“Who Should Investigate Police Abuse?”: When Local DA’s Investigate Local Police Officers, There Is An Inherent Conflict Of Interest
The national conversation about police abuse will shortly take a new turn. Following the failures of local grand juries to bring charges against the white police officers who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, protesters around the country took to the streets. Then, after the murders of the New York police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in Brooklyn on December 21st, a fierce backlash against the anti-police protests began. The result is a sour standoff, with opposing sides united only in their sense of victimhood. Protesters shout “I can’t breathe,” and cops turn their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio—but now what?
To date, one serious proposal for reform has emerged. On December 8th, Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General of New York, proposed that Governor Andrew Cuomo name him, Schneiderman, as an independent special prosecutor to investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute police officers in any situation where they cause the death of a civilian. As Schneiderman noted in his letter to the governor, the proposal seeks to address a real problem. When local district attorneys investigate local police officers, there is an inherent conflict of interest. In virtually all usual circumstances, police and prosecutors are partners, working together to build cases against defendants. This is especially true in a place like Staten Island, where the elected district attorney, Dan Donovan, both works closely with the police and answers to many of them as his constituents. As Schneinderman noted, on the rare occasions when prosecutors investigate the police, even when all parties act with the best of intentions, “the question is whether there is public confidence that justice has been served, especially in cases where homicide or other serious charges against the accused officer are not pursued or are dismissed prior to a jury trial.” Cases, in other words, like those of the officers who killed Brown and Garner. (Cuomo has hedged in response to Schneiderman’s idea, saying that he wants to weigh a full package of reforms.)
Schneiderman’s proposal met with a fiercely negative response from an unexpected quarter. Kenneth Thompson, the newly elected district attorney in Brooklyn, blasted Schneiderman’s proposal as “unworkable” and an insult to the state’s sixty-two elected district attorneys. Thompson, a Democrat, is hardly a mouthpiece for his colleagues in law enforcement; he defeated an incumbent district attorney, in significant part, by criticizing the cozy relationship between police and prosecutors in the borough. In his objections to Schneiderman’s proposal, Thompson pointed to potential practical problems—saying that it would stretch the attorney general too thin, particularly if it came to include all accusations of police brutality, not just those that ended in death. But Thompson’s objections were also more profound. “As the duly elected district attorney of Brooklyn, I am more than able to thoroughly and fairly investigate any fatality of an unarmed civilian by a police officer,” Thompson said. Indeed, Thompson recently brought a police-brutality case against two officers, and is investigating the recent police-shooting death of an unarmed man in a housing project.
The conflict between Schneiderman and Thompson illustrates a paradox, even a contradiction, in the criminal-justice system. New York, like most states, has a regime of elected countywide prosecutors. The idea is that law enforcement should respond to the needs of the local community, and for the subjective needs of the community to be paramount. But the system also demands objectivity—an ideal of justice untainted by the special interests of the locals. This is the heart of the conflict over Schneiderman’s idea, and both sides can point to examples that prove their point. It is true that local prosecutors like Thompson have, on occasion, brought successful cases against local police officers. And outsiders, who are not subject to the usual checks and balances on prosecutors, can abuse their freedom. “When you start to talk about special prosecutors—do we really want another Ken Starr?” Frank Sedita, the Erie County District Attorney, asked in response to Schneiderman, referring to the federal independent counsel who led the investigation of President Bill Clinton. The risk, according to Sedita, is ending up with “somebody who is not accountable to the public and specifically not accountable to the citizens of that county.”
Schneiderman’s idea has considerable appeal; his judgment in the Eric Garner case would surely have had more credibility than the one rendered by Donovan. Still, special prosecutors are not necessarily good or bad. Like the locals they replace, they are only as good as the cases they bring, or refrain from bringing. That, ultimately, will rest on the good judgment of the individuals involved, and no one has yet figured out a way of putting the right person in place all the time.
By: Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, December 30, 2014
“Racism; It’s The Law”: What Institutional Racism Looks Like When We Finally Notice It
Smoke and fire, sirens blaring, horns honking, a sudden hail of bullets. This is what passes for the American dialogue on race and justice.
