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By Carl M. Cannon - September 21, 2014
One of the catalysts for the rage and rioting in Ferguson, Mo., was the sight of that poor teenager’s body lying face down in the street hour after hour.
At 12:02 p.m. August 9, one of their officers shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown six times. By 12:05 p.m., a responding paramedic pronounced him dead. Yet his body was still there in the summer sun at 4 p.m., the sheet not quite long enough to cover his 6-foot-3-inch frame. Among the outraged onlookers in the Canfield Green apartment complex was his mother, distraught, and barricaded from her son’s body by police.
At least they checked the pulse of the young man to make sure he was dead, which is more than Fairfax County, Va., police did a year earlier when they gunned down John B. Geer in the doorway of his own home. Gravely wounded by the bullet fired into his chest, Geer closed the door as he collapsed and lay there alone, bleeding to death as the cops assembled their ubiquitous SWAT gear and military-style toys.
By the time these faint-hearted officers battered down the door with an armored tank, Geer was dead. His loved ones were present at the scene, too, including his father and his daughters. One of them, 13-year-old Morgan, yelled at the officers, “Don’t you hurt my daddy!”
The Ferguson shooting was viewed through a racially tinged prism, which is understandable in a predominately black town with a nearly all-white police force and where a white district attorney refuses to prosecute police for even the most egregious cases.
It was also understandable, after many nights of civil unrest, that President Obama would dispatch U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson, and that the Justice Department would launch an investigation into possible civil rights violations in Brown’s shooting.
But the nagging nightmare is that the Justice Department has a much bigger problem on its hands than the occasional trigger-happy racist cop. John Geer was not black. He was a 46-year-old employed white homeowner with no criminal record. Yet more than a year later, Virginia authorities won’t even tell his family the status of their investigation—or if there is one.
This is not an isolated case, but how many are out there no one knows. A federal database that can tell you how many auto thefts were committed two years ago in San Clemente, Calif. (61), how many unprovoked shark attacks took place in Florida last year (23), and how many law enforcement officers were killed on duty in 2012 (48) does not include the number of annual fatal police shootings in this country.
Attempts at ferreting out these numbers have been undertaken, usually by investigative journalists, and the numbers are bracing. In the wake of the Ferguson case, USA Today reported that 96 times each year—almost twice a week—white police officers have killed a black person. That estimate came from teasing out FBI data from 2005-2012. It is probably an undercount.
continued...
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ar..._official_cowardice_124041.html#ixzz3DylLY8KK
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
One of the catalysts for the rage and rioting in Ferguson, Mo., was the sight of that poor teenager’s body lying face down in the street hour after hour.
At 12:02 p.m. August 9, one of their officers shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown six times. By 12:05 p.m., a responding paramedic pronounced him dead. Yet his body was still there in the summer sun at 4 p.m., the sheet not quite long enough to cover his 6-foot-3-inch frame. Among the outraged onlookers in the Canfield Green apartment complex was his mother, distraught, and barricaded from her son’s body by police.
At least they checked the pulse of the young man to make sure he was dead, which is more than Fairfax County, Va., police did a year earlier when they gunned down John B. Geer in the doorway of his own home. Gravely wounded by the bullet fired into his chest, Geer closed the door as he collapsed and lay there alone, bleeding to death as the cops assembled their ubiquitous SWAT gear and military-style toys.
By the time these faint-hearted officers battered down the door with an armored tank, Geer was dead. His loved ones were present at the scene, too, including his father and his daughters. One of them, 13-year-old Morgan, yelled at the officers, “Don’t you hurt my daddy!”
The Ferguson shooting was viewed through a racially tinged prism, which is understandable in a predominately black town with a nearly all-white police force and where a white district attorney refuses to prosecute police for even the most egregious cases.
It was also understandable, after many nights of civil unrest, that President Obama would dispatch U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson, and that the Justice Department would launch an investigation into possible civil rights violations in Brown’s shooting.
But the nagging nightmare is that the Justice Department has a much bigger problem on its hands than the occasional trigger-happy racist cop. John Geer was not black. He was a 46-year-old employed white homeowner with no criminal record. Yet more than a year later, Virginia authorities won’t even tell his family the status of their investigation—or if there is one.
This is not an isolated case, but how many are out there no one knows. A federal database that can tell you how many auto thefts were committed two years ago in San Clemente, Calif. (61), how many unprovoked shark attacks took place in Florida last year (23), and how many law enforcement officers were killed on duty in 2012 (48) does not include the number of annual fatal police shootings in this country.
Attempts at ferreting out these numbers have been undertaken, usually by investigative journalists, and the numbers are bracing. In the wake of the Ferguson case, USA Today reported that 96 times each year—almost twice a week—white police officers have killed a black person. That estimate came from teasing out FBI data from 2005-2012. It is probably an undercount.
continued...
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ar..._official_cowardice_124041.html#ixzz3DylLY8KK
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
