The insanity of the McKinney, Texas fiasco: where are the adults, and why is nobody blaming the real culprits?

Earlier this week, we touched on events that occurred in McKinney, Texas last Friday and the gross mischaracterization of the situation by a media who seems to care more about stirring up another race incident where there isn’t one, and less about actual facts. We also asked the question: when did it become okay for teenagers to disobey police officers?

Matt Walsh did a terrific job yesterday detailing events that led up to the “Dime Piece Cookout” being characterized by mainstream media as nothing more than an innocent children’s pool party gone bad. It was anything but.

It was advertised heavily on Twitter for a full month leading up to the event, and organized by a professional promoter named Tatiana Rhodes. Rhodes is a grown woman who, apparently along with her mom, put together this party primarily as a means to sell tickets to another event, Make It Clap Pt 2, which was supposed to happen in late June.

This was a massive blowout held in a private community, fully equipped with a DJ, advertised on social media to hundreds of people, but never once cleared with the local homeowners association. It was also promoted as a pool party (hence the giant image of a pool on the flyer), even though the pool is off limits to non-residents, unless they are guests of residents. Residents have a limited number of friends they can invite. I’m not sure what the number is, but I assume it’s somewhere south of 100.

The organizers claim they got permission, but the HOA confirmed to local media that they neither sought it nor received it. This fact is essential, because it confirms two things: 1) The people who threw this party did not care about respecting the clearly outlined rules of the community, and 2) They don’t mind lying.

Walsh goes on to explain, with actual factual examples, that this “innocent children’s pool party” was a bunch of out-of-control teenagers looking to get drunk and hook up. He even goes so far as to explain for us naive types what the terms they used actually mean.

In fact, I’ve never heard of children’s parties with terms like “Dime Piece” and “Make It Clap” in the title. For those mercifully uninitiated, the former is a slang term for attractive women. “Dime” as in a 10-out-of-10 on the sexy scale, and “piece” is short for “piece of ass.” The latter, “make it clap,” refers to a girl twerking on the dance floor and making her butt cheeks clap together.

Well, isn’t that precious?

Those facts are why I was so shocked to see someone like Jen Hatmaker, star of the HGTV show My Big Family Renovation and author of  The Modern Girl Bible Study — a woman with a significant conservative following — yet again jump the gun and play the race card, slamming the police officer in this case, crying racism, when she was grossly misinformed of the facts like the rest of the media.

Sad thing is, she did the same thing when the incident in Ferguson occurred, and once it was shown that she was very, very wrong in the way she characterized the incident, she erased her comments and instead of apologizing, made excuses for why she was say such terrible things.

People like Hatmaker and others like her who are in the spotlight certainly have the right to think however they wish, and to express it on social media just like the rest of us. But they do an enormous disservice to the people who so loyally follow them and you’d think, at the very least, they’d wait for the facts and consider those before jumping the gun and accusing a police officer and an entire neighborhood community of racism. Now that actual facts have emerged, along with video that tells a side of the story that the 7-minute clip didn’t tell, it’s clear once again that Hatmaker and the media at large was less than informed about the situation when they raced to social media and the airways to share their opinions.

I have had the privilege of teaching during the course of my life. At one point, I taught pre-schoolers, and more recently, high school students. As a teacher and as a mother, I learned one very important thing when dealing with conflict: wait for the whole story.

Clearly, the McKinney Police Chief Greg Conley had all the facts when he took to the microphone yesterday to announce that Officer David Eric Casebolt’s actions last Friday were “indefensible.” Thank God for honest homeowners — both black and white — who have come forward to tell the real story and present video that shows a very different side to the story. Chief Conley knows the real story, and he’s just one more in a long line of pandering politicians that will throw their own people under the bus in the name of political correctness. In the words of Fox News commentator Todd Starnes, “The McKinney Police Department is sending the same message to youngsters that officials sent in Ferguson and Baltimore: feel free to pillage and plunder and terrorize.”

I won’t ever just defend a police officer for the sake of defending a police officer — there are bad apples in every bunch, and law enforcement is no exception. Officer Eric Casebolt did what most police officers would do in that situation — he clearly felt his life was in imminent danger of serious bodily harm when several men ran up behind him on his right side (the side on which he carries his gun), and he pulled his weapon. He never pointed the weapon at the girl he was attempting to arrest, or at any of the men who attempted to come up behind him. When he realized he had no need of it, he reholstered the weapon. The situation where he was detaining the “girl” — who, in some reports, is said to be older than 14 — said “girl” failed to comply with his commands, continued mouthing off, and resisted arrest. In fact, she and every punk running around out there creating chaos, were trespassing after notice and responsible for this entire fiasco. Am I the only one wondering where the parents were in this case?

Did anyone reporting on this case ever consider what they’d do if they were put in the same situation? 

Officer Casebolt did what just about any officer whose own police Chief threw him under the bus would do, he resigned. According to Breitbart News:

The police corporal is a Navy veteran who served from 1993 to 2003. For seven of those years, he served as an operations specialist and as a military police officer for three years. After the Navy, Casebolt served as a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper for two years before joining the McKinney Police Department in 2005.

Casebolt was the senior police officer initially called to the scene, where more than 70 teenagers had gone into full blown meltdown mode prior to his arrival.

And yet it’s all the fault of one lone “racist” police officer, who was attempting to gain control of a completely out of control situation where innocent little kids were having a pool party.

Right. 

Have all of the sane adults left the building?