burying the lede

[cellio]

Since this is national news -- I just saw an LA Times story that omits this very important fact entirely,¹ though most just bury it -- let me add an important detail from here in Pittsburgh:

Antwon Rose was fleeing the scene of a shooting when he was shot by a police officer. While we have major problems with racism in this country, including disgusting, senseless violence without remedy from white police officers against everybody who's not white, in this case there was a clear and present danger to the community.

I'm sad that the man died and I feel bad for his family. I wish the officer been able to stop the fleeing man without it being fatal (which is hard). But convicting the police officer would have been a triumph of revenge over justice. We're better than that. We've all seen videos of police officers beating, tasing, and shooting people who were doing nothing to resist, who were cooperating, and yet they were attacked anyway. Those are the police officers we need to convict and remove from our streets. Those are the cases we need to focus on when seeking reform. Counting Antwon Rose's case among them weakens that cause. Don't do it. Sometimes the police officer is actually right; let's focus on the many cases where they're wrong as we pursue justice in our broken country.

[1] The article I just saw said that police shot him at a traffic stop, making it sound like the guy was sitting in the car when it happened.

Comments

[jducoeur]

This suspect had just gotten out of the car used in a drive-by shooting

So this one sets off its own form of alarm bells in me.

Thing is, I've been foreman on a jury once, back when I was in my late 20s. Drunk-driving case, which was presented as open-and-shut.

The problem was, as the defense attorney started to dig into it, it became clear that that had *nothing* to do with the arrest. What had actually happened was that the cops had pulled over the car that had been used in a robbery a few minutes before, pulled the driver out, slammed him onto the hood, roughed him up a little, brought him down to the station...

... and *then* realized they had the wrong car. The drunk-driving case was entirely a legal shield, invented after the fact to keep the cops from being sued for false arrest and beating the driver up. (And *despite* that, and despite a complete lack of evidence of the drunk-driving charge, two of us still had to spend two hours arguing the rest of the jury around to an acquittal.)

The point of which is, cops do *not* always get the facts right in the heat of the moment. Yes, when someone pulls a gun on you, you defend yourself. But it shouldn't be your go-to response -- even when the victim turns out not to have been an innocent, it's still a dangerously bad call that will sometimes turn out to have been a mistake. In the case I dealt with, the (white) kid "just" got framed; if he'd been black, I think there's a non-trivial chance things might have gone much worse before it got to that point...

[cellio]

Fabricated cases: ugh. And yes, I know that happens, and that our jury-selection process works against juries calling it out.

Trials like this boil down to trying to get into the cop's head, a cop who of necessity acts in the heat of the moment and from training that I assume is instilled firmly (like with soldiers). I am very glad that I've never had to make life-or-death decisions; I suspect strongly that I couldn't do it.

One thing that puzzled me during the (reported parts of) the trail was how much time the prosecution spent trying to prove that Antwon Rose wasn't the killer. This meant they had to contend with unfavorable evidence, and it seems utterly irrelevant in *this* trial. They weren't trying Rose; they were trying the cop, who at the time he had to make the decision certainly didn't know whose prints were on the gun or which window (front or back) the shots had come from. He had the known car and somebody running away. The focus needed to be on what was reasonably known, what threats were honestly perceived, and what level of force was called for by law.

I don't know what the right answers are. We certainly don't want police shooting people on suspicion of misdemeanor theft, we do want them to stop active shooters, and there's a vast space in between where things are fuzzy and decisions are hard. I'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea that it's *never* ok to shoot someone who's fleeing, though; had the Tree of Life murderer broken free, would it really be ok to stand by and let him run if he didn't currently have a visible gun? He was headed to another synagogue after that one if he hadn't been stopped, and he had more guns.

I want the police to stop imminent threats in populated areas. It's really hard to nail down "imminent". I also want police to be well-trained and well-screened for mindsets that interfere with objectivity, from racism to "gung-ho macho". I don't know how we do that either. (Tangentially, I think if I were a cop (which I'm really glad I'm not), I'd want to be able to insist on a black partner.)