When Michael Brown’s death came to light in the media, I did not want to write about it. I was very upset about the Trayvon Martin case, and wrote several posts on Facebook, which received a light smattering of responses. But when Eric Garner died in such a similar circumstance, and both of the cases have been thrown out by grand juries, I feel that I must speak up.
The cases of Brown and Garner (or non-cases, as it turns out) are tragic replays of the Trayvon Martin case, with one big difference: in these two cases, grand juries have decided that the policemen responsible for ending these young men’s lives did not even need to stand trial. In effect, the grand juries have held the trials already, and acquitted the responsible (or irresponsible) parties.
Some disturbing facts about Brown’s death: 1) Brown was unarmed. 2) Officer Darren Wilson’s excuse for not using a tazer was that the department only owned one of them, and he did not feel comfortable using it. He offered no excuse for not using a billy club. 3) Wilson killed Brown with twelve bullets. It seems clear that Wilson was both poorly trained and terrified. He said that he was intimidated by Brown’s size. Brown was six foot five, and Wilson six foot four. Even if Brown was charging Wilson (the only one to do it, as it turned out), he surely could have been immobilized by fewer than twelve bullets, in non-lethal places.
Garner’s death is in some ways more bizarre. Again there is evidence of poor training. Instead of compressing the victim’s carotid arteries, which would have led to a loss of consciousness and presumably ended the encounter in a non-lethal way, Officer Daniel Pantaleo compressed Garner’s trachea, leading to airway obstruction, hypoxia, and death.
Both deaths were unintentional and unpremeditated. Does the term “manslaughter” come to mind? For some ungodly reason the grand jurors did not want that possibility to ever reach the floor of a courtroom.
Q: Are black males an endangered species?
A: No, because endangered species are protected by the law.
Let’s see if the grand jury in the case of 12 year-old Tamir Rice will do any better…
Thanks for reading.
edwardtkoh 
Anyone who’s seen even one episode of “Law and Order” knows that relationship between prosecutors & cops is a very tight one; as it should be since they’re basically on the same team. That said, the notion that a prosecutor can, without bias, investigate a member of his own team, seems fatally flawed to me. And so it was as well, I believe, in Ferguson & Staten Island. Special prosecutors need to be utilized in these instances to avoid the appearance, whether real or imagined, of impropriety. As for the policing in these two cases, it bordered on the pathetic if not completely incompetent. Policeman are supposed to de-escalate tense situations, not inflame them, as the cell phone video shows they did in the Garner case. The facts in the Michael Brown case are murkier, given the variance between the physical evidence, and the varying “eyewitness” accounts. One thing is certain though in this case…officer Wilson twice fired his weapon multiple times in succession. Rather than pausing between shots to assess his effectiveness after his first fusillade, he instead emptied his magazine in his second volley of fire. To me this speaks to either one of two possibilities in my estimation:
1. Darren Wilson feared for his own life from a wounded and unarmed man and thus was in my estimation pretty cowardly in gunning him down with his 2nd series of shots. Doesn’t every cop also have pepper spray and a baton at their disposal? Or…
2. He is a racist, and his fear of a wounded and unarmed Michael Brown was born of that sad fact.
Thanks, Paul. I agree with every one of your points.