Tag Archives: Jeronimo Yanez

The Public Deserves All Available Information in the Justine Damond Shooting … Now.

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While no more outrageous and appalling than the police killing of Philando Castile and the nearly 600 others (many unarmed minorities) gunned down by American law enforcement officers this year alone, my reaction shifted slightly from the moment I first heard that two young Minneapolis cops were involved in the death of a 40 year-old white woman in her pajamas.

Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted in Castile’s death despite clear evidence he panicked, purely and simply, at a seat-belted black man with a woman and child in the car. So my reaction to Saturday’s night’s events was that yet again the city and the shaky reputation of the police will suffer as a result of a very poorly vetted and trained officer sent out on the streets with a license not just to enforce the law but to act as summary executioner should he feel “a threat to his life.”

The twist in this incident that places the responsibility on a Somali cop, a two-year veteran of the force, sets the sadly normal racial dynamic askew. As of today, Tuesday, the public — which is vast considering the international attention the story has received — is waiting for even the most basic explanation from city officials.

The delay in explaining what happened, if not why, is inexcusable. There are only two witnesses, Officer Mohammed Noor and his partner, Matthew Harrity. Where is their version of the event? We’re told from early reports that Harrity was “stunned” by the gunfire and that Noor has issued his condolences to the family of the dead woman, Justine Damond.

We’re told Damond, who made the 911 call had run out to speak to the cops and was in some kind of conversation with Harrity, the driver, when Noor shot her. For me, the “conversation” part is critical. If she said anything to Harrity it should have been obvious she was not the suspected attacker, which suggests Noor shot her for some reason other than panicked fear, as in Yanez’ case.

If there is “some other reason” this thing is going to get very, very weird.

My assumption is that there was no actual conversation between Damond and Harrity, other than perhaps Damond running out from the darkness into the alley trying to get their attention … at which point Noor panicked and began shooting out the patrol car across his partner’s face.

The fact that Damond was killed by a shot to the abdomen suggests she was still several feet from Harrity’s side window when Noor opened fire. Up against the door in “conversation” with Harrity she would have been struck in the chest or face.

The point being, this element of the incident can and should be explained now, not days and weeks from now. Even if Harrity and Noor are telling conflicting stories, an event this high-profile involving — to understate the obvious — critical public employees, requires extraordinary expeditiousness and transparency.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario that dampens down the already burgeoning racist demonizing of the on-line alt-right. That disease will spread even if there isn’t a whiff of affirmative action, racial quotas or special “outreach” in Noor’s hiring. The alt-right crowd isn’t exactly in the facts game, as we know.

Getting expeditious with bureaucratic formalities may not spare the local Somali community a fresh round of venom from racists, but it will provide responsible citizens a foundation of fact upon which to assess the hows of a cop who shoots a pajama-clad woman in one of the safest, quietest neighborhoods of the city.

 

Justice for Castile v. the Authoritarian Juror

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The charge, “So we have reached a point where it’s been proven a cop can do anything he wants when stopping or confronting a black person?” is entirely valid and worth broad discussion in the wake of the “not guilty” verdict in the Philando Castile case.

But leaving police hiring criteria and training aside for minute, what is it about juries, supposedly a random sampling of every day Americans that leads them to reject a seemingly cut and dry situation like this one, where a nervous young cop panics and kills a man who by the weight of 99% of available evidence was being fully compliant?

The questions I think ought to be rolled more heavily into the mix of topics related to the Jeronimo Yanez verdict and (the rare) other cases where cops are brought to trial, are these:

1: A shrewd defense attorney like Earl Gray, (he of the “it shouldn’t even have been charged” quote), has to have developed a well-tuned sense for jurors with an authoritarian mindset. “Authoritarian” is often confused as solely the attitude of the dominating personality, the one demanding or manipulating others to his will. But in jury selection the “authoritarian” aspect refers to those on the receiving end, people who have been acculturated to give uncritical respect to any authority figure, be they parents, teachers, government leaders or cops. When you’re raised to defer to the judgment of such people — people you regard as superiors, and with bona fides well beyond you’re own — it becomes an enormous leap of intellectual courage as a juror to see any such person being in critical error, much less guilty of felony behavior.

