I have not watched any of the videos out of Minneapolis or listened to any of the commentary.  I have not watched because I resent having to watch only one genre over and over again.  This is the genre in which a white antagonist, presumed guilty at the outset, kills or injures a black protagonist, presumed innocent.

More than 15,000 Americans were murdered in 2019, but no movies for national release were made about blacks killing blacks, the most common scenario.  Nor were any made about blacks killing whites, Hispanics, or Asians.  In fact, these movies are generally suppressed.

No, only one genre of movie is allowed.  In recent years, we have seen the Trayvon movie; the Ferguson movie; the Baltimore movie; and, for comic relief, the Jussie Smollett movie among others.  The most lethal of the movies was the one filmed in Ferguson.  The most dishonest one was the Trayvon movie, filmed on location in Florida.

In 2019, in his film and book The Trayvon Hoax, filmmaker Joel Gilbert proved beyond any doubt that the State of Florida's star witness in its murder case against George Zimmerman, Rachel Jeantel, was an imposter.  Gilbert enlisted a private investigator, as well as two prominent handwriting analysts, an audio expert, and a forensic DNA lab.  After poring through page after page of text messages, phone calls, tweets, Facebook messages, high school yearbooks, and crime reports, Gilbert was able to find the real "phone witness," a then-sixteen-year-old Haitian-American hottie Trayvon knew as "Diamond."  Diamond had the good sense not to regurgitate the media's false narrative under oath.

A Pulitzer awaited the intrepid reporter who followed Gilbert's leads, but the media were not about to reshoot this movie.  Not a journalist could be bothered — not in New York, not in Orlando, not even in Miami.  Only twelve minutes elapsed from the time Gilbert sent an email to the Miami Herald's managing editor asking for his help to the time Gilbert was told, "Thanks for reaching out.  We are going to pass."  The ensuing email flurry from the Herald newsroom quickly built to Category 5 level contempt, and this was Miami, Trayvon's home.

The fact that Trayvon's mother, Sybrina Fulton, undeniably at the heart of the conspiracy, was running for county commissioner did not pique the media's interest.  Nor did the fact that her co-conspirator, attorney Benjamin Crump, has gone on to star in several subsequent movies, including Minneapolis.

In Ferguson, only the media were corrupt.  Not too long after Michael Brown was shot, I spent an afternoon with the officer involved in the shooting, Darren Wilson, pushing his infant daughter in her swing, reviewing his past, and assessing his future.  He had no job and no prospect of getting a job, certainly not in the St. Louis area, at least not as a police officer.  Were it not for the courage of St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch, a Democrat, Wilson suspected he would be in prison.  McCulloch's grand jury introduced too much legitimate eyewitness testimony for the DOJ to ignore.  Grateful Democrats responded by defeating McCulloch in the next primary.

The cops got the picture. They knew they too could face termination, lawsuits, criminal charges, and death threats, all driven by the mandates of mob justice.  They knew, as well, that the political class, from President Barack Obama on down, would gladly throw them to the wolves to preserve the peace.

Nationwide, but especially in cities where rioting followed lethal police-citizen encounters, cops instinctively began to pull back from actively policing black neighborhoods.  Sensing opportunity, criminals moved into the void.  Attorney and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald has dubbed this phenomenon the "Ferguson Effect."

Observed Mac Donald in a 2016 Washington Post column, "Arrests, summonses and pedestrian stops were dropping in many cities, where data on such police activity were available.  Arrests in St. Louis City and County, for example, fell by a third after the shooting of Michael Brown.  Misdemeanor drug arrests fell by two-thirds in Baltimore through November 2015."

At an emergency session of police chiefs held a year after the Ferguson incident, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel explained the phenomenon to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.  "[Cops] don't want to be a news story themselves," said Emanuel.  "They don't want their career ended early, and it's having an impact."

The impact was deadly and undeniable.  According to FBI data, the murder rate in the United States declined steadily from 2006 to 2014 except for a minor blip in 2012.  As a result, there were three thousand or so fewer murders in 2014 than in 2006.

After Brown's death in August 2014, the trend sharply reversed itself.  In 2015, the murder rate rose nearly 11 percent, its greatest one-year jump in a half-century.  In 2016, the trend continued with an 8.5-percent increase over the year before.  What this means is that nearly three thousand more Americans were murdered in 2016 than in 2014, an estimated eighteen hundred of them black.  After Donald Trump took office, the murder rate began to decline once again.

Missouri proved particularly vulnerable.  There, the spike began almost immediately after the August 2014 shooting in Ferguson.  As a result, St. Louis had the highest murder rate in the nation in 2014, a dubious honor it held through 2017.  Statewide, the murder rate nearly doubled from 2014 to 2017, and there was no good explanation for the surge in Missouri or nationwide other than the "Ferguson effect."

I'm sorry George Floyd died in Minneapolis.  He may well be as innocent and the cop as guilty as everyone says, but until the media try to undo the damage created in Florida and in Ferguson, I have no interest in helping them create a "Minneapolis Effect."

@jackcashill's forthcoming book, Unmasking Obama, is available for pre-order at Amazon.