Police Brutality

I’m hearing a rumor that Darren Wilson’s indictment decision is going to be announced on Monday, and that he’s not going to be indicted. I must say that this news makes my usually cerebral approach to situations go out the window. I have a very strong visceral reaction to this possible outcome, and it’s not good. I keep having visions of him being gunned down in the street like a rabid dog who needs putting down. I cannot accept that this man isn’t going to ever appear before a jury. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.

As I laid out in a previous post, there was ample evidence presented for an indictment by the Ferguson police spokesman, in his very first press conference. No other piece of evidence need be presented to a grand jury in order to get an indictment.

At this point I have to let you know that I’ve served on a grand jury so I’m going to share some observations I made over the course of the month that I served (it was two days a week for three hours per day). The district attorney has complete control over what is presented to a grand jury. Defendants can appear if they choose to do so and they can bring an attorney, but their attorney can’t say anything. If the defendant chooses to appear, the district attorney can ask them questions. I learned that, as a defendant, presenting your case before a grand jury is a giant mistake. Defendants aren’t allowed to present evidence, so all they can really do is to deny what the district attorney has just told the grand jury. Defendants really come off looking like they’re lying, whether they are or not. Over the course of the month that I served, we heard approximately 15 – 20 cases. Of those, only two defendants came to testify. Any decent attorney won’t let their client to that, and it’s abundantly clear why letting them do it is a bad idea.

Since the deck is so thoroughly stacked in favor of the prosecutor, they almost always get an indictment. I think that my grand jury indicted all but two or three cases that we heard. And frankly, the people sitting on the grand jury are predisposed to indicting. I wasn’t, but more people in that room were inclined to indict than weren’t. I mean, a prosecutor wouldn’t be presenting a case against someone that did nothing wrong, right?

My point in sharing all of that with you is to let you know that I earnestly don’t know how it’s possible for a district attorney to fail to get an indictment. I live in New York City. We have over 500 district attorneys so I saw between 13 – 18 different district attorneys present cases. It became clear which ones were good and which ones weren’t because we had so many to compare. It almost didn’t matter if the DA was good. As I said, we indicted on all but two or three cases.

I cannot conceive of a DA failing to get an indictment against Darren Wilson on just the basis of the fact that the he and Mike Brown started the altercation with physical contact and that, by the time the last bullet was fired, there was thirty-five feet between them. This is not a fact that is in dispute, since the Ferguson PD spokesman gave us that information in his very first press conference. As I said in my earlier post, that distance opening up between the shooter and Mike Brown negates the validity of any claim of self defense. The greater the distance between them became, the lower the plausibility of self defense became. Remember, an indictment isn’t a guilty verdict, it’s merely a judgment that there is sufficient evidence against the defendant to go to court. An indictment is actually very far from a guilty verdict given the disparity of opportunity to present a case, between the defendant and the district attorney.   

If Darren Wilson isn’t indicted, it will most definitely be because the DA didn’t want to indict him. I cannot accept that we live in a country where police officers routinely kill unarmed citizens and never face a jury for doing it. I simply can’t accept this. I can accept a bad verdict, but I cannot accept a system where a verdict is never allowed to be handed down. No rational person with a modicum of intelligence will see this as a good outcome.

There has literally been no case made by Darren Wilson, wherein he demonstrates his innocence. That motherfucker ran and hid like a feckless thug. In a million years, I don’t go into hiding if I’m being accused of something I didn’t do. I face the public and make my case, with the conviction of an innocent person. When it comes to shooting at an unarmed kid, he’s a tough guy but when it’s time to face the public and tell them his story, he becomes officer micro-testicles. He hasn’t given anyone any reason to believe he’s not a murderer, so anyone who does believe in his innocence is making a baseless choice. It’s an increasingly stupid choice.

Police officers used to reserve this type of behavior for minorities in poor neighborhoods who don’t have the means to seek justice, but that’s not the case anymore. They’re expanding their parameters of "dangerous looking people" to include white people. I don’t just mean homeless white people, they’ve always been disposable. I mean white people who look like this:

Okay, she was actually homeless after her parents died when she was a child and a series of other unfortunate events occurred in her life. But look at her. More and more white people who look like her are going to join the "shootable" class. And as their murderers join the "free from consequences" club, the tide will eventually turn in terms of the level of support these murdering cops get from the public. Mary’s murder, Jeremy Dear, killed her back in April. We’re still waiting for the completion of an investigation into what happened because these things take time, but mostly just when the shooter is a cop. This is one of the cases that prompted the Justice Department to look at Albuquerque PD. Jeremy, or officer motherfucker as I like to call him, had a little body camera malfunction at the very moment he was murdering Mary. This malfunction seems to have flummoxed even the manufacturer of the camera. They can’t explain why it wasn’t working when Mary was being murdered. Even more curious though, is the fact that officer motherfucker’s camera malfunctioned on three separate occasions when he happened to be accused of police brutality. Each time investigators went to look at the camera footage, there wasn’t any to be found. Huh. Poor officer motherfucker, his camera actually malfunctioned more than sixty times over the course of his time with Albuquerque PD. I guess some people just don’t have much luck with technology. Lucky for him though, that  Albuquerque PD found nothing suspicious about those malfunctions (not even the three that coincided with excessive force complaints against him), so he got to keep his job and subsequently murder Mary.

