February 27, 2014 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The teachings of the domestic violence industry were on display in Moore, Oklahoma Tuesday as this article shows (CNN, 2/27/14).
A family of three, Luis and Nair Rodriguez and their 19-year-old daughter went to a local theater to see a movie. Before they entered the theater, mother and daughter had an argument and Nair slapped the younger woman. That apparently was witnessed by patrons or employees of the theater, one of whom called the police telling the dispatcher there was a domestic violence situation.
Nair was so upset about her set-to with her daughter that she headed back to their car. Luis followed close behind attempting to calm the waters. That’s when the police arrived.
The police knew they’d been called to a domestic disturbance and, as we’ve seen before, that means they’re trained to assume wrongdoing by the man and likely arrest him. (Indeed, we’ve seen police training materials used in New Hampshire in which, in every hypothetical example of domestic violence, correct procedure was to arrest the man. That was true even in one example in which the man was injured, both the man and his wife said she’d hit him and both admitted he hadn’t hit her.)
Sure enough, the police attacked Luis, threw him to the ground and at least three of them sat on him. In short order, he was dead, apparently suffocated, although an official autopsy has yet to be performed. Throughout the officers’ attack on Rodriguez, his wife was screaming at them that she had been the one who hit her daughter. They ignored her.
Astonishingly, the officers’ excuse for their attack on Rodriguez is that he refused to hand over his identification to them. Of course Rodriguez was well within his rights to do so, but a police spokesperson told reporters that the officers had acted properly. Three officers of the Moore Police Department have been suspended pending a police investigation into the killing.
Yes folks, we live in a country in which a man, whose tax dollars pay for police salaries, the uniforms they wear, the cars they drive, the weapons they carry, can be killed by the police for refusing to disclose his identity, which is his right. I’ll bet good money these officers are still on the payroll this time next year, having received no meaningful discipline.
But the larger point is what the police didn’t do. They didn’t question Nair Rodriguez. Yes, she’s the one who slapped her daughter and yes, that constitutes domestic violence. But to date, as far as we know, that’s been completely forgotten about. Nair Rodriguez hasn’t been arrested or charged for slapping her daughter.
Now, let me be clear; I don’t think she should be. After all, it’s not as if she slapped a three-year old. The daughter is, for all practical purposes, an adult. Certainly slapping a person — any person — isn’t ideal behavior, but is it truly something we need the police to sort out? Did Nair Rodriguez really need to go to jail, be charged, hire a lawyer and defend her actions before a judge and jury? Just how many of our public resources should we devote to what was unquestionably a trivial matter? Doubtless mother and daughter were upset with each other, and just as doubtless, if witnesses had just left well enough alone, they’d have sorted the matter out and everyone would have gone on with their lives.
Now Luis Rodriguez will no longer go on with his. His body is on a slab in the morgue and the reason is clear; when the police are called to a domestic violence incident, they assume the man is at fault and that they’ll arrest him. Of course the Moore police claim they used lethal force against Luis because he didn’t show them his ID. Absurd as that is, it obscures the fact that they never asked Nair for hers or listened to her when she told them she was the wrongdoer. She’s alive and her husband, who literally did nothing wrong, is dead at the hands of the police.
For decades we’ve been taught by the domestic violence industry that essentially all domestic violence is perpetrated by men against women. Indeed, read any statement by Vice President Joe Biden on the subject of domestic violence and you’ll never see any reference to women as perpetrators. Never. The fact that that’s utterly untrue, the fact that hundreds of studies conducted over 40 years show women to be as physically aggressive as men in domestic situations alters the public discourse on domestic violence not a whit.
Hundreds of millions of dollars flow every year to a domestic violence industry that’s told the same false narrative of male violence, and female innocence and victimization for decades. They’re not about to jeopardize that funding by now admitting that they were making it up all along. And of course politicians aren’t inclined to appear soft on domestic violence or to be part of the mythical “war on women” so beloved of DV activists.
So the money flows and the rhetoric never changes. The great irony is that, because the DV industry has always been wrong about who commits domestic violence and why, their “solutions” to the problem don’t work. After all, when your “solution” to the problem of DV is to send men to re-education sessions that simply repeat the untrue mantra that men commit violence against their partners because they want to maintain control over them, it can’t be a surprise that the programs don’t change behavior.
The DV industry likes to point to the fact that rates of DV have come down some 64% since the mid-90s and claim that proves their programs are effective. (Of course they make those claims when they’re not making the opposite one — that there’s a continuing epidemic of DV whose rates are on the rise.) But as usual, their claims are intellectually flimsy. What they don’t mention is that rates of all violent crime have come down even more than those for DV in the same period of time. Nor do they mention that experts who track data on domestic violence say that there’s no evidence that our approach to the problem has had any measurable effect on its incidence.
Luis Rodriguez wasn’t killed by domestic violence; he was killed by the domestic violence industry. That industry and its false claims about violence between partners has guided police training for decades. That guidance has taught that, overwhelmingly, it’s men who commit domestic violence and women who are its victims. It’s taught that, in essentially all cases of DV, correct police procedure dictates arresting the man.
The police in Moore, Oklahoma were acting according to what they’d been taught. (I of course don’t mean that the DV industry teaches police to use lethal force on non-resisting men.) They’ve been taught that it’s the man who’s responsible for any incident of DV and that women who deny that the man was at fault are simply attempting to shield the perpetrator from the consequences of his wrongdoing.
So it’s no surprise the police tagged Luis Rodriguez as the perpetrator of the domestic violence they’d been told had occurred at the movie theater that day. It’s no surprise they gave a pass to the real perpetrator, his wife Nair.
And it’s no surprise they showed up at all. It’s another false lesson we’ve learned from the DV establishment — that all violence between family members is a matter for the police. Fifty years ago, bystanders would have witnessed a single slap by a mother to her adult daughter and perhaps wondered what the problem was, but then have gone about their business.
But in our brave new world, that sort of common sense approach to a problem can’t stand. No, the police know best. They’re the ones who’ve learned the teachings of the DV industry. Let them handle it.
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