Tag Archives: justine damond

Every Day, A Higher Level of Infuriation with the Justine Damond Case

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We should be able to agree that the entire police culture is on trial in Minneapolis these days, and not just Mohamed Noor. With every passing day of trial testimony the natural reaction — certainly from me — is greater and greater infuriation.

Few incidents put “the blue wall of silence” and the truly horrifying inadequacy of police hiring and training in starker relief than the killing of Justine Damond and the “professional response” by Minneapolis police in the minutes and months afterward.

As we’ve learned through the first weeks, the two cops immediately involved, Matthew Harrity and Noor, ignored police procedure about body cameras, as did virtually every other cop who arrived on the scene, turning them on and off as they saw fit. Likewise, we’ve learned that contrary to the original, long-standing police version of the event, the alley in which Damond was killed wasn’t pitch dark, but so well illuminated by street lighting that the next wave of arriving cops could plainly see her lying dead on the ground as well as the surrounding area.

Then there’s the “startling” slam on the police car that so terrified Noor he fired at the first shape he saw outside Harrity’s window. We now learn that the slam on the car was something that only churned up into the story days after the event, by which time the whole case was pretty much in lockdown by “the blue wall”, with Noor refusing to explain himself and other officers forced to give testimony by a grand jury.

The credibility of police in a civilized society is a pretty damned important matter, and here in Minneapolis, and all over the USA, that credibility continues to take a ferocious beating. Why? Because tech advances and social media are more and more able to transmit real-time evidence of actual police behavior. The taxpaying public can now see — fully, as in the case of Philando Castile, and intermittently in the Damond case — how more or less average cops go about their daily business. And, frankly, it’s terrifying.

When the Noor trial started it was estimated at a straight-up 50-50 call on his guilt. I doubt that has changed. Noor’s Somali ethnicity may play a role in this case that the Hispanic ethnicity of officer Jeronimo Yanez didn’t in the Castile case. But it’s likely that typical jury respect for anything with a badge will again be a powerful counter-balance to the appalling behavior of Harrity, Noor and so many other cops on the scene in quiet, leafy southwest Minneapolis that fateful night.

I mean, FFS, what goes through a trained cop’s mind when they can’t bring themselves to tell the arriving EMT crew what actually happened?

Clearly, a lot of rethinking of the basic cop code has to be done to relieve public concerns that too many of these people are poorly vetted, ill-trained, demonstrably terrified individuals playing out a bizarre kind of military adventure on city streets, with themselves as executioners routinely exempt from punishment.

What to do?

1:  Offer significantly better compensation to attract a much higher quality of police candidates. Give communities a true choice in the quality of people they’re (arming) and putting on the streets, rather than forcing cities to pretty much take (and keep) whoever walks in the door.

2: Vet out the most militaristic “Bulletproof Warrior” crowd, the people itching for the authority a badge and a gun gives them. Don’t try to adapt them to police procedure, simply red-line them at the get-go.

3: Never, ever, allow two newbie cops in the same car on the same beat. Neither Harrity or Noor had the emotional stability or experience to deal with Damond situation, and that’s with the reminder that they supposedly “feared for an ambush” in southwest [bleeping] Minneapolis, a neighborhood with one of the lowest violent crime rates in the country.

4: Multi-projectile police revolvers. Service weapons with two separate loads of ammunition. The default position being either rubber bullets or chemical darts. If cops are responding to a Hollywood-style shoot-out they can switch their weapons over to the real thing. (Harrity and Noor had a military-style rifle in their car.) In the meantime, given the horrifying tally of citizens executed by inexperienced cops “fearing for their lives”, a rubber bullet fired in terror at a nice lady in her pajamas would have a much different ending than … her being dead on the spot.

5: A fresh re-writing of the city’s police standards and legal consequences. As in:

a:  fail to turn your body camera on when responding to a possible crime — you’re fired.

b:  fail to fully describe the events of a shooting to arriving back-up, EMT and supervisors — you’re fired.

c: “decline” to give any statement or testimony to police or state investigators after a police-involved shooting — you’re fired. Likewise, counsel an officer involved in a shooting incident not to speak to investigators — you’re fired.

