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Alton Sterling’s Killing Was Caught On Camera, But Justice Is Still A Long Shot

Alton Sterling’s Killing Was Caught On Camera, But Justice Is Still A Long Shot

Yet another black man has been killed by police officers during a confrontation. This time, it was Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old father of five who was known for selling CDs outside the convenience store where he was shot down on Tuesday.

The Advocate reported that police were called after an anonymous caller claimed that Sterling had threatened him with a gun.

Sterling is the tenth person to have been killed by police in the state of Louisiana this year. Out of the ten victims, seven were black, two were white, and one’s race was “unknown.” For two of victims, it is “unknown” if they were armed at the time of the shooting.

Eric John Senegal was one of them. He was killed at 27-years-old by deputies who were serving a narcotics search warrant. Two officers were placed on desk duty after the incident. Local media did not follow up on Senegal’s killing.

Shannon Labit, Travis Stevenson and Calvin Smith suffered from mental illnesses.

No one has been indicted in the nine deaths before Sterling’s, and Lousiana Gov. John Bel Edwards did not make statements after any of the previous killings, though he did after Sterling’s death.

Tuesday’s shooting is different in one way – it is clearly visible in a now-viral 48-second video caught by a bystander. By Wednesday morning, protesters were demanding answers and justice, and Sterling’s family made a heart wrenching televised statement. Sterling’s 15-year-old son cried uncontrollably as his mother pledged that Sterling’s death “will not go unnoticed.”

“I think that the city is going to have to give us some good answers,” Edmond Jordan, an attorney representing Sterling’s family who is also a Louisiana state legislator, told CNN. “And I don’t know if they’ll be able to.”

According to Baton Rouge Police Department spokesman Captain L’Jean McKneely, the officers involved in the shooting were wearing body cameras, but the cameras allegedly came loose during the altercation.

Baton Rouge Police Lt. Johnny Dunham later said that the body cameras did catch some footage. “That footage may not be as good as we hoped for. During the altercation, the body cameras did become dislodged, but they did stay on and active and recording at this time.” he said at a Wednesday press conference.

This is not the first time Baton Rouge Police officers have had trouble capturing incidents with their body cameras. The Advocate reported in January that the Baton Rouge Police Department planned to stop the use of L-3 brand body cameras because officers were having trouble keeping them in place.

 

The national attention provoked by the video may be why Louisiana officials are promising to meticulously investigate Sterling’s death.

Gov. Edwards announced Wednesday morning that the shooting of Sterling will be investigated by the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. He called the video of the shooting “disturbing, to say the least.”

But this is not the first time such an incident was caught on camera, and more often than not, video of a police killing isn’t enough to convict the officers. Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner with a chokehold in 2014, was acquitted by a jury. Garner was unarmed, and Pantaleo had faced two civil suits previous to the incident related to abuses of power.

The 2015 murder of Walter Scott is one of few cases of police shootings where an officer involved has been charged with murder. Video of the incident showed officer Michael Slager shooting 8 times at an unarmed Scott, who was running away on foot. Slager is awaiting trial.

Police violence caught on camera has been a part of American life for decades. The videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991 caused outrage across the country, which further intensified after the officers who hit him with batons more than 50 times were acquitted by a jury. Three days of violent riots followed in which at least 53 people died.

The Rodney King case happened more than 20 years ago, but black men continue to be harmed and killed by police officers at a disproportionate rate.

The 2012 murder of teenager Trayvon Martin revived activism against police brutality, yet the man who killed him, George Zimmerman, infamously walked away with an acquittal. Just last week, another officer was acquitted in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and another in the videotaped beating of a teenage girl in Texas.

With the rise of social media and increased accessibility to information including video, citizen activism has exploded and the Black Lives Matter movement has gained momentum, but little has been done to address the issue in a lasting manner.

While no legislation has been passed to address police brutality in the state, Louisiana passed a law to protect “Blue Lives” back in May. The law includes crimes against law enforcement under the state’s hate crime legislation. It says anyone found to have targeted a police officer, firefighter, or first responder because of their profession will face an increased penalty of five years in prison, and a fine of up to $5,000.

At the time, Gov. Edwards said police officers “deserve every protection that we can give them.”

Louisiana is one of 14 states that have a “bill of rights” for police, including the allowance that “Any interrogation of a police employee or law enforcement officer in connection with an investigation shall be for a reasonable period of time and shall allow for reasonable periods for the rest and personal necessities of such police employee or law enforcement officer,” and “The police employee or law enforcement officer shall be granted up to thirty days to secure such representation, during which time all questioning shall be suspended.”

During these 30 days, officers are not required to answer any questions, and can council with each other if there is more than one officer involved.

According to a Washington Post database of news reports, public records, social media and other sources, at least 505 people have been killed by police so far this year. The states leading the country in police killings are California with 63, Texas with 45 and Florida with 33.

 

Photo: A protester wears tape over her mouth during a silent demonstration against what they say is police brutality after the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer, in St. Louis

Police Officers Must Be Held To Higher Standard Of Conduct

Police Officers Must Be Held To Higher Standard Of Conduct

The omnipresence of video cameras hasn’t restrained the impulses of violent police officers, it seems, but cameras have at least repudiated the narratives that have saved so many police from prosecution. In several cases, video footage has offered a truth that defies official justifications for savagery.

Because he was wearing a body camera that contradicted his account (stunning, yes, that he was aware he was being recorded), Ray Tensing has been charged with murder in the July death of Cincinnati motorist Samuel DuBose, whom Tensing, then a University of Cincinnati police officer, had stopped for a traffic violation. Tensing claimed that he shot DuBose because he feared for his life, but the footage doesn’t appear to show him in any danger.

