from my friend Kevin Stone ... Open letter to police officers and other law enforcement officials: Fellas, you seem to be struggling with a loss in confidence in your abilities and with an increasingly hostile populace as a result of numerous high profile incidents of excessive force, unnecessary death, destruction of property and other claimed offenses. Thanks to the miracle of miniaturized video, including cell phones, GoPro and similar devices, many of these misdeeds are being captured and disseminated via YouTube and social media. The end result is that the populace is becoming ever more likely to presume that law enforcement is the guilty party in cases such as the Michael Brown shooting, even when, as in that case, there is overwhelming evidence that the action in question was justified. The Brown shooting provides a perfect object lesson in both the problem and the solution. Lets start with the problem. The problem is that we are no longer a unified culture with a unified concept of fairness and justice. Rather, certain subgroups have gone the route of choosing to defend other members of their group against any accusation of wrongdoing, conveniently ignoring, dismissing or, if possible, destroying any contrary evidence. Defense of the group has come to trump fairness and justice. These groups not only include certain minority groups, but also law enforcement and the political class. Ironically, members within these groups seem to be free to go after each other with gusto, but the group will immediately consolidate against any external threat. Two such groups are represented in the Ferguson shooting, one being law enforcement, the other being the black community. As we have seen in recent high profile cases, including Tawana Brawley, OJ Simpson, Trayvon Martin, Rodney King and others, that community will rise in defense of even the most obviously indefensible and guilty among them. They are particularly polarized against law enforcement in general, in no small part because the proclivity of the law enforcement institution toward defending its own, even when their actions are indefensible, is of an equal magnitude to the black communitys inclination to do the same. As I stated at the outset, I believe that facts as we know them clearly indicate that the officer in the Ferguson shooting was defending himself against a hulking assailant who had only moments before committed a strong-arm robbery, then attacked the officer before he could even get out of his car, attempting to take the officers gun, resulting in a single discharge of the weapon, breaking the officers skull at the orbit of his eye, then attempting to flee before the officer could recover. It appears that when the officer did recover and trained his gun on the assailant, demanding that he freeze, the suspect turned and attempted to charge and again overpower the officer, but was stopped by a hail of bullets. If these clearly emerging facts are accurate, this was the definition of a justifiable shooting. The problem is that the portion of the black community rallying around the shooting victim dont want to know what the facts are. As was clear from viral video shot in the minutes after the shooting, neighbors who did not witness the incident were already forming opinions to the effect that the policemen shot Brown for no reason. Now, even though Browns cohort has issued a sworn statement that backs the officers version of events, that community chooses to pretend that the statement does not exist. As pathetic as the desperate attempt to vindicate a man that all evidence says was a robber who assaulted a police officer and tried to take his weapon before being shot undeniably is, similar precedent exists within law enforcement and its persistent ignoring or destruction of evidence in defense of its own officers. One such recent case was the shooting of 13-year-old Andy Lopez, who was guilty of nothing more than carrying a BB gun. The problem is epidemic in Philadelphia, where a veteran officer famously told a local reporter that, “The only way a cop can lose his job in this city is if he shoots another cop during roll call.” If there are law enforcement officers reading this, and Im sure there are, you are probably saying to yourself, To hell with this guy! Im clean and so are the guys I work with. Fine, but where are you when, as happens pretty much weekly in this country, a fellow officer does the cross the line, resulting in death, injury or destruction of property of an innocent civilian? Where is your voice when the local administration just gives the guy a light slap on the wrist, if that, and puts him back out on the street? Lets be clear: The angry mobs in Ferguson are not law-abiding citizens. Citizens who respect the law dont loot their neighbors stores and they dont ignore exculpatory evidence. You, on the other hand, are SWORN to uphold justice, and you are PAID to uphold justice. We deserve better from you than we get from an angry and prejudiced mob, yet what you do in defense of your own, even when its just your silence when you have an obligation to speak out, is inexcusable, because your special powers and authority are predicated on a public trust that you too often break in favor of your fraternity. Officers, heres where the solution lies in the Brown shooting: If you want more respect, and if you want sympathy when you face false accusations such as in the Ferguson case, then you need to start behaving like the exemplary citizens and holders of the public trust that you are supposed to be, and less like the lawless mobs that are being called out after you. Stop defending the indefensible, and maybe you will find more people defending you.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 03:23:08 +0000
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