With the national attention protests over police
brutality in Ferguson have received over the last week and a half,
one could imagine police departments around the country being, at
the very least, more self-aware of the way their actions could be
misinterpreted. Perhaps they could renew their interest in
transparency and communication. No such thing. Police killings
continue to happen regularly, largely outside the public
eye—victims are painted as security threats and without a lot of
independently-verifiable evidence in such cases they tend to
disappear.
Armand Bennett of New Orleans, wanted on multiple charges of
marijuana possession, weapon possession, resisting an officer, and
property damage, was shot in the head last Monday during a traffic
stop. He suffered critical but not life-threatening wounds. Police
claim Bennett tried to fought them while Bennett’s brother, also in
the car, says the shots were unprovoked—familiar competing
narratives in cases like this. But does the police department have
a responsibility to act in a way that won’t damage its
believability? Doesn’t seem so. The police department didn’t
acknowledge its role in the shooting of Bennett until the
Times-Picayune
reported it. The New Orleans
paper explains:
NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas apologized to
the public, calling the failure to disclose the shooting “a
complete snafu.”Serpas said at a news conference that he “personally authorized”
a news release at noon Monday, about eight hours after the
officer-involved shooting injured a man wanted on non-violent
felony warrants. But the release was never sent, and the chief
didn’t mention the incident to reporters at two news conferences
since the shooting, on Monday and Tuesday. “Clearly, it fell
through the cracks,” he said.
Unbelievably, when stuff falls through these cracks it almost
always benefits the police department. In Ferguson, Officer Darren
Wilson is facing a grand jury investigation over his shooting of
Michael Brown last Saturday. His department has
no dash cams—it had body cameras but hadn’t deployed them yet.
Missouri’s governor, Democrat Jay Nixon, has called for a
“vigorous
prosecution,” skipping the fact-finding phase along with the
mob.
There are a lot of unanswered questions about the Brown
shooting, and the Bennett shooting. There are few checks and
balances in places to limit police powers—cops are rarely
disciplined or terminated. Their
public employee privileges, coupled with their authority to use
violence and the tendency by the ruling class to give them the
benefit of the doubt, has left Darren Wilson fearing he’s going to
be made an example out of.
Rather than tackle the kind of union and other police reforms
necessary to bring transparency and accountability to police
departments around the country, it seems making an example out of
Wilson is exactly what establishment activists and politicians want
to do. It may please Brown’s mother and many Ferguson residents,
but it won’t change the rules police operate under. It may even
serve to have a temporary chilling effect on cops. But the solution
to police violence isn’t to rush cops who kill through the justice
system, denying them theirs because of a misunderstanding of what
justice for the victim means, it’s to give police departments and
local governments the ability to fire problem cops—cops who behave
inappropriately as well as cops who damage the force’s reputation.
Repealing laws that criminalize consensual non-violent behavior is
paramount too. Every cop, even murderous ones, deserve due process
in the criminal justice system. They just don’t deserve it for
their jobs. Cops concerned about what’s happening to Darren Wilson
and worried it might happen today ought to be the first advocates
for rolling back protections that prevent the worst of them from
being terminated.
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