It’s hidden until it explodes.
“By 10 p.m.,” the Wall Street Journal informed us, “a St. Louis County Police squad car burned just down the street from the Ferguson Police Department, with spare ammunition ‘cooking off’ or exploding in the car.”
Those who want to shake their heads in disgust can do so. American institutional racism conceals itself so neatly from those who prefer not to see it and, of course, aren’t victimized by it. And then every so often something sets off the public trigger — an 18-year-old young man is shot and killed by a police officer, for instance — and the reality TV that is our mainstream news brings us the angry, “violent” response, live. And it’s always one side against another; us vs. them. It’s always war.
“But what is justice in a nation built on white supremacy and the destruction of black bodies?” Mychal Denzel Smith wrote in The Nation the day after the grand jury announced that police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted. “That’s the question we have yet to answer. It’s the question that shakes us up and makes our insides uncomfortable. It’s the question that causes great unrest.”
What is justice, indeed? And beyond that question are the real questions, perhaps unanswerable. What is healing? What is peace?
If an officer had been indicted in Michael Brown’s killing, and then convicted on one charge or another, maybe that would have been justice, in a “case closed” sort of way. In our limited legal bureaucracy, justice means nothing more than punishment. Even when such justice is done, it changes nothing. The state’s “interest” has been satisfied and that’s all that matters. The terrible loss suffered by parents, friends and community would remain a gaping wound. And beyond that, the social brokenness and racism that caused the tragedy in the first place would remain unaddressed, unhealed.
But not even that minimal justice was in the cards for the loved ones of Michael Brown, or the occupied community in which he lived — because that’s not how it works. Officer Wilson, whatever he did inside or outside the state’s rules on the use of lethal force when he confronted Brown on the afternoon of Aug. 9, was just doing his job, which was controlling and intimidating the black population of Ferguson. He was on the front line of a racist and exploitative system — an occupying bureaucracy.
The New York Times, in its story about the grand jury verdict, began thus: “Michael Brown became so angry when he was stopped by Officer Darren Wilson on Canfield Drive here on Aug. 9, his face looked ‘like a demon,’ the officer would later tell a grand jury.”
This sort of detail is, of course, of immense value to those who sympathize with the police shooting and accuse the black community of endemic lawlessness. See! Michael Brown wasn’t just a nice, innocent boy minding his own business. He and his companion were trouble incarnate, walking down the middle of the street spoiling for a fight. He was Hulk Hogan. The cop had no choice but to shoot, and shoot again. This was a demonic confrontation. Politeness wouldn’t have worked.
If nothing else, such testimony shows the stark limits of our “who’s at fault?” legal system, which addresses every incident in pristine, absurd isolation and has no interest beyond establishing blame — that is to say, officially stamping the participants as either villains, heroes or victims. Certainly it has no interest in holistic understanding of social problems.
Taking Wilson’s testimony at face value, one could choose to ask: Why was Michael Brown so angry?
Many commentators have talked about the “anger” of Ferguson’s black community in the wake of the shooting, but there hasn’t been much examination of the anger that was simmering beforehand, which may have seized hold of Brown the instant the police officer stopped him.
However, an excellent piece of investigative journalism by Radley Balko of the Washington Post, which ran in September — “How municipalities in St. Louis County, MO, profit from poverty” — addresses the issue head on. He makes the point that local municipal governments, through an endless array of penny-ante citations and fines — “poverty violations” — torment the locals for the primary, or perhaps sole, purpose of keeping their bureaucracies funded.
“Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts,” Balko writes. The fines are mostly for traffic offenses, but they also include fines for loud music, unmown lawns, “wearing saggy pants” and “vague infractions such as ‘disturbing the peace,’” among many others, and if the person fined, because he or she is poor, can’t pay up, a further fine is added to the original, and on and on it goes.
“There’s also a widely held sentiment that the police spend far more time looking for petty offenses that produce fines than they do keeping these communities safe,” Balko writes. “If you were tasked with designing a regional system of government guaranteed to produce racial conflict, anger, and resentment, you’d be hard pressed to do better than St. Louis County.”
