Low Quality Bait

Have you heard the name Ralph Elrod? Does his face, pictured below, ring a bell? Have you seen his image anywhere at all? Have you heard his story? Did you see a hashtag about the war on police he waged? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are lying. His image is hard to find. What’s wild is that Ralph Elrod did something truly unthinkable. Like a sniper, he fired at least 50 shots at police in rural Georgia. He shot and killed two officers, Daryl Smallwood and Patrick Sondron, and attempted to shoot three more. If Ralph Elrod was a black man, you’d know him by now. In fact, if a black man fired over 50 shots at police, he’d be dead. When police claimed that they thought they saw a gun with black men like Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, who were actually unarmed, they fired almost 100 shots at them. But if somehow, a black man fired over 50 shots at police, killed two officers, and narrowly missed killing three more, the Black Lives Matter movement would be blamed. I’d be blamed, President Obama would be blamed, and that black man would be the new poster child for the war on police.

Instead, it’s hard to find a single leader who seems to give a crap about Ralph Elrod. On Wednesday, he was finally indicted and charged with “two counts of malice murder, two counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault and three counts of aggravated assault on three other officers.” Yet, when I search for Ralph Elrod on Twitter, hardly a single soul has mentioned his name in over a month. Conservatives haven’t lobbied for justice online for Officers Smallwood and Sondron. No hashtags have been created like they did in response to the young man who was kidnapped and assaulted in Chicago. Elrod’s face hasn’t been memed and shared. His actions haven’t been blamed on a single soul. The lack of fallout over what Ralph Elrod did typifies modern America. For all the love of law enforcement that we hear from conservative pundits and politicians, it seems like the darker the shooter, the greater the outrage. In this case, Elrod is pretty damn white, so the outrage is nearly non-existent, in spite of the fact that he fired more shots at police than almost any single incident the entire year.