I thought we all knew this by now, but apparently some people missed the memo. Responding to my Washington Postop-ed, a few people see rather upset that I wrote: In Ferguson, as the Justice Department made very clear, all credible evidence supported officer Darren Wilson’s account of a justified, legal and necessary shooting. Brown robbed…
Read more
Two years ago a somewhat shadowy person or group began compiling all media accounts of people killed by police. It’s at killedbypolice.net. Best I can tell, he/she/it/they do a pretty good job. According to the site: “Corporate news reports of people killed by nonmilitary law enforcement officers, whether in the line of duty or not,…
Read more
An op-ed of mine to appear in Sunday’s Washington Post: This one is different. Walter Scott was killed — shot multiple times in the back — by North Charleston, S.C., police officer Michael Slager last weekend. Scott, already running away, was no threat to the officer when the first shot was fired. He was even…
Read more
Here’s video of the initial Walter Scott car stop. (Yes, his brake light was out.) But what I love, which I suppose is kind minor in the grand scheme of thing, is how fucking amazing this drawling dispatcher is. She is bad-ass and calm. “Shots fired. He grabbed your taser. Suspect is down,” she drawls,…
Read more
Good article by Tom Blackwell in Canada’s National Post: “If we point to the officer and say, ‘You did something wrong,’ we all feel a lot better, and it’s concrete,” said Marcia McCormick, a criminal-law professor at St. Louis University. “But when the problem is the system — you have racism without racists…. It doesn’t…
Read more
It was an odd feeling to be made-up and mic’d and then walk off the set of a TV show. I had just rushed (on a Citibike, no less) from AP’s studios on 33rd and 10th (for Dutch TV) to midtown. It’s a studio I’m very familiar with (though not the show). I was rushed…
Read more
A bad police-involved shooting is a bad shooting. Now admittedly police, being armed representatives of the state, have a higher degree of responsibility than an average Joe. But my problem with the dozen or so media requests I get after something like this is perspective and selective outrage. Perhaps 500 or 600 people are killed…
Read more
Very bad. For a lot of reasons. A man is wanted for arrest for unpaid child support. A cop shoots the man while the man is running away and clearly, at that moment, is not a threat. The officer then apparently picks up and moves and drops his Taser closer to the dead body? Oh,…
Read more
“According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Mr. Hinton is the 152nd person exonerated from an American death row since 1973.” You’d think people would care more.
This isn’t exactly news, but now it’s official… because it’s in the papers: “Study Finds Mexican Troops Did Not Stem Drug-War Killings“