Leave it to our fine mainstream media to build an entire narrative based on one, off the bell curve incident. The latest case of this comes from Charles Blow at the New York Times who makes a herculean effort to show that cops are just, you know… racists. Why? Because one of the many maniacs roaming the country wound up being arrested without incident and wasn’t gunned down by the Five O. And she happened to be white. I include a fair bit of this just to give Blow a fair chance here.

The day after Christmas, a shooter terrorized the streets of a Chattanooga, Tenn., neighborhood. According to the local newspaper, the shooter was “wearing body armor” and “firing multiple shots out her window at people and cars.” One witness told the paper that the shooter was “holding a gun out of the window as if it were a cigarette.”

“Officers found two people who said they were at a stop sign when a woman pulled up in a dark-colored sedan and fired shots into their vehicle, hitting and disabling the radiator. Then more calls reported a woman pointing a firearm at people as she passed them in her car, and that she fired at another vehicle in the same area.”

When police officers came upon the shooter, the shooter led them on a chase. The shooter even pointed the gun at a police officer.

Surely this was not going to end well. We’ve all seen in recent months what came of people who did far less. Surely in this case officers would have been justified in using whatever force they saw fit. Right?

According to the paper, the shooter was “taken into custody without incident or injury.”

Who was this shooter anyway? Julia Shields, a 45-year-old white woman.

Blow describes this as “the privilege” of being detained without incident or injury. Given the hashtags running all around on Twitter regarding these protests, it’s not much of a stretch to see this as a thinly disguised claim of #WhitePrivilege. And if all you knew of any of these stories was Blow’s description, your conclusion would probably be clear. Holy cow! He’s right! The cops must all be racists!

Of course, Blow only cites one bit of coverage of the story (available here) and, indeed, all it says is that the white woman in question was arrested without incident. Now, I’ll agree that Ms. Shields is probably lucky to be alive. Towards the end of things she did indeed point a weapon at an officer briefly, and if the police had dropped her right then I don’t think anyone would blame them. I certainly wouldn’t. But the cop was under cover, and if Charles Blow had the journalistic integrity to check a few more sources where additional interviews were conducted, he would have found this.

Lt. Joel when asked about a possible motive, replied: “At this time it’s still being investigated but it’s pretty safe to say she is a mental health consumer so I can only speculate.”

After a brief car chase, police say shields stopped in the middle of the road and aimed her gun at an officer. Authorities say the officer was able to talk Shields into putting her weapon down. She was taken to custody without incident or injury.

Now, just to be clear, I still think the officers probably should have just taken her out, but they put in the time, defused the situation and took her in alive. So they must do that with all white people, right? Well, here’s a story from just this week which you’ll probably never hear about from Charles Blow or on any of the cable news outlets.

A man shot and killed by San Francisco police had brandished what appeared to be a handgun but was actually an air gun, officials said.

“We don’t know his motive or why he challenged the officers or approached them in the first place,” police spokesman Albie Esparza told KPIX-TV. “It was very erratic behavior by the suspect, very unusual.”

Whoa! Another guy with an Airsoft pistol was gunned down by the cops? How is that not all over the news and generating marches on the Mayor’s office? Oh, wait… (emphasis added)

The shooting took place around 5:15 p.m. Sunday outside the Mission District police station, Esparza said. Officers fired after the 32-year-old white man, who has yet to be identified, pulled the gun from his waistband. Three officers had ordered the man to leave a restricted parking lot The officers got into a police vehicle to leave and the man blocked their way, Esparza said. The man lifted his sweater and showed what appeared to be the butt of a handgun. When he pulled it out, two of the officers opened fire, hitting him three times.

It was a white cop shooting a white guy. (Which happens pretty much every week.) And, as such, you’ll never hear about it on the news. For the record, just as with the woman above and so many other cases covering people of all colors and gender, the cops had every right to shoot him. I have no sympathy for him. If you pull out a gun when confronted by the cops (or anything that looks like a gun) bad things are going to happen.

I guess that guy in San Francisco didn’t make out so well with his White Privilege, huh? Maybe somebody should mention that to Charles Blow.