Regarding the anger and resentment in communities like Ferguson, he quotes a longtime racial justice activist, Jack Kirkland, who says: “I liken it to a flow of hot magma just below the surface. It’s always there, building, pushing up against the earth. It’s just a matter of time. When it finds a weak point, it’s going to blow.”
And when it blows, we get to watch it on TV: the flames, the smoke, the rage, the ammo “cooking off.” This is what institutional racism looks like when we finally notice it.
By: Robert Koehler, Award-Winning, Chicago-Based Journalist and Nationally Syndicated Writer; The National Memo, December 29, 2014
“Unworthy Of Attention”: Why Is No One Talking About The NYPD Shooter’s Other Target?
New York City’s police commissioner is laying blame for the Saturday shooting of two of the city’s police officers at the feet of protesters participating in #BlackLivesMatter actions. Patrick Lynch, the head of the police union, claimed there’s “blood on the hands” of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who, Lynch has said, didn’t do enough to disavow and put an end to local protests.
None of this is surprising, unfortunately. The tragic killing of two officers by an emotionally and psychologically unstable shooter is being used to further the political goals of an establishment that’s been challenged through effective, largely nonviolent protest. Despite that movement’s focus on the criminal justice system as a whole, from policing to the role of district attorneys and the grand jury system, police leadership and rank and file are using this moment to claim victim status, ramping up rhetoric and participating in symbolic moves such as officers and union leaders turning their backs on de Blasio during a public appearance over the weekend.
What’s equally predictable and disappointing is the near-erasure of Shaneka Thompson from the story of Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s shooting spree. Thompson is the 29-year-old ex-girlfriend whose Maryland apartment Brinsley entered before shooting her in the stomach and leaving her to scream for help. “I can’t die like this. Please, please help me,” she is reported to have shouted as she banged on a neighbor’s door. According to news reports, Thompson is a health insurance specialist with the Veterans Administration and an Air Force reservist. Brinsley took her phone with him as he headed north to New York, using it to post self-incriminating rants to Instagram before killing Officers Ramos and Liu and, finally, himself.
Thompson is hospitalized and was, as of Sunday, in critical but stable condition. She is also the latest in a series of women who have been brutalized by men whose violence only became notable when they took on targets deemed more important, more relevant to a national or international debate already in play. On Monday Muna Mire, a former Nation intern, noted on Facebook similarities between Thompson and Noleen Hayson Pal, slain ex-wife of Man Haron Monis. Monis is the gunman behind the sixteen-hour standoff in an Australian café that earlier this month left three people (including him) dead. He had a history of violence against women and at the time of the café attack was out on bail on charges including dozens of counts of sexual assault. He had also been charged with being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife, with whom he had a custody dispute. He allegedly conspired with a girlfriend, who then set Pal on fire and stabbed her eighteen times. To frame that hostage crisis as one simply driven by religious fanaticism leaves out a key element: Monis seems to have been quite sick and is alleged to have used women’s bodies as a place to target that sickness.
Monis had been charged with these crimes recently, but he wasn’t due back in court until February. This past weekend, Baltimore police started tracking Shaneka Thompson’s phone, which Brinsley had in his possession, around 6:30 am, less than an hour after she was shot. According to The New York Times, they knew Brinsley’s whereabouts, but didn’t contact New York police until after noon. They faxed a wanted poster to a Brooklyn precinct just after 2 pm.
There may well be legitimate reasons why law enforcement could not have apprehended Brinsley earlier, even though they knew his whereabouts as he traveled north from Baltimore to New York. But in both this case and the Sydney incident, there seem to have been assumptions that public safety was not at risk despite the allegations and evidence of violence against women. Why does the threat level and stoking of public fear skyrocket when a madman is thought to be tied to an ideology that’s generally hated in the mainstream—anti-police sentiment or Islamic fundamentalism—but not when that madness has threatened a woman’s life or safety?
