Eric Garner and Mike Brown: the problem is the system

I am so frustrated by what has happened that I have found it difficult to take a step back and write a measured blog post about it, and instead have been engaging in debates/arguments on Facebook. I still haven't coalesced all my thoughts, so instead am just going to flag a point I made in response to someone on Facebook, which somewhat gets to the core of my thoughts on this troubling issue.

It is impossible, in my mind at least, to say "I am on one side on Mike Brown and the other side with Eric Garner", because in both cases the problem is the same: a District Attorney is so scared of pissing off the police union that he chooses not to pursue criminal charges against a police officer, even if he does go through the pantomime of pretending to do so. In both cases (we know in Ferguson, and we can assume in Staten Island), the prosecutor bent over backwards to avoid having the issue go to a full, public, trial, during which the testimony and evidence would be tested at length. By subverting and perverting the grand jury process Bob McCullough also further undermined African Americans' faith in the justice system. The son of a cop who was shot, he refused to recuse himself, but had neither the balls to take a decision not to press for an indictment nor leave the question of guilt or innocence to a jury in a trial. It's almost as if both DAs were scared of what the outcome might be, and intentional or not, the end result is that cops in America have become judge, jury, and executioner. That's not a democracy, that's a police state.

12/10/14 UPDATE:

The New York Times has a good piece expanding, in rather more measured terms, the point I was making above:

Grand Jury System, With Exceptions, Favors the Police in Fatalities

Do What You're Told And You Won't Get Hurt

The deaths of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell in St. Louis have bothered me. They have bothered me not so much for their details, though I hope for the families of both men that when all the evidence emerges and is weighed that they feel the conclusions arrived at have delivered justice, but because of what they say, when taken together.

For that reason, as odd as it sounds, I want to set aside the arguments about whether Officer Darren Wilson and the two officers in the Powell case were justified in firing the bullets that killed these two men, though that is surely what the trial in the former case and the investigation in the latter will focus on.  I want to look at the total number of bullets fired, and what it says.

As I pointed out in my last blog post, police in Britain fired their weapons three times last year.  In both the Brown and Powell cases, at least three times that number of bullets appear to have been fired in each incident.  This is the aspect that worries me: multiple eye witnesses report that after some sort of scuffle at the police car, during which Wilson's gun was discharged, Brown set off running, and Wilson shot at him as he fled.  Forget what happened next and think about that for a moment.  If the eye witnesses are to be believed, and we now have so many that they are all part of a vast police-hating racially motivated conspiracy (and I am sure there are those who will want to believe that), Officer Wilson shot at Mike Brown as he ran away.  When two police officers fired at least nine bullets into Kajieme Powell at close range, three of these were fired while he was on the ground.  Both of these facts on their own should cause alarm, indeed outrage, among the public at large. In the sad circumstances of the deaths of these two men, however, it is a minor detail, though to me it speaks to the bigger problem.

As is stated in the British police college's guidelines on the discharge of firearms, and very graphically illustrated in the video at the bottom of page 1 of this piece in The Atlantic, (humblebrag: my last blog post got a mention on page 2, and in this Al Jazeera piece) that police officers do not shoot to wound, they shoot to incapacitate, and that can only effectively be done with an unholstered weapon at a distance of 21 feet or more, aiming at the torso.  "Incapacitate" is often expressed in the U.S. by police officers and gun enthusiasts as "neutralize the threat".  I find that worrying like a euphemism for "shoot dead".  Kajieme Powell was indeed close to the officers that shot him.  They could not have missed.  I believe they are trained to open fire with a "double tap".  A 'double tap' at the range in question is going to incapacitate. A 'double tap' is going to neutralize the threat.  A 'double tap' is probably going to kill.  The 9 or 10 bullets fired into Kajieme Powell, including a number while he was on the ground, are going to ensure that.  Threat neutralized indeed.

I will confess I have little appreciation for the stresses police officers in the U.S., or the U.K. for that matter, work under.  They do what is certainly a stressful and at times dangerous job.  32 of them died in the line of duty from gunshot wounds last year.  An even greater number died in Road Traffic Accidents.  What degree of risk the public can expect an officer to take while protecting the public is difficult to quantify.  I worry that too many in the Police believe the answer is none.

Deaths from Police Shootings... pic.twitter.com/y1qf6GDBv3
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) August 23, 2014

This opinion piece in the Washington Post by a 17-year veteran of the L.A.P.D. illustrates the point:

Worlds Apart

Ezra Klein hits the nail on the head re all that is wrong with policing in America:

"There is something wrong that the video seems obviously exculpatory to the police and obviously damning to so many who watch it."

Those with professional knowledge can speak to it better than me, but I suspect the protocol in Britain would be to park at a relatively safe distance, order civilians to get back, call for back-up and specialist assistance, while monitoring to ensure that Mr. Powell poses no threat to himself or anybody else.  What caused the situation to escalate to the point that the police felt so threatened that they needed to open fire on a mentally ill man carrying a *knife at his side was the arrival of the police. There is a serious problem in how US police perceive and deal with "threats". Mentally-ill people, even ones with knives, are primarily a threat to themselves. [UPDATE: The Police stated Kajieme Powell charged at them and he was carrying a steak knife. It was being reported in Twitter last night that it was a table or butter knife).

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

This classical Latin question of 2,000 years ago has no greater relevance than to Ireland today.  The national police force, An Garda Síochána (the Guardians of the Peace), is commonly referred to in English as 'the Guards'.  After a series of policing scandals, in 2005 an Ombudsman was established, the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC), to provide an answer to Juvenal's question of who will guard the guards.

The Commission was partly modelled on the equivalent office in Northern Ireland, but with fewer and blunter teeth.  Its relationship with the Gardaí has been, it has to be said, a tense one (€) over the years, characterised by suspicion (€) and misunderstanding.  GSOC has made some mistakes along the way that caused little love to be lost (€) between the two organisations.  This sits atop the natural loathing that any police organisation has for a body designed to oversee it.  It is just the nature of the beast.

Nonetheless, from a human rights perspective, to have a permanent police ombudsman is something of which Ireland should be proud, and places it in a very small number of jurisdictions in the world to have such a set-up.

It is natural, therefore, that Irish people should be concerned by reports in the press, first broken by The Sunday Times, that GSOC became concerned that the security of its offices had been breached.  They employed a British security company to sweep their offices, in the course of which they discovered three 'anomalies'.  Gavan Reilly outlines what they were in an excellent blogpost, that gets to the heart of a lot of this puzzling issue, or Sunday Times subscribers can recap on the detail from John Mooney here, a screengrab from which I have included below (click to zoom).  It should also be noted that Ireland should be grateful to the 'British' Sunday Times (as members of the Government have repeatedly referred to it) and John Mooney in particular, for pursuing this issue when other Irish media outlets sucked up the Government spin and spat it out again to its readers and viewers.

There are a lot of questions remaining, but to distil what they are, I want to go back through the chronology of what happened, and add my own thoughts and speculation.