The Chris Moeller Archives

Friday news dump: No charges in Sacramento

Tonight, we begin a new feature on the blog-- the Friday News Dump.

As part of their ongoing attempt to control the power of the news media, public relations personnel in and outside of government long ago learned the value of releasing required but unpopular or unflattering information late in the day on Fridays or early on Saturdays. The logic is that people have by and large moved on from their news week by noon on Friday. And by Monday morning, the media has lost interest in news from the previous week.

And what better role for a news blog to play than to attempt to rescue some of these unreported stories.

For our first week, we offer up the press conference from the police in Sacramento, California early Saturday announcing that charges would not be filed against the two officers that fired at a 22-year-old unarmed man named Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s backyard as many as twenty times, hit him eight times, including six times in the back, with several shots coming after he had fallen to the ground. The victim’s family has waited for almost a year for this investigation of the police by the police to conclude, and when it does conclude, it’s released… surprise… on a Saturday.

To almost no one’s surprise, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, who gets her pay from the same window as the police, and gets political contributions from the police union, wrote in her seven-page summary in a 60-plus page report that “(t)he evidence in this case demonstrates that both officers had an honest and reasonable belief that they were in imminent danger of death or great bodily injury.” Her decision is formally based on the findings of a police review released in October.

This is the Catch 22 that young black people live with, particularly black males. They are pre-perceived to be a physical threat to public peace and police officers have a license to kill because that threat perception then permits police to act with legal impunity. Officers simply need to state that they felt threatened by someone and it is safe to use deadly force. A hypothetical admission by a police officer something akin to: “I am a coward and I get easily scared” would be a legal justification for one of these extrajudicial shootings.

In this case, police were working on a report that there had been someone breaking out car windows in the neighborhood. Clark was carrying an iPhone-- which police said they thought was a gun. So um, yeah. Even a suspect with his back turned is judged over and over again in these types of cases to have been a threat. And in this case, the person they believe they are pursuing is accused-- by whomever called it in-- of only a property crime, not a violent one.

During her news conference, Schubert released private information from Clark's cellphone suggesting he had been considering suicide in the days leading up to his death, and this disclosure helps to make the public case that Clark was possibly attempting a “suicide by cop.” This concept has become another convenient out for police-- in each instance, containing at least a substantial amount of speculation about the victim’s motivations. If anything, Clark's private correspondence indicates that he needed mental health treatment, not death, but the slippery concept of “suicide by cop” serves to get us to stop asking difficult questions of those that are charged with protecting us when their actions work to bring about the opposite of protecting lives. The claim has quickly become popular among apologists of police misconduct, though there is-- after nearly four decades since the term was coined-- still almost no concrete data available about it. Shockingly, we’re so far yet removed from scientific research on “suicide by cop,” we don’t even have concrete data about how many Americans are shot by police in a given year.

Those that suffer from mental illness should be less likely to be shot by police, not more. The unsubstantiated language “suicide by cop” does the police no favors either. It gives citizens the false impression that police will always shoot you if they have a reason to. Such a notion could encourage truly suicidal people to place themselves in these risky situations.

Since police are trained only to make demands of the people they are policing and to expect compliance, it should come as no surprise that usually the missing training ingredient is that which involves de-escalation and conflict resolution. Two Sacramento cops don’t need to try to reason with a depressed, or mentally unstable person, when they’re enabled by the law to simply murder him. When police chiefs respond to incidents such as this with comments like, “the officers were reacting according to the training they’ve received,” the follow-up question eventually needs to be “why are we training this?”

In California, there is a piece of legislation-- Assembly Bill 392-- that would limit the circumstances under which police can use deadly force. There is no evidence that even Democrats can be relied upon to support it. Kamala Harris, the former state attorney general, now senator and “progressive” candidate for U.S. president has still failed to take a position on this bill. A former prosecutor herself, Harris seems intent on adding to her reputation as a progressive only when it matters the least. While we wait, another black soul, unarmed, is lost, and with no repercussions for his killers or the system that creates and backs them.

posted by CM @ 8:18 PM