Salamishah Tillett raised a similar question during the trial of George Zimmerman, who had been accused of molesting a cousin as a child and of abusing a former fiancée before killing Trayvon Martin. As Tillett wrote, “Zimmerman’s attorneys successfully argued that those acts were inadmissible or irrelevant. But these accusations offer us other truths: that violence against girls and women is often an overlooked and unchecked indicator of future violence.”
It’s predictable that some opponents of police reform want to use Brinsley’s shooting spree to discredit and mischaracterize the #BlackLivesMatter movement and any politician who hasn’t tried to stamp it out. Let’s not go an equally predictable route and ignore that a woman bore the brunt of Brinsley’s instability first, before he went on to commit the type of crime that media and law enforcement consider worthy of their full attention.
By: Dani McClain, The Nation, December 23, 2014
“The Eric Garner Case’s Sickening Outcome”: When Being The Wrong Color Becomes A Capital Offense
I can’t breathe.
Those were Eric Garner’s last words, and today they apply to me. The decision by a Staten Island grand jury to not indict the police officer who killed him takes my breath away.
In the depressing reality series that should be called “No Country for Black Men,” this sick plot twist was shocking beyond belief. There should have been an indictment in the Ferguson case, in my view, but at least the events that led to Michael Brown’s killing were in dispute. Garner’s homicide was captured on video. We saw him being choked, heard him plead of his distress, watched as no attempt was made to revive him and his life slipped away.
This time, there were literally millions of eyewitnesses. Somebody tell me, just theoretically, how many does it take? Is there any number that would suffice? Or is this whole “equal justice before the law” thing just a cruel joke?
African American men are being taught a lesson about how this society values, or devalues, our lives. I’ve always said the notion that racism is a thing of the past was absurd — and that those who espoused the “post-racial” myth were either naive or disingenuous. Now, tragically, you see why.
Garner, 43, was an African American man. On July 17, he allegedly committed the heinous crime of selling individual cigarettes on the street. A group of New York City police officers approached and surrounded him. As seen in cellphone video footage recorded by an onlooker, Garner was puzzled that the officers seemed to be taking him into custody for such a piddling offense. He was a big man, but at no point did he strike out at the officers or show them disrespect.
But he wasn’t assuming a submissive posture as quickly as the cops wanted. Officer Daniel Pantaleo placed him in a chokehold, compressing his windpipe — a maneuver that the New York Police Department banned two decades ago. Garner complained repeatedly that he was having trouble breathing. The officers wrestled him to the sidewalk, where he died. An emergency medical crew was summoned, but officers made no immediate attempt to resuscitate him.
The coroner ruled Garner’s death a homicide. He suffered from asthma, and Pantaleo’s chokehold killed him.
The Staten Island prosecutor presented evidence against Pantaleo to a grand jury; the other officers involved in the incident were given immunity in exchange for their testimony. On Wednesday, it was announced that the grand jury had declined to indict Pantaleo on any charge.
This travesty — there’s no other word for it — came just nine days after a St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson for Brown’s death. Demonstrators took to the streets across Manhattan. What else was there to do but protest? Set aside the signs that say “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” Bring out the signs that say “I Can’t Breathe.”
There are two big issues here. One involves the excessive license we now give to police — permission, essentially, to do whatever they must to guarantee safe streets. The pendulum has clearly swung too far in the law-and-order direction, at the expense of liberty and justice.
As I wrote Tuesday, we are so inured to fatal shootings by police officers that we do not even make a serious effort to count them; the Brown case illustrated this numbness to the use of deadly force. Garner’s death is part of a different trend: The “broken windows” theory of policing, which holds that cracking down on minor, nuisance offenses — such as selling loose cigarettes — is key to reducing serious crime.
Police officers, whose brave work I honor and respect, are supposed to serve communities, not rule them.
The other big issue, inescapably, is race. The greatest injury of the Brown and Garner cases is that grand juries examined the evidence and decided there was no probable cause — a very low standard — to believe the officers did anything wrong. I find it impossible to believe this would be the result if the victims were white.
Garner didn’t even fit into the “young black male” category that defines this nation’s most feared and loathed citizens. He was an overweight, middle-age, asthmatic man. Now we’re told that the man who killed him did nothing wrong.