Yet, the decision by Tensing’s superiors to prosecute him merely lays bare the remaining inequities in a criminal justice system that is by no means just. It is quite rare for police officers to be convicted and sent to prison for their unjustified violence, no matter the evidence against them.

(Indeed, it is still quite rare for police officers to be charged in the deaths of civilians. So far this year, 558 civilians have died at the hands of police, according to The Washington Post, which says that officers have been charged in only four cases, all of which were captured on video. In three of the cases, the victims were black, while the officers were white. In the fourth, the civilian was also white.)

Indeed, the criminal justice system is one of the last bastions of blatant racism, a pastiche of prejudices, wrongheaded stereotypes, and all-too-human assumptions. The implicit and explicit biases that color black people as dangerous and anti-social tend to let police officers, especially white officers, off the hook. Their crimes often go unpunished.

Perhaps you remember the trial of four Los Angeles cops in the brutal 1991 assault on Rodney King. Videotaped by a passer-by as they repeatedly beat and kicked a prostrate King, they were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force. Yet, none were convicted in a Simi Valley courtroom.

Two of the four, Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell, were later convicted after federal authorities charged them with violating King’s civil rights.

Still, U.S. District Court Judge John Davies was clearly sympathetic to the two men, saying that King had “contributed significantly to provoking the offense behavior.” While they faced up to 10 years in prison, he sentenced them to 30 months.

Now fast-forward a quarter-century. In May 2015, Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo, who is white, was acquitted of manslaughter in the 2012 deaths of an unarmed black motorist, Timothy Russell, and passenger, Malissa Williams. After other officers had ceased shooting and Russell had stopped his car — he had led the officers on a high-speed chase — Brelo jumped onto the hood of the vehicle and fired 15 shots.

The U.S. Department of Justice, by the way, considered that case when it issued a report that found the Cleveland Police Department had engaged in a long-running pattern of unnecessary force. More than 100 police officers pursued Russell’s vehicle because they believed they heard gunfire coming from the car, but Justice found it likely that the car had backfired.

Nevertheless, Cuyahoga County Judge John P. O’Donnell ruled that the “state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant, Michael Brelo, knowingly caused the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.” (O’Donnell presided over a bench trial — or trial without a jury.)

Law enforcement defenders would undoubtedly note that neither Rodney King nor Timothy Russell was a paragon of virtue. Both motorists failed to stop their vehicles, choosing to flee police. Their conduct was clearly wrong.

But neither King nor Russell took an oath to protect and serve. Neither man was given the badge and gun that ought to suggest a rigorous moral code and a significant degree of restraint.

In other words, police officers should be held to a higher standard of conduct. And if they behave like murderous thugs, they should be treated as such. Until they are, justice remains tantalizingly out of reach.

(Cynthia Tucker Haynes won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: Pete via Flickr

Walter Scott, Just Another ‘Isolated Incident’?

Walter Scott, Just Another ‘Isolated Incident’?

“…You foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear.” — Jeremiah 5:21

So here we are with another isolated incident.

That, at least, is how the April 4 police killing of 50-year-old Walter Scott will play in those conservative enclaves where the notion that there is such a thing as systemic racism is regarded as deluded and absurd. Those enclaves will not, of course, be able to claim innocence for now-fired North Charleston, SC, police officer Michael Slager. As cellphone video captured by a passerby makes brutally clear, Slager repeatedly shot the fleeing, unarmed African-American man in the back after a traffic stop.

They will likewise find it difficult to defend a police report that claims officers administered CPR to the dying man. The video shows them doing no such thing. Finally, they will find it problematic to support Slager’s claim that he shot Scott after the suspect seized his Taser. The video shows Slager picking up a small object and dropping it near Scott’s body, fueling strong suspicion that he planted the Taser.

The video, in other words, will make it impossible to deny Slager did wrong. But conservatives will dispute with vehemence the notion that the wrong he did has larger implications.

Indeed, Bill O’Reilly of Fox “News” has already invoked misleading statistics to assure his audience that “there doesn’t seem to be, as some people would have you believe, that police are trying to hunt down young black men and take their lives.”

In other words, move on, nothing to see here.

We ought not be surprised. It is only human that a Bill O’Reilly would want to think of himself and of the culture in which he has flourished as decent and good. To acknowledge that there is bias in that culture is to put oneself into an unenviable moral squeeze: One must either bestir oneself to say or do something about it — or else stop thinking of oneself as decent and good.

It is easier simply to deny the bias, to say that what is, is not. Small wonder that’s the default position of conservatism on matters of race: Absent burning crosses and pointy white hoods, nothing is ever racism to them. And the more fervently one denies self-evident truth, the more emotionally invested one becomes in doing so.

Thus, every incident that illustrates the racism of our system, every statistic that quantifies it, every study that proves it, becomes just another “isolated incident.” There is never an accumulation of evidence pointing toward an irrefutable, irredeemable conclusion. They are a thousand trees, but no forest, a million raindrops, but no storm.

Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima? Isolated incidents.

Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice? Isolated incidents.

Sean Bell, Levar Jones, Trayvon Martin? Isolated incidents.

A study co-authored by law professor David Baldus, a 1991 study by the San Jose Mercury News, a 1996 report from the National Criminal Justice Commission, a 2000 study co-sponsored by the Justice Department, a 2004 report by The Miami Herald, a 2010 book by reporter Joseph Collum, all documenting profound and pervasive racial bias in the justice system? Isolated incidents.

Sometimes, you have to wonder at our conservative friends: Where is conscience? Where are intellectual integrity and moral courage? Where is simple, human decency?

Because if you are a decent person, you are up in arms right now. You are demanding solutions — not making excuses.

And if you are not up in arms yet, then pray tell: how many more “isolated incidents” do you need? How much more obvious must this be? How many more bodies will it take?

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)