McCullochs account was a narrative crafted from start to finish to make the expected outcome feel in a (white) listeners mind like well, of course. We heard about the sick baby (natch!) that Wilson the White Knight had just come from aiding and assisting, a mini-episode set up to parallel the petty larceny Mike Brown (pick your epithet) had just come from participating in. We heard all kinds of stuff about rounds and shots and the choreography of the car and the street. . . . Excluded as (of course!) irrelevant to the case was any background on the prosecutor himself--the framer of the case-related narrative, whose father, a police officer who, when responding to a call, was killed by a black suspect in a housing project and whose mother, brother, uncle and cousin all worked for St. Louis police department (not that thats relevant, but if the wheezing baby minutes before the killing is, surely this is, too), or the fact that --as I understand this process -- the grand jury deciding on probable cause, on whether to indict -- cannot hear ANY evidence produced by a prosecutor or attorney who might hold different personal views (I mean, an actual trial attorney in the case of an actual trial). That the announcement was timed to spark exactly what people claimed they wanted to avoid -- people with dark skin smashing windows, looting and setting fires -- setting up the optics that would make the tear gas and riot gear seem legitimate -- is outrageous. Perhaps the militarization of the anticipated response had to be justified somehow -- enraging the community at night after the intense build up of tension over the last couple of weeks seems to me a provocation on top of a provocation. Had the announcement been made this morning, wed have had a more socially and racially diverse crowd in the streets in the immediate hours that followed. The sorts of protests going on right now, for example. Bottom line: How and why does a person with no gun walking down the middle of a street get shot 6 six times by a police officer and then be left in that street for 4 hours?
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 03:02:59 +0000
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