Facts did not matter much when the race-activist community held a press conference outside of the McKinney Police Station earlier today. This was in response to the now infamous pool party that took place last weekend in the suburban Craig Ranch subdivision of a Dallas suburb. Tempers flared, feelings frayed, and one speaker was compelled to threaten the Texas city with bringing in the Nation of Islam’s volatile spiritual leader Louis Farrakhan as a solution.
The general demand list was that the group wanted 10-year police veteran Eric Casebolt fired and criminally charged. Executive Director of Justice Seekers, Rev. Ronald Wright first spoke. He wanted the mayor of McKinney to handle the situation by firing and filing those charges against Casebolt. Wright said his group contacted the U.S. Justice Department to have them monitor the situation.
He claimed that the starting point of the entire debacle was an adult woman “assaulting a young lady a 14 year old.” They also wanted this woman prosecuted and one teenaged boy’s charges dropped.
Dallas-based Next Gneration Action Network founder Dominique Alexander voiced a lot of the group’s concerns. He insisted that the young man who was charged with evading arrest, was only trying to tell the girl “to stay calm” when the girl in the bathing suit was “yelling for her mother” and Casebolt “turned around and pulled out a gun on him.” Alexander said, he would have run. “What do you think? I would have stood there?” He called Casebolt a lunatic. “We want all charges dropped.”
The rhetoric was inflammatory from the get-go. Wright was quick to liken Texas and the passage of open carry law recently signed by Governor Abbott as being ripe for a terrorist attack not by ISIS but “USIS,” his personal Texas political slam and was a serious stretch to the situation at hand.
Then Alexander spoke at length on what facts were valid and which ones weren’t like “what was released in the media yesterday” was not really displaying what went on, he said.
The truth, according to Alexander, stemmed from an adult speaking to a minor “in a disrespectful manner” and the rest of the facts, he said, emerged from the teen’s viral video. Alexander said it showed that the officer who was dispatched “was very violent.”
“The children say that in the video they continuously stated to Eric Casebolt, ‘that wasn’t us, that was them over there’,” according to Alexander, who said that based the video, Casebolt violated their rights repeatedly, by “harassing” and “putting them on the curb.” He asserted that these were Craig Ranch kids. “They had every right to be there at this pool and not given a chance to speak,” Alexander told reporters.
He accused Casebolt of having a defensive military background and being in need of serious psychiatric evaluation. He likened the officer to being in a jungle and the officer was trying to get every animal down.
“We stand in solidarity with the community of McKinney, the local pastors . They have the NAACP and LULAC involved to “restore this community,” he added.
Several times, the community leaders and pastors claimed that America’s suburbs were under the seize of racism.
The group told reporters that they were allowing the City of McKinney and the McKinney Police Department to do their investigation. Pastor Bruce Miller, Christ Fellowship of McKinney stated that they are allowing “due process” and noted that they have met with the NAACP and LULAC in their quest against racism and violence. They are calling for churches to pray. He was followed by Pastor Derrick Golden, Amazing Church, who advised “McKinney is on watch.”
Weaved through the community’s commitment to solidarity, was the pervasive punting of the facts. Things like when pushed for a response if the kids were rightfully at the pool, Alexander deflected and said, “in order to be able to answer that question, I would have had to have been at that party.” “And just like city officials we’re going to wait for all of those facts to come out…”
He claimed they were doing their own investigation. Earlier, he said it was his understanding and from what he was told, he said, the officer never asked any questions but only jumped out of his car “and started running to the black kids.”
According to the activists, this was a cookout party coordinated by an African American family, who told the HOA there was going to be a party. It was well known, “they took the pool and the park behind the pool.” They said it only invited guests, not kids from elsewhere.
Alexander disputed the validity of the Home Owner’s Association (HOA), insisting it was only a “community social media site where they could communicate on” that had no leadership. One reporter asked Alexander if the family got clearance to host an event on the shared facility. Alexander said that the family “had all the procedures” and when pressed if the HOA “was lying,” Alexander told reporters “I don’t know about that.”
He added, “What I know about is that these people have the right to do a party. They were from the community.”
Later, when reporters questioned if the HOA required any party deposit fees and if the family had any receipts, Wright told reporters that didn’t matter. Facts, apparently only work one way.
According to the activists, they did not even know what was the protocol and said they would find out. Later, Breitbart Texas contacted the Craig Ranch Community Association. A representative said that what was said at hte press conference was not true. The Craig Ranch Community Association is a viable Home Owner Association. It is not as Alexander described.
The spokeswoman also told Breitbart Texas that when a family wants to use the pool facilities for guests, the policy states that each person who resides in Craig Ranch can bring in two people per their residential pool card. She said that there is no policy to rent out the facility for a pool party despite what was said by Alexander.
To a great extent, one video may have gone viral but few other facts that may also matter seem to be of interest to those who held a press conference. A Christian author and former resident of McKinney actually suggested not getting lost in the details of whether paperwork was or should have been filled out and not getting stuck in whether the children were right or wrong in being on the property at all.
He said the only accountability to be held for those those in “positions of power” and after Casebolt is fired the whole force needs sensitivity training over a “belief system”.
One dad whose daughter was at the party was disappointed there were no female or black officers sent to the scene. He did not like the idea of grown men, let alone, young boys touching his daughter. He said his daughter video-taped it and offered it up for viewing.
He actually started off quite fair-mindedly. He said he wasn’t indicting the entire police department. He said he saw other officers doing the right thing. Then all level headedness went out the window when this dad, who told reporters his name was Jahi Adisa Bakari, threatened that he was not going to stop until Casebolt was fired and threatened City of McKinney with three heavy hitters from the Nation of Islam — the hate-filled Louis Farrakhan Ajuma Muhammad and Anthony Shahid, the radical black activist associated with Ferguson.
He warned, “You don’t want that in McKinney.”
Follow Merrill Hope on Twitter @OutOfTheBoxMom.
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