Tag: crime

The Firing of Timothy Loehmann

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

tamir

Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who killed Tamir Rice in 2014, has been fired. But he was not fired for killing Tamir Rice. Cleveland.com has the story:

Timothy Loehmann, the rookie police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, was fired Tuesday.

His partner, Frank Garmback, who pulled his cruiser within feet of the young boy, was suspended for 10 days without pay.

Loehmann was fired not for shooting Tamir, but for lying on his application with the Cleveland police department. He was also in his probationary period as a Cleveland officer giving the department more flexibility in letting him go, Cleveland Public Safety Director Michael McGrath said…

A review committee comprised of city officials that took the place of a normal internal affairs investigation found that neither officer violated any police policies.

The panel, called the Critical Incident Response Committee, concluded that neither Garmback nor Loehmann violated any police policies at the time of the incident.

This case has been a troublesome one for all the white people who desperately want to appear reasonable and empathetic but also want to continue to support the systemic violence and racism of American policing. It was the kind of bad shooting that made even police supporters say, “Ok, yeah, that wasn’t right.” But then their next move was to claim that it was an isolated incident and Loehmann was one of those famous bad apples we hear so much about.

If the case is not indicative of systemic problems in American policing, then there must be an easy explanation for these questions:

Why didn’t Loehmann face a trial?

Why wasn’t Loehmann fired for the shooting?

Why didn’t the shooting violate police department procedures?

We can’t bring Tamir back, but we can change what comes next. We can elect good prosecutors. McGinty, the cowardly prosecutor in Cleveland, lost his reelection bid. In Philadelphia we just elected a reformist District Attorney who opposes police brutality and mass incarceration. We also need to pressure Democrats at the local level. This is a bipartisan problem, and body cameras are not a cure-all. We need everything from increased citizen oversight and control of police to better police training and more humane policies (astonishingly, deescalation is still a novel tactic in many police departments).

And since this is a blog about evangelicalism and I am a white evangelical, I’ll conclude with a note for us. We can do more to make our fellow Christians squirm. The selfishness and racism of white evangelicals is a major contributor to racial injustice in the United States. Let those status-quo supporting Christians know that we’re not asking them to debate a political point with us. We’re asking them to repent of their sin.

Department of Injustice

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

sessionsWhile the daily news cycle features a deluge of political controversies, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is quietly setting out to implement the racist agenda he has advocated throughout his career. Adam Serwer gets us up to speed:

On March 31, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was cynically sold by his defenders as a champion of civil rights, ordered a review of the Justice Department’s approach to policing, asserting that “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.” During his confirmation hearing, Sessions said federal investigations of police departments were bad for “morale,” and waved away the idea that police abuses could be systemic, rather than the actions of a few bad apples.

As attorney general, Sessions said he read a summary, but not the full Ferguson report, which found that “95% of Manner of Walking charges; 94% of all Fail to Comply charges; 92% of all Resisting Arrest charges; 92% of all Peace Disturbance charges; and 89% of all Failure to Obey charges” were filed against black residents. But on the basis of the summary alone, Sessions concluded that the report was “pretty anecdotal” and “not scientifically based.”

The refusal to believe police abuse could be systemic rather than individual is, in the aftermath of all the data collected by the very agency Sessions now leads, a form of denial. Nor can Sessions’s decision be justified by the familiar excuse that police reforms lead to higher crime rates—the notion that “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” is a normative standard that would eschew federal oversight of local police regardless of the crime rate or the gravity of any abuse that might occur.

Sessions is an advocate of an old false choice: some Americans have to choose between safety and the protections of the Constitution. You can have one or the other, but not both. Systemic police brutality is merely the price black neighborhoods have to pay for safety.

Serwer continues:

Sessions’s memo reads as an announcement that it is no longer the business of the federal government if American citizens’ rights are violated by those sworn to protect them and empowered with lethal force to do so. When local governments violate the basic constitutional rights of citizens, Americans are supposed to be able to look to the federal government to protect those rights. Sessions has made clear that when it comes to police abuses, they’re now on their own. This is the principle at the heart of “law and order” rhetoric: The authorities themselves are bound by neither.

Sessions says American policing doesn’t have systemic problems. This is the language of the uninformed, but Sessions can’t plead ignorance. In his case, it’s the language of cowardice, a man unwilling to admit that he supports racism.

The Absurd Violence of American Policing

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/03/13/us/13noknock-images-slide-J9IC/13noknock-images-slide-J9IC-slide-v3.jpg
The aftermath of a no-knock raid in Cornelia, Georgia.

The New York Times today has a great investigation of the dangerous “no-knock” SWAT raids that occur all over the country. The article begins like this:

CORNELIA, Ga. — This town on the edge of the Appalachians has fewer than 5,000 residents, but the SWAT team was outfitted for war.

At 2:15 a.m. on a moonless night in May 2014, 10 officers rolled up a driveway in an armored Humvee, three of them poised to leap off the running boards. They carried Colt submachine guns, light-mounted AR-15 rifles and Glock .40-caliber sidearms. Many wore green body armor and Kevlar helmets. They had a door-breaching shotgun, a battering ram, sledgehammers, Halligan bars for smashing windows, a ballistic shield and a potent flash-bang grenade.

The target was a single-story ranch-style house about 50 yards off Lakeview Heights Circle. Not even four hours earlier, three informants had bought $50 worth of methamphetamine in the front yard. That was enough to persuade the county’s chief magistrate to approve a no-knock search warrant authorizing the SWAT operators to storm the house without warning.

The point man on the entry team found the side door locked, and nodded to Deputy Jason Stribling, who took two swings with the metal battering ram. As the door splintered near the deadbolt, he yelled, “Sheriff’s department, search warrant!” Another deputy, Charles Long, had already pulled the pin on the flash-bang. He placed his left hand on Deputy Stribling’s back for stability, peered quickly into the dark and tossed the armed explosive about three feet inside the door.

It landed in a portable playpen.

It’s a long piece but worth the read. Policing is the most pervasive and intimate way in which Americans face real oppression at the hands of their government. But because this oppression is directed disproportionally at people of color and the poor, people who claim to be skeptical of government power are usually happy to support this kind of government overreach.

How can we stop these immoral and counterproductive uses of state violence? Attention to the issue has definitely waned as the 2016 campaign and now the Trump presidency have sucked all the oxygen out of the room. We need to continue to draw attention to police misconduct and promote the goals of Black Lives Matter. One of the reasons Black Lives Matter is such a noble movement is that its solutions would both improve the lives of people affected by systemic racism and make police officers safer. But too many people refuse to see how violent policing produces toxic feedback loops of distrust and danger for police and residents alike. Indeed, in our gun-obsessed culture, many Americans seem to think safety is achieved through violence. God help us.