Tag Archives: police violence

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The Castile Doctrine: Cops Without Consequences

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Dashcam video of police officer Jeronimo Yanez shooting Philando Castile
Dashcam video of police officer Jeronimo Yanez shooting Philando Castile

 

On June 16, a jury acquitted St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez of all charges in the 2016 killing of motorist Philando Castile. That acquittal was, in a sense, also a death sentence — not for Yanez, but for future motorists unfortunate enough to encounter cops like him.

No, this is not a “bad cop” story. It’s a sad tale and I actually feel sorry for Yanez. But the facts are what they are.

Yanez killed Castile. The killing was caught on video and neither Yanez nor his attorneys denied it.

His defense (that he feared for his life) was based on ridiculous grounds relating to the smell of cannabis and the presence of a child  (“I thought, I was gonna die, and I thought if he’s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five year old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing, then what, what care does he give about me?”).

Reasonable fear of death or grievous bodily harm justifies a self-defense claim. Yanez’s fears were far from reasonable, especially in a trained law enforcement officer whose partner was mere feet away and whose subject of interrogation was peaceful and compliant right up to the moment Yanez shot him.

Castile had informed Yanez that he possessed a concealed weapon and a permit for it, and was following Yanez’s orders to produce the permit when Yanez panicked and fired.

Key word: Panicked. His fear wasn’t justified. It wasn’t reasonable. It was unthinking and irrational. That made him culpably negligent in the killing.

Jeronimo Yanez should have never been issued a badge, a gun, a patrol car, and authority to pull over and interrogate motorists. But he was. That’s a failure of pre-employment psychological screening.

Once Yanez DID receive those items and that authority, the responsibility for what he did with them became his as well. Yes, it was a heavy responsibility, but one he voluntarily assumed and failed to fulfill.

The jury, in relieving him of the consequences of that failure, continued a sad tradition of holding law enforcement officers to a lesser standard of conduct than ordinary Americans. In doing so, they made the world a safer place for cops who shouldn’t be cops — and a more dangerous place for the rest of us.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Police Violence: Peace Isn’t The Priority

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Korryn Gaines and son
Korryn Gaines and her son (photo widely distributed, allegedly from Facebook)

Precisely how did Korryn Gaines die? We don’t know, and probably never will.

The Baltimore County, Maryland Police Department admits that one of its officers shot her dead on August 1. In fact, the department admits that the officer shot first and that Gaines then returned fire in self-defense and defense of her five-year-old son (no, the department does not use those terms) before being gunned down.

The police also admit that before forcing their way into Gaines’s apartment and killing her, they went out of their way to ensure  their actions would be hidden from public view. The department contacted two social media services, Facebook and Instagram, asking that Gaines’s accounts be disabled so as to cut off her photo and video streams of what was happening. To their everlasting shame, the two firms complied with the request.

So we don’t know what happened. But we have a pretty good idea what happens next: The Baltimore County Police Department will “investigate” itself and announce that it has cleared itself and the unidentified officer who killed Gaines (he or she is currently on paid vacation, aka “administrative leave,” until the “investigation” is over) of any wrongdoing.

Baltimore County police chief James Johnson  characterizes his department’s desire for “peace” as the overriding priority justifying the concealment operation. Social media contacts needed to be stopped from urging her “not to comply with negotiators’ request that she surrender peacefully,” he says. “For hours, we pleaded with her to end this peacefully.”

Let’s dispense with the risible claim that “peace” was the priority here. Had that been the case, Johnson could have just called it a night and directed his officers to get in their cars and drive away.  Problem solved. Easy, peace-y.

If the priority was not “peace,” then what was it?

Officer safety? No.  Sending an officer into an apartment occupied by an armed woman isn’t very safe for the officer at all.

Public safety? No. At least one police officer fired multiple rounds — firing first, remember? — in an apartment building. Those rounds were probably 9mm, 10mm or .45 caliber rounds which could have penetrated walls (Gaines was allegedly armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, a much safer weapon for people on the other side of a wall).

The Baltimore County Police Department’s number one priority, their overriding concern, wasn’t peace, or officer safety, or public safety. It was — as has become the case with many American police departments, much of the time —  successful exercise of authority at any price.

That’s why the Baltimore County PD covered up the details of their killing of the ninth American woman of color to die at police hands this year. Just like a cat in a litter box.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Hands Up Don’t Shoot, Oregon Edition

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English: A Picture of FBI SWAT officers. Origi...
A Picture of FBI SWAT officers. Originally from http://buffalo.fbi.gov/specialty_programs.htm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

“They shot him right there, he was just walking — I saw it,” says Victoria Sharp . “I swear to God, he was just walking with his hands in the air.” She’s describing the January 26 killing of LaVoy Finicum by FBI agents and an Oregon State Police SWAT team.

Sharp’s account doesn’t go uncontested. Mark McConnell, described as a “witness” even though he was a mile away at the time of the shooting and was just “told” what happened, describes Finicum as “charging” the police. And unidentified “law enforcement sources” tell CNN that Finicum “reached down toward his waistband where he had a gun.” Grainy overhead video of the shooting, subsequently released by the FBI, does more to stir the pot than to resolve the conflicts of account.

 

Sound familiar? It should. There’s another pair of competing legends in the making, both of which will incorporate preferred truths and discard inconvenient facts to reach the desired conclusions.

Most of those who decried police actions to evict the Occupy demonstrators and  wanted Ferguson, Missouri police officer Daren Wilson’s head on a platter for the killing of Michael Brown have already written the Oregon occupiers off as “terrorists” and pigeonholed Finicum’s death as “suicide by cop.”

Most of those who wanted the smelly hippies of Occupy swept from the streets and would cheerfully vote for Wilson for president if he was old enough to run, on the other hand, probably consider the Oregon occupiers heroes and Finicum a martyr.

I find myself in a strange position here. For once, I’m the moderate.

I don’t know exactly what happened on Canfield Drive in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, or along US 395 in rural Oregon on January 26, 2016. Neither, in all likelihood, do you. We weren’t there. All we can do is choose which glass to see those events through. Darkly.

I take that back. There’s another thing we can do. We can reaffirm the basic American principle that law enforcement personnel and other government employees aren’t special.

When a cop shoots someone under circumstances brought into question by credible evidence and/or testimony, that cop should be charged and tried just like you or I would be.

Culpability in Finicum’s death should be sorted out by a jury on the basis of reasonable doubt or proof of guilt beyond such doubt. The fact that his killer or killers wear badges and collect government paychecks is irrelevant to the matter.

Update: This column was revised the day after initial publication to reflect the release of FBI video of  Finicum’s death.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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