How the left-wing media vilifies police officers, even when they commit heroic acts

During a summer evening last month, Jason Bagshaw, commander of special operations of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Emergency Response Team, protected restaurant guests along Washington, D.C.’s waterfront from Lazarus Wilson, a gun-wielding criminal. As restaurant patrons were ducking for cover, Bagshaw valiantly confronted the threat. After Wilson refused Bagshaw’s multiple requests to drop his gun, Bagshaw fatally shot him. Bagshaw potentially saved countless lives. But despite his heroism, many media outlets wanted to blame him, not Wilson, for the incident.

As I wrote earlier this month, numerous outlets attacked Bagshaw after the shooting, insinuating that he was the aggressor. This vilification was motivated mainly because the police officer was white and Lazarus Wilson was black. But, as one witness told me, these accounts were a complete misrepresentation of facts.

“He had the gun raised and pointing, that was the last thing I remember, because we were on the patio. I was facing the water, and I looked over, and everyone’s getting to the floor, and I didn’t know what was happening,” a witness, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me. “All I heard was ‘He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun.’ And I looked up and actually saw a man with a gun, and we went under the table.”

The media’s version compared to the account of someone who was actually at the incident read like two entirely different stories. Sadly, the Left has created a political climate in which the police are the enemies and the criminals are the good guys.

“It was very scary,” the witness said. “It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. The trauma has been compounded by the fact that this guy is being miscategorized when all he was doing was having dinner with his wife.”

In just a few years, left-wing outrage at police officers has evolved from condemning (what they believed to be) unjust police shootings (even though most investigations proved otherwise) to any police shootings — even if they protect dozens of people from a man holding a gun. To many on the Left, no matter what the reality is, the police officers are presumed guilty until proven innocent. They frequently advance this propaganda by editing videos of shootings to portray the police in the worst possible way or creating agenda-driven narratives around the police officers involved in the shootings — such as they did with Cmdr. Bagshaw.

“He wasn’t trying to be excessive. But when you try to tell someone to drop a gun, and they don’t and there are civilians all around, I don’t know what else he could have done,” the witness said. “When you watch the NBC 4 video, I’m just sickened. I watched that news story, and I was livid. I was livid and couldn’t not say anything.”

Truthfully, we should all be as livid as the witness. The Left has made it close to impossible for police officers to do their jobs. Even when they unquestionably do the right thing, they are still wrong and reviled. Judging by the vilification of Cmdr. Bagshaw, one could assume these media pundits felt Wilson should have been allowed to ignore Bagshaw’s commands to drop the gun and leave without any accountability.

“As upsetting as witnessing the shooter itself, the media accounts were even more so because there was a man holding a gun. I saw him.” the witness said. “We were under the table and crawling into the restaurant for safety and calling 911.”

I asked the witness if it felt like there was a bias or agenda in the media’s accounts of the story.

“Oh, there’s absolutely a political agenda in this coverage. The way they described the event is not the truth. The way we talk matters. And the way things are reported matters,” the witness said.

Cmdr. Bagshaw was a hero that evening, not a villain. When homicides have surged throughout the country, the media’s criticism of Bagshaw instead of Wilson is concerning. It’s also indicative of how the left-wing media are out of touch with reality. Sadly, they care more about creating narratives that adhere to political beliefs than reporting the truth.

“We’ve heard that time and again about the media, especially the last administration. And what the media did here is so misleading, it doesn’t go to what a scary event this was,” the witness said. “Personally, I’m very, very grateful that the police officer was brave. Crawling on our hands and knees into the restaurant and getting our heads down, looking at the tiles on the restaurant floor, not knowing if someone is going to come in and kill you is terrifying.”