The Chris Kaba row has brought out the worst of the virtue-signalling Left

Establishing the truth first did not occur to those on the Left desperate to paint Kaba as a blameless victim

The story of Chris Kaba – the violent thug who in 2022 was lawfully shot dead by a police marksman – was already grim. What made it even grimmer, though, was the way so many on the Left rushed to judgment.
Shortly after his death, for example, the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott wrote an article in the hard-Left newspaper Morning Star. “As the terrible fate of Chris Kaba shows,” she declared, “people can lose their lives even when going about their daily lives.” 
As we now know, Kaba was not merely going about his daily life. He was driving an Audi, which police believed to be the getaway vehicle used after a recent shooting. And when police ordered him to get out of the Audi, he instead rammed it into a police car – putting others’ lives at risk.
In that same article from September 2022, Ms Abbott also wrote: “A campaign for justice for Chris Kaba has already been established and taken important public protests. Millions of viewers on Sky TV especially will have seen the recent demo, although they were initially told it was a memorial walk for the Queen. The mainstream media have an unfortunate habit of erasing inconvenient truths when they have decided what ‘the story’ is, and it is amazing how often it happens to black people.”
Deciding what “the story” is, rather than establish the true facts? You certainly wouldn’t catch Abbott doing that.
Still, we now have a rather clearer idea of what the true facts are, because on Monday, after a three-week trial at the Old Bailey in London, a jury cleared the police marksman of murder. Even after that, however, supposed progressives continued to make fools of themselves. 
The Runnymede Trust, a charity for “racial justice”, tweeted “#JusticeForChrisKaba”, and railed against “racist state violence”. Labour MPs bleated about “our communities” and the need to restore their “confidence” in the police – which rather makes it sound as if, somehow, the police were to blame. 
Meanwhile, the Women’s Equality Party stated: “We are holding Chris Kaba’s family and friends in our hearts today. It is both terrifying and outrageous to hear politicians say the police should be scrutinised less after they kill unarmed members of the public. No justice, no peace.” 
What an extraordinary comment. First because Kaba was not “unarmed” (by ramming into other vehicles, he was using his car as a weapon). And second because in April 2022, as we now know, Kaba was banned from contacting the mother of his unborn child, and even from entering the street where she lived, under a domestic violence protection order. A fact that, you’d hope, would interest a party founded to support the rights of women.
The whole business has been disturbing. And it leaves us with an important question. How did so many people on the Left manage to convince themselves that Kaba must have been a blameless victim of racist white policemen? An “aspiring architect” and doting “father-to-be”, rather than a dangerous brute? 
It’s as if they were desperate to turn him into a George Floyd-style martyr. So desperate, in fact, that they didn’t wait to find out what he was really like.