Lynch Mob Lawyer
Lynch Mob Lawyer
The bigger the riots, the bigger the payout.
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
$27 million in the George Floyd case, $12 million in the Breonna Taylor case, and $1.5 million in the Michael Brown case. Ben Crump’s business is smearing cops and intimidating cities into offering huge settlements in the hopes of avoiding even more expensive BLM race riots.
Crump, dubbed a “civil rights lawyer” by the media, and the nation’s “black attorney general” by race hoax thug Al Sharpton, is delivering for his clients and, almost certainly, for himself. As Reuters noted, “Crump’s payments have not been made public but plaintiffs’ attorneys frequently receive around a third of the settlement amount.”
Neighborhoods burn, store owners lose their livelihoods, and people die, but Ben gets richer.
You can usually spot Ben Crump at press conferences, raising a fist next to Sharpton, or the family of whichever robber or drug dealer was the latest to die while struggling with a cop.
A list of Crump’s clients also often happens to be a map of race riots, hateful protests, and a nation divided by racist incitement. From Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to George Floyd to Daunte Wright, Crump is on the ground, raising a fist, and vowing to fight until the check clears.
“This historic $27 million settlement is PROOF that Black lives will no longer be written off as trivial, unimportant, or unworthy of consequences,” Crump declared in March after the Floyd payout. Despite all those millions, Crump is still showing up to sue anyone he can..
Crump’s best weapon is histrionics. His book is titled, “Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People”. He demanded first-degree murder charges against Derek Chauvin, the officer who was restraining Floyd when the career criminal died of what medical experts determined was a heart attack caused by a drug overdose. “Driving while Black continues to result in a death sentence,” Crump falsely claimed over the death of Daunte Wright who in addition to driving had a warrant out for his arrest for choking a woman and robbing her at gunpoint.
Crump is not shy about admitting that he’s not really making legal arguments, he’s feeding lynch mobs with lies.
“What we’re doing is continuing to make the arguments in the court of public opinion,” Crump claimed. “The court of law is not very kind to marginalized minorities.”
What Crump actually does is make dangerous claims that aren’t true, that don’t stand up in court, but that help incite the mobs already eager to riot in the name of false smears of racism.
After Makiyah Bryant was shot by a police officer before she could stab another girl with a knife, Crump tweeted that the police had, “killed an unarmed 15yo Black girl.”
Bryant was 16 and she was attacking two girls with a knife.
An op-ed in the Courier Journal alleged that, “Crump helped create the untrue ‘hands up, don’t shoot!’ mantra”. Six black eyewitnesses told a grand jury that Brown was charging the officer head down when he was fatally shot. But Crump’s lawsuit claimed that Brown had his hands up. In his book, Crump wrote that, “Brown stopped running, turned around with his hands up, and started slowly walking toward the police officer.”
Ben Crump even includes him in the list of black men “wrongfully” killed “who posed no threat”.
Crump falsely claimed that George Floyd and Officer Derek Chauvin, who restrained him, knew each other, and that because of that Chauvin should be charged with first-degree murder.
What kind of lawyer does that? The kind who doesn’t have the facts on his side.
Crump has a history of making claims that aren’t true.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat it,” Crump falsely claimed of Michael Brown. “He was executed in broad daylight.” The truth is that Brown committed a strong-arm robbery, tried to take a police officer’s gun and punched him.
Crump claimed that Jacob Blake was “shot several times in the back” by the police “after breaking up a fight.” Actually the police were responding to a domestic abuse call by Blake’s fiance who previously accused him of sexual assault. Blake got into a car, and appeared to be about to kidnap a child. Officers tried to use a taser on him, but Blake tore away the taser wires.
Blake pulled a knife on them and only then was he shot.
But no matter what, Crump sticks to his basic narrative which is that black people get shot by police and white people don’t. This big lie is so central to his story that Crump even titled one of his chapters in the book, “Police Don’t Shoot White Men in the Back”. “A Black person moves a certain way, they’ll shoot to kill them,” Crump ranted to Vanity Fair, while “[a white person] can literally attack, spit on them, take their car, and drive towards them, and they still don’t shoot.”