2: Added to that is the relative ease — or so it seems to me — with which defense attorneys are able to gum up what objective critical faculties remain in average jurors with a kind of absolutist concept of “reasonable doubt”. In this case “reasonable doubt” was laid heavily upon jurors trying to decide whether Yanez actually did see a gun — i.e. Castile going for the weapon he told Yanez he had on him. The end result of their thinking being that since there was “reasonable doubt” about whether Castile was not going for his gun, authoritarian-minded jurors gave the authority-figure the benefit of the doubt and voted for acquittal … because, you know, they were in “reasonable doubt” about what actually happened.

i don’t know what the solutions to these issues are.

Perhaps, in the latter, more articulate jury instructions from the presiding judge on what “reasonable doubt” means and doesn’t mean

But on the former, the prevalence of the powerful authoritarian impulse built into a society (I would argue human nature) trained by family, institutions and culture to accept the judgment of anyone in a position of authority, I suspect we have a monumental problem for every prosecutor who follows Ramsey County Attorney John Choi’s path and takes the case of a panicky cop before a jury of peers.

 

Before the Jeronimo Yanez Verdict

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Not being what you’d call a gambling man, (there was that slot machine in Beatty, Nevada years back) I’ve never put the chances of Jeronimo Yanez’ conviction in his killing of Philando Castile any higher than 15%. I hope I’m proven wrong, but history is on my side as we await the verdict. And this is an actual jury, not one of those sealed off police review boards where the chances of the finger of guilt would drop into the low single digits.

Before the jury returns I just want to return to a couple facets of this more or less routine run of traumatic incidents of police playing judge jury and executioner with black motorists and guys selling CDs on the street corner..

1: Jeronimo Yanez should never have been a cop. No one operating at the level of fear and panic he demonstrated should be wearing a badge, much less toting around a loaded gun with a license to kill. I’m told he’s a sweet guy. But that isn’t the point. He clearly didn’t have the emotional stability to be in the job he was in. Maybe at a desk for a non-profit. But not a cop. And for that I blame his employers as much as him.

Just because someone wants to be a cop is no reason to hire him. In fact, given the militaristic-to-racist attitudes of too many of these guys (and the woman in Oklahoma), wanting (badly) to be a cop should be a red flag for anyone sorting through applications. Moreover, are city police forces so desperate for bodies to fill uniforms that they can’t adequately vet someone like Yanez for aptitude and judgment? Put another way, if they took Yanez, who did they turn down? This guy?

After that we move on to training, where as we’ve learned, there is plenty of focus on gunplay and combat-style tactics — they call it “Bulletproof Warrior” for chrissakes — and not so much on how you go about dialing down the temperature of a situation.

Finally, on this facet, there’s the demand put on “emotionally vulnerable” young cops like Yanez to produce revenue for cash-strapped municipalities, largely by repeatedly ticketing low income minorities for nuisance violations. You don’t want to know how beyond-crazy ballistic I would have been after the second ticket from some twitchy cop, and Castile was stopped something like 44 times.

But as we all know the Jeronimo Yanez law enforcers of the world aren’t going to be hassling middle-aged and older white folks in clean new cars, even if they have a broken tail light.

2: And apparently I’m the only person on the planet who is obsessed with this, but why, considering all the pain and suffering to victims, families, police department reputations, city budgets and on and on hasn’t anyone (else) suggested issuing police a kind of dial-barreled service revolver, with a default setting firing rubber bullets or chemical darts? (When city cops get into the exceedingly rare raging, Hollywood-style gun battle, they could simply re-set the thing to fire its load of live ammo.)

Had Yanez freaked at the word “gun”, whipped out his and starting pumping rubber bullets into Castile’s chest, (being careful as he says not to scare the toddler in the back seat), Castile would have been pretty damn sore for a week or so, but he’d be alive, Yanez wouldn’t be on trial, the cops wouldn’t be fending of the now standard and very hard to dispute accusations of racism, the cities involved would be several thousands of dollars less in the red and Castile would be alive to pay another few hundred dollars a year in expired tab fines, or whatever the next cop could get him for. (I’m not sure what St. Anthony Park’s basic fine is for “Driving While Black”.)

This is good: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines/

As far as I can tell my dual-barrel revolver idea has garnered exactly zero interest anywhere in the country, probably because no politician could stand up to Second Amendment fanatics shrieking about, “Disarming the cops!”.

One other facet worth giving some thought to are statistics dug up by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones on the disproportionate number of these cop v. minority killings that involve peace officers who are either young or very new to the job.