05/17/2008
Did politically motivated negligence on the part of the Knoxville Police Department contribute to the Knoxville Horror?
Eleven days after the carjacking-kidnapping-gang-rape-torture-murder of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, a federal prosecutor charged that Eric Boyd had been on a months-long crime spree with the alleged ringleader of the crime, Lemaricus “Slim” Davidson, then 25, and sometimes with Davidson’s half-brother, Letalvis “Rome” Cobbins, then 24. The alleged spree began with Davidson’s August 2006 release from West Tennessee State Penitentiary, and ended only with the January 11, 2007 arrest of Boyd, Davidson, and Cobbins.
Last month, Boyd was convicted as an accessory after the fact to carjacking, for helping then-fugitive Davidson elude capture.
Davidson and Boyd had met at West Tennessee State, where Davidson served a mere five years on previous convictions for carjacking and aggravated robbery, and where he — but not Boyd — joined the racist gang, the Black Gangster Disciples.
During a January 18, 2007 hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Stone declared, “Mr. Boyd’s criminal history in a word is quite scary. I can’t even count the (number of) aggravated robbery convictions” on his rap sheet.
She lost count at 12. A 34-year-old, 12-time loser. And Boyd is a gentleman, compared to Davidson and Cobbins.
According to Stone, Boyd and Davidson, who along with the other three defendants are black, had been “robbing restaurant employees, committing home invasion robberies and plotting a bank robbery.” And yet, they weren’t arrested until after the white couple’s bodies were found. During the period in question, Chief Sterling Owen IV’s KPD was missing in action. Was department policy, “All the robberies are on the house, but we have zero tolerance for murder”?
“De-policing” and the racial profiling myth have both been around since at least the 1960s, though they received their current names circa 1999. That year saw a coordinated, national campaign joining the MSM, black race hustlers, and white allies, promoting the Big Lie that black males’ astronomical rates of conviction for violent crimes was due to innocent blacks being rounded up and even murdered by racist white policemen. In order to avoid career-destroying “racism” smears, white policemen began increasingly avoiding black suspects.
The ability of Davidson and Boyd allegedly to operate unmolested for months at a time has all the earmarks of a de-policing scenario.
De-policing leads to cascading social pathologies and institutional failures. Think New Orleans. The bad guys come to own the night, and increasingly, the day, as well.
Even after arrests were made in the atrocity, Chief Owen’s primary concern was in placating the black community. He espoused the transparent lie that race had played no role in the crime. You’d think blacks had been the victims.
Chief Owen has Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom’s blood on his hands.