One more story

A few years ago I was telling a friend about a suspicious police shooting that I had followed closely in my college years.  The shooting occurred in my college town, at a time when I was heavily involved with the Black community there, and so I kept up-to-date on the details of the case.

Basically, two police officers had shot and killed a young Black man during a traffic stop at night.  One cop claimed the man had pulled a gun and fired at them while they were conducting a search, and they fired on him in self-defense.  There were major issues with their story that made the case suspicious.

* The police rationale for stopping the man was dubious.  They claimed that they stopped him for speeding, but the ticket they wrote out was for "no registration".  However, the car was new and the registration was taped right to the car's window.  Why did they stop him, why did they ask if he was on probation and ask to search him, and why did they write out the ticket when he clearly had registration right there in the window?

* The motive didn't make sense.  The man was 18 years old, had no warrants, no violent record, no gang ties, no history of animosity towards the police.  He was a father returning home at night, had to go to work in the morning.  He had only one spot on his criminal record - a conviction for "carrying a concealed weapon" - brass knuckles in his glove compartment.  Why would he be carrying a gun illegally at night (especially being on probation for the brass knuckles charge), and why would he decide to kill two police officers, who had already run his information and called in the report (the second officer had come specifically as backup for the search)?

* The police officer claimed that the man fired at them first.  However, the gun recovered from the scene had not been fired.  This was the biggest issue with the case...how could the officers claim that the man had fired on them first when the gun recovered from him had not been fired?

* The gun recovered from the victim was a collector's item registered to a retired police chief.  There was no record of it having been sold or stolen.  The gun did not have any fingerprints on it, not even smudges.  This is the second huge red flag.  No one has ever shown how a retired police chief's weapon got into the hands of an 18-year-old Black man.

* Only one officer spoke to investigators.  The other officer pled the 5th and refused to speak.  Why did that officer plead the 5th when the other officer gave a description of events that would have clearly showed no wrongdoing at all?  Why wasn't he willing to give his side of the story to fellow police investigating him?

* There were many other minor points that showed inconsistencies in the "official" version of events.  Among them, an audio recording showed 15 shots fired, but only 14 shots had been fired from the officers' guns and only 14 shell casings were recovered from the scene.  What happened to the mystery shot?  What gun was it fired from? Why did investigators find gunpowder on Irvin Landrum if the gun they had supposedly recovered from him had not fired a shot? The officers' declarations in later testimony differed from their statements directly after the shooting - the officer who fired first changed his statement about whether he had actually seen the gun, changed his statement about who had fired first, and made a claim that the other officer had warned him about the gun when the other officer stated he had never said such a thing.


None of this is a clear smoking gun of manslaughter/murder.  But there are myriad worrisome issues.  No matter what happened, the fact that the officer claimed the man had fired first, when the man's gun had not been fired, is an issue.  No matter what happened, the fact that a gun registered to an officer had ended up on the scene without anyone being able to explain how is an issue.  No matter what happened, the fact that one officer pled the 5th in an officer-involved shooting, but was eventually allowed to return to duty, is an issue.


The behavior by city officials afterwards just added to the anger surrounding the case.  During the aftermath, the following issues emerged.

* Police went to the home of the man's girlfriend (and mother of his two children) to elicit any testimony that could be used as evidence against him.  They did not inform her about the shooting or his death until after they had tried to draw out as much circumstantial evidence against him as they could from her.

* The local sheriff handled the "outside investigation" of the shooting.  Many protesters thought that the local sheriff was too close to the police department to be a truly independent investigator.

* In the initial report, the city said that the gun found had been registered to "a collector", and that it was unknown how it got into the man's possession.  Months later that the city was forced to admit that the "collector" in question was actually a police officer, in fact a former chief.  The city claimed that they had blotted out the police officer's name and failed to disclose his profession because he "wasn't really involved in the case".

* Throughout the case, the city used underhanded methods to taint the credibility of the victim and his family.  They released a report stating that the victim had a previous conviction for "carrying a concealed weapon", without mentioning that the weapon had been brass knuckles, not a gun.  When the man's uncle started leading weekly protests against the city, the city released the uncle's criminal record to newspapers (he had a conviction for armed robbery from back in the 1970s).  That arrest had nothing to do with the case and was  pure retaliation.  The city also hired private investigators to look into the backgrounds of other protesters.

* At the end of the year, the city awarded the two officers with their "Employee of the Year" awards, which included a $1,000 financial prize.  Since the men had not yet returned to duty, the sole action for which they were being rewarded was the shooting of the Black teenager.

* Both officers were eventually allowed to return to duty, even though one officer had pled the 5th and never told his supervisors or the outside investigators what had actually happened.

* The City settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the family for $450,000 without admitting guilt of any kind.


I was well aware of these facts as they occurred, and it upset me a lot.  I stayed focused on the case for more than a year.  However, my focus faded as I moved away from the community.