These cops are a menace to society and eventually, even supporters of Darren Wilson will see that.

In the meantime, I’m probably going to continue having my fantasies about Darren Wilson being put down. I don’t anticipate ever feeling bad about those fantasies since they may well be the only times I feel a sense of justice regarding Mike Brown’s shooting.               

UPDATE: The recording below has been authenticated by the company that makes the app used to record the call so we are looking at a first degree, premeditated murder situation. To be clear, the only way this company could possibly know that their app was used to make the recording, is because the FBI went to them for authentication.

 

We may have an audio recording of Michael Brown’s murder. Here’s the report and audio from CNN:

 

If this audio is authentic (we don’t definitively know that), it’s pretty significant since we know two things to be empirically true:

• The fatal shot to Michael brown was the last one to enter his body.
• Per the Ferguson police chief’s initial press conference, the shooter was 35 feet away from Michael when he fired.
  

You can hear six shots, a three to four second pause, and then either four or five more shots. So either the shooter got all six of the first wave of bullets into Michael and missed all of the last four or five shots OR he had time to let a couple of thoughts run through his mind before firing the fatal shot. We know that the incident began with physical contact between Brown and the shooter at the police car. Three different witnesses, including Michael Brown’s friend all confirm that. Since the Ferguson police spokesman told us that there was thirty-five feet between Michael and his shooter at the time of Michael’s death, we know that Michael ran away because that distance didn’t magically open up on its own.

Here’s the Ferguson police spokesman‘s first press conference:

 He plainly confirms that a distance opened up between Brown and the shooter. Let me digress for a moment to review some other notable comments the spokesman made. He said that he didn’t know how many times Brown had been shot. I find that incredibly hard to believe, given that the press conference was held the day after Brown was killed. He said that it would be up to six weeks before the toxicology report was going to be available and yet, they conveniently managed to get that out within hours of the details of Michael’s private autopsy being revealed. Curious. He also volunteered the following, "….the officer who was involved is, ah, been on the police department about six years. I’m unaware of any other issues that he’s been involved in during his employment as a police officer in the city of Ferguson". Let’s take a closer look at the parts of that sentence that stood out to me;

….the officer who was involved is, ah, been on the police department about six years. I’m unaware of any other issues that he’s been involved in during his employment as a police officer in the city of Ferguson.

That was a lot of equivocating. "I’m unaware" is a clear establishment of plausible deniability. "I’m unaware" is very different from, "He was not involved in any…". I found "he’s been" a curious (and possibly Freudian) way to phrase what he’s trying to say. There should be something between "he’s" and "been" like, "hasn’t" or "may have". It was just strange. That one could just be nothing, but it’s odd. When I heard the press conference initially, I thought the last part of the sentence, "in the city of Ferguson" was odd, but I didn’t know why. Now we know. The shooter came from a police force that were disbanded and all fired because their relationship with the black community in the area they were charged with "serving" and "protecting" was so toxic, that they had to go. That was three years ago, which would fall into the spokesman’s "six years" statement. I don’t know why he didn’t just limit his comments to the shooter’s tenure with the Ferguson police department, but he didn’t and that explains the last part of that sentence. He was lying, and he knew it. There’s no possible way that Ferguson was unaware of the circumstances of the shooter’s separation from his previous employer.

If the only information we had on this incident, was the information contained in that original press conference, this would be unacceptable to anyone who cared about their community and the country at large. There was a distance of thirty-five feet that opened up during the course of an unarmed person being gunned down. Thirty-five feet is not self defense, and no rational person can make that claim. And anyone who wants to defend this is a fool. We can’t sanction this kind of behavior from our police forces.

The identity of the victim is irrelevant. The color of the victim is irrelevant. The size of the victim is irrelevant. The drug use of the victim is irrelevant. The temperament of the victim is irrelevant. All of these things became irrelevant with every foot of increasing distance that opened up between him and his shooter. Period. I have to question the motive and intelligence of anyone who wants to make these things relevant. Motive, because this is a clear case of a cop overreacting with disproportionate force and I have to question where the motivation to see it differently comes from. Intelligence, because you really have to be a special kind of stupid not to be able to see where condoning this shooting by this cop will lead for all of the cops, contemplating any shooting.

Without this audio recording, this was a clear cut case of murder. If this recording is authenticated, we know that this was a premeditated execution. Remember, premeditation doesn’t mean pre-planning. It means that whatever that cop was thinking for those three to four seconds before firing off another barrage of bullets at an unarmed man, was meditation.

I imagine that there are a significant number of people that will press on with defending the shooter by making Michael Brown a "bad guy" but the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter what kind of guy he was. This was an execution, and no one should want a cop to get away with doing that to anyone in their community because the next victim may be someone they know. Giving a group of people license to shoot their weapons with impunity and no fear of repercussion is an incredibly bad idea. I can’t even fucking believe I have to say that.