<Update 6/17 8PM -The news of today paints a much less flattering picture of the officers. Officer Rolfe (no word if Officer Earl knew him) is up on felony murder charges and could get the death penalty. Kicking Brooks after he was unconscious shows quite a bit of malice. Manslaughter might be the starting point of deliberations rather than the end as I wrote earlier.>
I've been on a blog hiatus for a bit, so I haven't had a chance to wade into the George Floyd death. In that case, the manslaughter/murder charge seems valid given the story and multiple non-police witnesses. That was flat out evil.
I've been surprised by the depth of anger on this case, but it's legit outrage, probably magnified by COVID, which ravaged the black (I'm warming to the idea of upper-casing Black, but I'm lower-case for now) community. COVID has left all of us a bit edgy after having been in lockdown mode for a couple of month; that frustration likely amped up the outrage. There are a lot of things that need to be done to get cops a bit less trigger happy, more humane treatment of folks in custody, to avoid Driving While Black pullovers and (the hardest of all) to get out of the habit of assuming black youths are trouble on the half-shell.
Some of those can be done on a policy basis, instructing police officers what to do and what not to do and enforcing it, but others will be harder to do, especially when Trump's base will reflexively back police and even more reflexively look down their noses at black activists.
The case of Rayshard Brooks will put that reflexivity to the test. Mr. Brooks was passed out in a Wendys drive-through, blew a positive breathalizer test, grabbed a cop's Taser and pointed it at him, and was killed by said cop. Cop was white, Brooks was black.
Is a guy with a Taser armed? It's not a lethal weapon (although it can induce a heart attack at times) but it would be enough to give a police officer pause? What's the normal protocol for dealing with an adversary with a Taser? My untrained mind would think that the cop could picture getting paralyzed by the Taser, then having the gun nabbed by your adversary and getting it used on yourself.
That's going to mean that charges against the officer are going to be hard to make stick. It looks close enough to self-defense such that a DA might not opt to press charges, like in the Ferguson case. Reasonable doubt out the wazoo, it seems.
HUD secretary Ben Carson chimed in this morning-
"I think this is a situation that is not clear-cut, like the callous murder that occurred in Minnesota, and it really requires some heads of people who actually know what should be done under these circumstances to make judgments," Carson said on "Fox News Sunday," referring to the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis.
This could get ugly. In London, we've seen some pro-racism protesters confront anti-racism counterparts, something that we've not see in the US that much. However, we have quite a few folks on the right that are pro-police but not racist per se.
Somehow I missed seeing the Thin Blue Line flag previously. It sends a message "I support the police." In this current climate, supporting the police can have the undertone of not supporting the Floyd and Brooks protesters. While few folks looked to defend the Floyd killer, Brooks' antagonist might get quite a bit of support, especially from Fox Nation folks.
That could lead to some unsavory street theater, if not street combat, if pro-police right-wing goons look to lock horns with some of their BLM counterparts.
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