Tony Timpa's murderer, a policeman, receives qualified immunity

Tony Timpa

Tony Timpa, as I mentioned earlier after George Floyd was murdered, was killed in an eerily similar fashion in Dallas. His life was snuffed out under the weight of a police officer, just like Floyd, except he was already handcuffed when the police arrived on the scene.

The police officer that killed Timpa was given qualified immunity with a judge that appeared to not be able to see straight when presented with prior cases. It's likely that the case will be appealed, but it looks unlikely that Timpa's family will get any kind of justice.

This is yet more evidence that qualified immunity needs to be scrubbed from the books like Justin Amash is attempting to do. Unfortunately, only one Republican has cosponsored Amash's bill so far (wtf, Massie, where are you?) and it's very unlikely the bill will be veto-proof, since Trump has publicly said he would veto qualified immunity. Republicans are for small-what? Ha. I thought they said "small-government".

Unfortunately, it is doubtful that this story will reach more than a small handful of people. At this time, the only real stories, besides the scant few opinion pages of newspapers, I see about the recent Timpa development, which is already a week old, are local Dallas newspapers, libertarian Reason Magazine, and a bizarre article on The New Republic, which claims that somehow Timpa's (who is white) murder is further proof of white supremacy in policing. The writer claims it stems from eugenics trying to clean the white gene pool of whites with mental illness, despite the officers' reactions to learning of Timpa's death clearly showing it was not an intentional murder. I'm sure the writer is good friends with Alex Jones and is applying for a position at InfoWars.

Other than that, of which only the Dallas Morning News is a traditional newspaper, it's just been buzz on social media and other alternative media sites. You would think some major newspaper outlets would cover this, given the stark similarities to Floyd's death and the current major push for police reform. But I suppose if it doesn't provide the correct predetermined narrative that allows them to race-bait, it wouldn't get attention.

It's too bad because drawing attention to this would help give ammo to scaling back police brutality for all races, potentially saving lives. If only they were interested in doing so.