© Twitter/@Candymudge
Urged by the chanting of several hundred people during the Black Lives Matter demonstration, Webster Police Chief Michael Shaw participated and laid face down on the pavement for over eight minutes, as the crowd was heard yelling: "Thank you chief. Thank you chief."
"It's not enough, but it's a start!" one demonstrator also shouted towards the end of the symbolic act, according to the Telegram & Gazette.
Many in the crowd were heard chanting "mama" and "I can't breathe," as they were seen on the ground for eight minutes and 46 seconds, according to the paper. The time signified how long Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer, pinned Floyd to the ground. Shaw was seen lying on the ground with his hands behind his back. He also wore a mask to limit the spread of coronavirus.
"To all my brother and sister officers who were disgusted," Shaw said as he later addressed the crowd during the demonstrations, according to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. "You know who hates bad cops as much as you all? Good cops ... We can do better."
He added, "your message is heard loud and clear."
Randy Becker, chairman of the Town of Webster Board of Selectmen, later released a statement on Facebook regarding the actions by Shaw.
"I feel the need to speak out on the comments being made about Chief Shaw in response to the post on today's Black Lives Matter protest. We are beyond blessed to have such a humble, intelligent, and caring man leading our Police Department. For the record, I was at the event today, along with three of our four other Selectmen. It was a deeply moving experience. Yes, I laid down along with almost every other participant in the protest," Becker said.
The decision by Shaw drew both positive and negative responses by users on social media.
Many police officers across the U.S. have also kneeled and prayed in solidarity with protesters -- which they said represents how they are willing to listen to anger and frustration over police brutality.
"Images like these reflect our willingness to listen and work toward solutions," Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams said shortly after officers were seen taking a knee in Arizona.
In Orlando, Orange County Sheriff John Mina explained to Fox News that it was important for him to "listen to and hear the anger and frustration" of demonstrators.
"The two young gentlemen asked us to kneel and we said, 'Well, why don't we kneel and pray?'" Mina said. "And so we did, and I think that sent a great message not only to the people protesting out there but to our officers and our deputies who were watching their two leaders here in Orange County kneel, take a knee and listen to what the protesters had to say."
Reader Comments
What the f' is going on with this planet? We stepped from the Twilight zone of cov1984 to a totally staged bizarro color revolution with homo undertones...
RC
I have no idea what that means, but I'm probably better off with my ignorance in this case.
Anybody got any ideas?
Thus, it seems that there would be even less need for facts when Lockdown II comes this October.
R.C.
*I'm presuming you're referencing another C1984/lockdown.
RC
So they'd likely need to create another spike of dead to really focus on... maybe something new from their black bag that kills babies too for the second wave...
Or f' it... just go for the Alien Greys...?
Two major studies of HCQ have been completely withdrawn (they were based on the falsified data of a company that nobody had heard of before and they both had the same lead author)
ALL of the COVID measures, masks, social distancing, locking down healthy people, closing all businesses, stopping air travel, and so on, have no scientific evidence that they work, and in actual fact since different countries adopted different measures we can see that their case/death data is statistically unrelated to the different combinations of measures, i.e. with the exception of isolating the vulnerable, they don’t work. They are NOT based on science.
ALL of the predictions about infection rates, deaths, etc. were wildly WRONG (almost all on the high side).
Starting to see a pattern here?
Are people getting sick and some dying? Yes. About the same number as in a bad (NOT horrible) year for flu.
Do we know what people are sick from? No. Surprised by that answer?
Here is the short version of why: To identify a virus with certainty you must isolate it and purify it. Then you take electron-microscope photographs of it and compare them with your catalog of photographs from previous viruses that have been similarly identified. This has NOT been done for whatever illness is going around. There are NO electron-microscope photographs of the current virus, none. There should be hundreds or even thousands of such pictures at this point, but there are not. I have looked, multiple times. There is a lot of misleading crap out there, but they don’t even claim their “artists impression” or the photograph they have IS COVID-19, with one exception.
There is a photo that is claimed to come from Ft. Detrick (the bio weapons laboratory, of course) which claims that it is of COVID-19, but if I showed you a photo of a dust ball from under my bed and their extremely fuzzy photo, you wouldn’t be able to tell me which is which. That is not the kind of photo that identification is made from. In other words, there are no usable photos.
That means that whatever tests have been developed DO NOT ID COVID-19, because it has never been identified.
Is the pattern getting clearer?
So whatever is next will likely involve more real killing. The narrative always works better with actual death.