April 16^th

No right wing columnists for me to dispute today, but O’Reilly of Fox News has decided that liberals are at war with the police so that’s worthy of comment. We now have more and more evidence that some police departments and some individual officers are loose cannons; they are simply out of control. The recent spate of police actions documented by cameras, some from bystanders, some from patrol car cameras, give us views of police misbehavior we’ve never had before and the public is outraged by it!

The worst example is the shooting of a fleeing black man in North Charleston, South Carolina who was shot multiple times in the back by a patrol officer who was in no danger whatever and standing about thirty feet from his fleeing victim. Following the killing the policeman handcuffs the man he shot. If he’s not alive why handcuff him; if he is alive why not call for an ambulance? This was all recorded by a bystander who went to the police to tell them he had photographed the whole thing. He was told to wait while the officer reported this news to his superiors. He left while he still had the tape and it eventually made its way to the New York Times. The bystander movie of the killing bore little relationship to the police report of the incident. The cop who shot that man has now been discharged and is being held on a murder charge.

The odds are that in spite of the evidence against him, he will not be convicted. Grand juries are reluctant to indict police officers. Consider the case of five police officers in New York City who tackled a black man for selling individual cigarettes, a misdemeanor. He was brought to the ground in a choke hold and died on the spot. He told the arresting officers, “I can’t breathe.” But they didn’t believe him so he died. No indictment against the officers was forthcoming. Curiously some maintained that if he could speak, “I can’t breathe” well then he obviously could breathe. But when you speak you do so by expelling air, not inhaling it. He was expelling air he already had inhaled.

The standard police excuse for killing someone is that they thought their lives were in danger, they thought that the screwdriver was a pistol and so on. If that doesn’t work some carry a drop gun. This is an unregistered handgun they take from the police property room and put in a holster strapped to their ankle. If they’re worried about the legitimacy of killing someone they just drop that hand gun at the scene, making sure of course that the victim’s fingerprints are on it; good insurance for a bad shoot. The cop who shot the fleeing man in North Charleston is photographed dropping something next to the victim’s body. Maybe it was the Taser the cop claimed the victim took from him; who knows.

If this is a “war on cops” the police, by their tendency to lie about what they’ve done and assume that they have the right to shoot anyone who “disrespects” them, will have brought it on themselves. Now that almost everyone has a camera this is a war they will lose.