“[Police] know how to de-escalate just fine. Look at how they de-escalated with the white nationalists who were attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Crump argued.
Crump neglects to mention the fact that a black Capitol Police officer, whose name, unlike the names of those officers who have killed Black Lives Matter martyrs, shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, who was unarmed, making her the only person killed during the Capitol Riot.
Unlike the various criminals he rallies behind, the “civil rights lawyer” has not rushed out to meet with her family, hold press conferences, and demand justice for a white woman killed by police.
Nor has he shown any interest in the fatal shooting of Justine Damond, a white woman, by a black Somali police officer in Minneapolis, except to use her case as evidence of racism.
“Only one man in history has been held accountable, and that was a minority man that killed a white woman, Justine Damond,” Crump claimed at a press conference with the families of George Floyd and Daunte Wright, both of whom, unlike Damond, were criminals.
The rest of the time Crump ignores the existence of white people killed by police.
“I would ask the audience to name me one white man who was killed by excessive use of force or shot in the back? I tell after a minute of silence, that they’re not to worry, I will wait for them to give me a name,” Crump writes in “Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People”.
Police actually shoot more unarmed white people than black people. And the number of unarmed people of all races shot by police remains negligible.
Crump doesn’t just argue that police are more likely to kill black people, he contends that, “only black people seem to have to worry about the police shooting first and asking questions later.”
But Crump isn’t making a legal argument. His argument in the “court of public opinion” is that America is racist and that the police are agents of genocide.
It’s a big lie guaranteed to feed racism, incite lynch mobs and divide Americans.
“Police killings are brutalizing black and brown people and do in fact amount to genocide,” Crump insists.
There is no evidence that Floyd’s death or any of the other deaths in or around the police have been motivated by racism. Even Attorney General Keith Ellison had admitted to 60 Minutes that there was no evidence that “Derek Chauvin had a specific racial intent to harm George Floyd”.
But Crump’s argument is that the police, all the police, black and white, are racially biased against blacks. In his book, he quotes a study showing that, “nonwhite officers kill both black and Latino suspects at significantly higher rates than white officers do” and blames institutional racism. When black officers shoot black criminals, it’s because America is systemically racist.
Even though institutional racism of any kind has been outlawed since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“America is telling us they’re not gonna give us anything. If we’re gonna get equality, we have to take it,” Crump threatened.
He justified his regular rallies and press conferences, which are indistinguishable from incitement to a lynch mob, outside the George Floyd trial with the mantra, “We have to keep the pressure on.” Pressuring a court case already in progress is what lynch mobs do.
“This is the Ben Crump model. He goes into a city, creates a racist narrative, cherry-picks facts to establish, to prove that narrative, creates chaos in a community, misrepresents the facts, and then, he leaves with his money and then asks the community to pick up the pieces,” Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is black, observed.
It’s the Sharpton extortion model with a law degree.
Crump turns on the pressure. He pushes overcharging in the criminal case, as he did against Officer Derek Chauvin in the George Floyd case, to whatever extent he can. If prosecutors lose the criminal case, that just means more unrest and a bigger payout in the civil case.
The bigger the riots, the bigger the settlement.
The George Floyd riots caused an estimated $500 million worth of damage with over 400 buildings damaged in the Twin Cities. And that probably influenced the $27 million settlement.
All of this is good news for Crump and bad news for America.
The lynch mobs do their dirty work and the “civil rights lawyer” gets richer. Shop owners lose their businesses and their dreams.
Ordinary people lose their lives.
Two police officers were shot at one protest for Breonna Taylor and seven were shot at another Taylor protest. This was just a small part of the violence unleashed by the lynch mobs which wrongly exploited Taylor’s death due to her drug dealer boyfriend to spread violence and hate.
But when Ben Crump isn’t thinking about settlements, he’s talking revolution.
“Legalized discrimination is a thread woven so tightly into the tapestry of America that it is impossible to eradicate it without unraveling that tapestry,” Crump concludes in his book.
America’s tapestry has been torn apart since the racial hate mongering of the Obama years helped create the Black Lives Matter movement and its false campaign against the police.
And Crump is one of the most dangerous leftist radicals unraveling America.