Dude, no one is saying Stallings rioted. He had a gun at the riots on day 4 of the riots and shot at people. Why you continue to support that is beyond me.
Answer this: Do you feel Rittenhouse was also “acting as a citizen should?”
apples and oranges...please read/reread the article and explain how you might have acted differently in that situation:
Before the white, unmarked cargo van of the Minneapolis Police Department drove down Lake Street, an officer gave Sgt. Andrew Bittell his orders: “Drive down Lake Street. You see a group, call it out. OK great!
F*** ’em up, gas ’em, f*** ’em up.”
Bittell turned to his SWAT unit in the van and said, “Alright, we’re rolling down Lake Street.
The first f***ers we see, we’re just hammering ’em with 40s,” according to body camera footage described in court documents. He was referring to “less lethal” plastic projectiles sometimes called rubber bullets or 40mm launchers or rounds.
It was nighttime, just five days after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Protests and riots had raged for days and laid waste to businesses along Lake Street and the Third Precinct police station. By May 30, protests had ebbed but a curfew was in effect.
At 17th Avenue and Lake Street, around 10 p.m., the SWAT team saw a group of people outside the Stop-N-Shop gas station. Bittell told the driver to head toward the station and said, “Let ’em have it boys!”
“Right there, get ’em, get ’em, get ’em, hit ’em, hit ’em!” he ordered as the officers fired their plastic bullet launchers without warning. They later learned they were shooting at the gas station owner, neighbors and relatives guarding the station from more looting, as well as bystanders, including a Vice News reporter who had his hands up and was yelling, “Press!”
A SWAT team member pushed the reporter to the ground, and as he lay there, with his press card up, another officer pepper sprayed him in the face.
About an hour later, three blocks to the west, they opened the sliding door of the van and began firing plastic rounds at people in a parking lot.
They hit Jaleel K. Stallings, 29, a St. Paul truck driver, who says he didn’t know they were cops because they were inside an unmarked white cargo van with the police lights off. He thought they were real bullets. And, he says he was mindful of warnings earlier that day from no less than Gov. Tim Walz that white supremacists were roaming the city looking for trouble.
Stallings, an Army veteran, returned fire with his mini Draco pistol, for which he had a permit. He aimed low, toward the front of the van, and didn’t hit anyone. When the SWAT team jumped out of the van yelling, “Shots fired!” Stallings realized they were police. So he dropped his weapon and lay face down on the pavement, according to court documents.
His eye socket was fractured in the beating that followed, with officers later claiming he resisted arrest.
A Hennepin County jury recently acquitted Stallings of all charges after he was allowed by a judge to claim self-defense.
