Cops Shoot 19-Year-Old San Jose Woman After Mistaking Power Drill For an Uzi and Nothing Else Will Happen

While the
mainstream media is trying to fit surveillance video purporting
to show Michael Brown robbing a convenience store of some cigars
into the various narratives it’s been constructing since protests
and riots in Ferguson, Missouri, propelled the police shooting of
an unarmed Brown into the national news cycle.

But the regular succession of police, or “officer-involved,”
shootings continue. Earlier this week, for example, officers from
the Los Angeles Police Department
shot and killed a mentally disturbed 25-year-old they said
later maybe might have been in a gang. In San Bernardino County, a
newspaper employee died
in police custody after being tased. Police claim the employed,
married, father of five was a suspect in an attempted burglary.
It’s reported cops are “aggressively” seeking people who may have
recorded their interaction with the victim.

And yesterday a 19-year-old woman in San Jose was shot and
killed by police after they mistook a power drill she was
brandishing for an Uzi.
ABC 7 news reports:

San Jose police spokesperson Albert Morales says officers
arrived at the scene with caller information that gave them
reasonable concern their lives might be at risk. 

“We had a call, somebody with an Uzi, threatening to kill family
members — a very, very serious situation, very dangerous situation
for our officers. We had communication with this person.
Unfortunately, I guess at some point those communications either
broke down or the officers felt threatened in some form or
fashion.”

Officers who did respond had specialized training to deal with
the potential the person may have mental health issues. 

There was no one else in the home outside of which the
19-year-old was shot so it’s unclear how the 911 call was so
botched. Without media attention, don’t expect that call, or much
more information, to be released. None of these cases appear to be
gaining significant media or community attention, so the stories
will remain murky, uncertain. It’s likely each one will be ruled
justified, with little information being shared before then. The
victims appear, or are depicted, as mentally unstable. Cops claim
in each case that they felt threatened, and residents are expected
to give police the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, the
other side
insists on counting cops who died because things fell on them
or they were involved in accidents as “killed in the line of duty”
to push the perception of cops working in a “war zone” not of their
own making.

Calls by politicians like Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) that
Ferguson be a “turning
point” are largely hollow. Cummings voted
against an NDAA amendment in June that would’ve limited
transfers of military gear to local police department, and none of
the establishment activists who have attached themselves to the
situation in Ferguson seem to be doing anything to focus people’s
attentions on the systemic problems behind police brutality,
starting with the propensity of most fatal police shootings to be
ruled justified in a process shrouded in government secrecy and
privilege.

We shouldn’t have to read these kinds of stories and speculate
about what happened, there ought to be a transparent process
trusted by the public that can come to an understandable
conclusion, whether you end up agreeing or not. Instead, cops and
prosecutors act almost like a team during investigations of police
shootings—it shouldn’t be surprising given that they do operate as
a team in pretty much every other part of their jobs. And police
generally control the narrative of a shooting, painting themselves
in the most positive light possible and victims in the most
negative light possible. Without an engaged national media they
often get away with it.

The
indictment of Gov. Rick Perry (R-Tex.) for trying to force a
district attorney charged with drinking and driving out of office
is illustrative here. A district attorney who drinks and drives
shouldn’t be allowed to keep that job, given how often a district
attorney prosecutes drunk drivers. And it’s rich to see a
prosecutor charge a governor with “coercion” for threatening
funding if a DA embroiled in a scandal wouldn’t resign, when
prosecutors coerce defendants into plea deals all the time. Is
Perry enjoying widespread for trying to force a DA that damaged her
reputation out of office? Of course not, the DA is a Democrat so a
significant amount of Democrats will back her. Her job is to
monitor public integrity. It would seem her job should obligate her
to resign after being charged with drunk driving. But prosecutors
and cops will act in their own self-interest, especially when their
jobs are on the line. And so bad actors are incentivized to help
each other. Add partisan tribalism into the mix, and you have a
recipe for a big old heap of nothing else happening.