Callous Insensitivity

There was a lot of bad judgment in St. Louis over the weekend.

First, a 26-year-old violent criminal tried to pass a bad check at a Wellston market. A police officer was dispatched to deal with the situation. That’s when things went horribly wrong. The officer, 40-year-old Michael Langsdorf, was executed with a shot to the head.

What happened next is hard for me to fathom. As the officer fell to the floor, the store  clerk first called for help….then went live to Facebook to live stream the dying officer’s last two minutes on earth. If that wasn’t bad enough, the link to that stream was then published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch during its coverage of the shooting.

You can’t make this stuff up. The clerk says she doesn’t know why she decided to go live. For the life of me, I can’t understand a person who has witnessed a shooting and who just can’t wait to post it so she can….what….get likes? Any rational person would be on the floor trying to aid the fallen officer. Have we become so indifferent to human suffering that we believe it simply must be posted on social media?

And if you think that was bad enough….wait….the next miserable judgment came on the part of a cast of news professionals. The Post-Dispatch, which once boasted over a quarter-million subscribers, decided to link the shameless Facebook video into the news story published on their website. For the record, the Post now has less than 100,000 daily readers. I think I know why.

The only positive to come from this story is the shooter was apprehended before he could kill again…and confessed to the crime. As for the clerk and the newspaper? They both are having a rough time explaining their actions.

Two words come to mind….”Callous insensitivity.”