility as law enforcement,” Hall said of Shuffield. “The day we start picking and choosing which crimes we will and won’t push forward is the day we become the corruption that some police, or some people believe, that the police department is.”
But was this really about “picking and choosing” crimes or a matter of a lack of equal protection under the law?
Because while Lee was immediately hit with a felony for arguably defending herself after being brutally assaulted, police, at least at first, couldn’t be bothered to charge Shuffield with a felony in what was inarguably a brutal beating, during which Lee was called a “stupid nigger.”
Only after community outrage and protest, did police upgrade Shuffield’s charges in the case from a misdemeanor to a felony.
Even prosecutors didn’t see things as the cops did, with the Dallas County district attorney’s office quickly dropping the charges against Lee.
So, whatcha saying, Chief Hall?
As she told Fox 4:
“Could we have handled that situation differently from a communication standpoint with the district attorney? Absolutely,” Hall said. “The district attorney and myself should have had a conversation. [...] to make sure we were executing something that he was willing to push forward.”
Really, sis? Really?