Until that moment seven years later when I looked up the case for a friend.  I looked up an article about the shooting for him and saw the names of the officers.  And then I realized that one of the involved officers had become a friend of mine.

I hadn't known the officer when I was following the case and am generally bad with names, so his name had hadn't stuck with me.  When I first met him a couple years later, I didn't make the connection.  I knew this new friend had been a police officer, and that he had recently left the force, but we never talked about his previous job.  He was a soft-spoken, polite, kind guy, who looked up to me in a sense and constantly praised the things I was doing in my life.  He was the kind of person you have a hard time imagining as a police officer, figuring that he must have focused on community relations or something.  You couldn't imagine him using force of any kind.  Over the next five years as we got to know each other and our friendship grew, his time on the police force just didn't come up.

So I sat there stunned, seeing his name on the computer screen.  This was the first major police case I'd ever known about, my prototype of a suspicious police shooting.  And my nice, soft-spoken, kind-hearted friend was the man who had fired first.

My mind spun.  I didn't know what to think.  I couldn't believe that I'd never heard about it, never been told about it.  From carefully talking around the issue with a number of mutual friends, I found that none of them had known about it either. As far as I could tell, no one at church had ever spoken about it in any context.  How did this stay such a big secret?  Could my police officer friend tell me what really happened?  Did the fact that a guy like him had been involved make me want to rethink the case?  I spent my time reading through all the evidence, all the reports, all the protester arguments against the official reports.  I did that at least three times without getting clarity.


Some friends who have read my accounts have felt that I've been overly focused on the side of the victim.  They feel that I have not given the police officers a fair hearing.  And it is certainly true that it is the victims' side of the story that I have wanted to tell.  But I have known a lot of officers in a number of contexts, and it adds a humanity and uncertainty to how I view many of these cases.  As I said earlier, a close relative of mine was a career officer.  Two friends from childhood became officers.  I got to know one former officer quite well as we went to graduate school together, another from church, and partnered with several others in various work capacities through the schools I taught at and a charity I was involved in.  Most intensely, I spent a year working in a jail side-by-side with sheriff's deputies five days a week.

Knowing officers had added depth to my thoughts about these cases.  That can go both ways.  It can make me wonder whether soft-hearted people I know could be capable of malicious intent.  But I've also been able to hear good cops tell me first-hand stories of why they had beaten suspects who didn't need to be beaten, solely due to the stress that they had been under.  The more I've learned about how many modern police forces operate and been able to meet the people who have been working under them, the more I've been able to believe that good people, even cops, can be capable of some really bad things.


This is my last post in this series.  I wanted to share my own context for these issues because the cause is both personal and global to me.  Today's news stories are about the recent tragedies of Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, John Crawford III, Eric Courtney Harris, Anthony Hill, Eric Garner, Sureshbhai Patel, William Chapman, Kajiemi Powell, Akai Gurley, Yvette Smith, Timothy Russell, Melissa Williams, Michael Brown, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, Charly "Africa" Leundeu Keunang, Rumain Brisbon, and dozens of others just in this past year.  They're also about those who faced the things back before it became the public issue - Kalief Browder, Darren Rainey, Karil Denyakin, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Trent Benefield, Joseph Guzman, Robbie Tolan, Leroy Grant, Rayshawn Brown, Danny Reyes, Oscar Grant, Alexandra Torrensvilas, Douglas Dendinger, Jonathan Ferrell, Larry Jackson, Reynaldo Cuevas, Rekia Boyd, Wendell Allen, and hundreds of others.  But it's also about the thousands of incidents every single day that never get reported, and the regular people we interact with in our daily lives who never make the news.

I also wanted to share my personal experience because 95% of what I've experienced has occurred during the short period in my life in which I was deeply involved with the Black community.  Those who condemn the citizens of Ferguson without having read the whole report, who critique the riots in Baltimore without knowing the history between police and residents there, who watch video of teens running in McKinney without knowing what segregation has meant in that town's recent history - or even the positive connotations it holds for some White people there today, do so without a real understanding of the difference between interacting with police from a privileged perspective and interacting with police as a Black person in a Black community.

Illicit police-citizen conflict is not merely a racial issue.  The victims and perpetrators both can come from any racial background.  But due to the manner in which Black communities are policed, it is an issue that far and away disproportionately affects the Black population.  And that has negative repercussions that extend far beyond the immediate victims themselves.  Poor policing discourages a community, prevents citizens from seeking the police for help, exacerbates crime.  Fathers and mothers and caretakers who are unjustly shot or unjustly imprisoned leave orphans back in their communities, leading to more crime, leading to more death and imprisonment, and feeding into a cycle that only gets worse.

A look at the comments section on any mainstream or conservative media source will reveal hundreds of comments of the type, "But look at how many Black people are in jail!  Look at how many minorities are arrested!  When are we going to accept that it's all their fault!"

Until we've addressed the real systematic issues that have led to those communities being where they are today, and that help contribute to so many people from those communities ending up dead or in jail, we haven't accepted that it is indeed partially our own fault.