Eric Garner was engaged in an activity that warranted no more than a warning to move along. But I recognize that he also committed a capital offense: He was the wrong color.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 3, 2014
“The Political Situation In Ferguson Is Toxic”: Underlying Causes Of Ferguson Need To Be Addressed
Missouri is the Show-Me State.
It says so right on our license plates. We Missourians like to think this slogan captures our strength of character, our down-to-earth sensibility and skeptical savvy.
Very different qualities have been on display lately. Missouri has become synonymous with violence and misgovernment in the mayhem that has spiraled since the shooting death of Michael Brown in August.
We’re a national embarrassment. In the days following Brown’s shooting, protesters marched peacefully — and some looted — and police met them with excessive and militarized force.
After the St. Louis County prosecutor announced last week that charges would not be brought against Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, again protesters marched peacefully — not just in Ferguson, Missouri but across the nation — while others looted, rioted and set buildings aflame. This time there were actual soldiers on the streets of Ferguson to face down residents.
The killing of Michael Brown has become a politically divisive issue. In some ways it is a Rorschach test for racial and political points of view. Some regard Brown as one more casualty at the hands of a racist police force that demonizes all young black men as thugs. Others see him as a genuine thug who died in a scuffle that easily could have left a policeman dead instead.
In this charged atmosphere, nobody expected the grand jury’s decision to satisfy both sides — and it didn’t. The quality of the evidence it was shown, it has to be said, was not good. Accounts were contradictory, and in the end the jurors seem to have relied on Wilson’s account most of all.
The mass media coverage, especially the 24/7 cable TV treatment, has played Ferguson for all the drama it can provide. Eventually, the media will tire of the Ferguson story, yet the resentments will remain, as will the conditions that inspired them.
Nobody believes that Michael Brown will be the last unarmed black man to be shot down by a policeman with dubious cause. This happens everywhere in the United States. That’s why, in the days following the grand jury’s decision not to indict, protests and mass demonstrations were held in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, New York, Denver, Los Angeles and many other cities.
People of every race were among the protesters marching peacefully in solidarity with similar peaceful protesters in Ferguson. Not with the rioters, not with the lawless, but with the far greater numbers that have gathered, peacefully, every day since Brown died in early August.
The object of their frustration is policing that does more to agitate communities than to protect them. People have seen too many instances of questionable encounters between police and people winding up severely hurt or dead.
This is not a new storyline.
What’s new is that many of the protest events were not led by the usual suspects—civil rights leaders, politicians and media-versed clergy. It was young people, 20-somethings often either still in college or recently graduated, who organized protests by tapping networks cultivated previously through social media.
What comes next is crucial. Mass demonstrations serve a purpose, but organizing for change is what solves problems.
The first step in Ferguson ought to be a massive voter-registration drive. This was attempted but wasn’t successful in the initial days after the shooting. The appeal should be simple. Don’t like the elected officials you have? OK, vote them out. Feel that you’re not represented on the city council or in the ranks of the police? Standing in the street yelling won’t accomplish it. You need to make change happen, and voting is the first step.
The political situation in Ferguson is toxic. Like a lot of smaller towns in America, it generates a disproportionate amount of its revenue through fines. Despite a recent decision to eliminate some fines, the city still puts police in the structural role of the Biblical tax collector, stopping and ticketing citizens for relatively minor infractions, and issuing arrest warrants when they don’t or can’t pay their fines. It also so happens that a disproportionate number of tickets are given to black residents. This heavy hand, squeezing citizens for their hard-earned money, is not just or healthy for the body politic. But it’s hard to see how it will be reformed unless the majority in Ferguson first exerts its power and throws the bums out.
Everyday misgovernment does not inspire the outrage that a police killing does. But the resentment it causes year after year adds to the explosive charge when the spark is supplied. Ferguson may have flamed out. It could very well wind up a footnote, a trivia question for future generations. Or perhaps something else may happen. Maybe once all the cameras are gone, local residents, working with national civil rights organizations and others, will do the hard work of taking government back for the people.
Ferguson might then become a laboratory of democracy … and show the rest of the country how to do it.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-Page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, December 2, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 