In a fair world, where as Randy Newman said, “It’s money that matters”, a massive, eight-figure pay-out to the Damond family for the actions of Noor and the Minneapolis police might get the gears turning on some of these reforms.

Not that I’m betting on it.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s Time for an All-Female Police Force

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It’s no surprise that “What to do about the police” has become a the hottest topic in the current Minneapolis mayoral race. What is surprising, and as dismaying as it has always been, is the still pervasive thinking that police brutality or to speak more broadly, “the police culture” will be revolutionized by changes that are in no way revolutionary.

There’s an old joke in Europe about the difference between Heaven and Hell. It goes like this:

HEAVEN is a place where the British are the police, the Germans are the mechanics, the French are the cooks, the Italians are the lovers, and it’s all run by the Swiss.

HELL is a place where the British are the cooks, the Germans are the police, the French are the mechanics, the Swiss are the lovers, and it’s all run by the Italians!

The line about the Germans is worth injecting into the conversation about the Twin Cities/America’s police culture, where conventional wisdom continues to turn on the belief that conventional nostrums, properly tweaked, will eventually, some day, some how, produce the result we all want. Never mind that “all” of us hold wildly opposing ideas of what is wrong and what needs fixing.

Following the call-and-response on various Facebook pages or in newspaper comments section is never a good way to start or end your day. In the aftermath of the killing of Justine Damond … by a panicked rookie cop in one of the metro area’s safest neighborhoods … there is a clear Trump base-like percentage of people adamant that the only reasonable response to a terrified rookie cop gunning down a woman in her pajamas is  … you guessed it, a freer license for cops. A less-fettered license to “do their jobs” to stop the overwhelming criminal horror being produced by “non traditional” interlopers, mainly Muslims.

While the majority of us express far (far) more educated, informed and enlightened thinking about “what to do about the police”, the gamut of most-discussed solutions runs from “greater outreach to communities of color” to different “prevention strategies” and so on … and on … pretty much re-repeating every idea ever tried before and hoping this time for a different, better result.

To get all realpolitik about it, it is time for the very fundamental question of whether men, especially young, aggressive males should be policing American neighborhoods to be put on the table for non-facetious discussion. Studies have repeatedly shown that men, young and inexperienced men in particular, enforce the law in a substantially more aggressive, physical and violent manner than their female colleagues.

Put another way, the propensity to physical assertions of authority and dominance is genetic, biological and a fact of human existence.

I’ve been saying for a while now that one of the key red flags for any police applicant should be how badly they want to be a cop. Applying the Hell-is-a-German-police force idea, (non-facetiously), it is a question of the depth of the applicant’s authoritarian psychology that should worry applicant screeners.

The disqualifying issue is connected to how police work has been represented in the press and popular culture for centuries now. Namely as a largely militaristic profession, with unambiguous military-style male authority figures dictating orders and an unambiguous authority lent to every (predominantly male) who can pass a community college-type course and put on a badge. With the badge and gun comes an alpha status unavailable or at least far more ambiguous in most other jobs. This is heroic imaging for many boys.

As in Germany and everywhere else in recorded human society, there are people who can handle this authority-given-by-authority with self-discipline. But in the United States, where cops are under stress from an out-of-control gun culture, there is a much too high a percentage who can not, and the consequences for the regular screw ups of that faction are not tolerable.

Flushing every male out of the entire Minneapolis police force and replacing them with women is a radical idea worth considering. The women may be as young and as experienced as the men they replace, but genetically and culturally women are far, far more likely to use (profanity free) verbal persuasion than a fist to the head or a bullet to the stomach to de-escalate situations.  (What’s the cost of sucking up the men’s pensions compared to the regular pay-outs for excessive force and the cratering community confidence … before the Damond killing?)

Troglodytes like union chief Bob Kroll and the Chicken Little Trump-base percentage living in terror of incipient Sharia Law, convinced the only solution to a rampant minority-driven crime wave is to double down on a military police force (the “Full German” response)  should be treated like the fools they are. Serious changes have to be made and the only thing the Kroll-Trump crowd is serious about is their paranoia.

Violent crime rates have been falling in the majority of American cities for well over a generation, (and here’s another), (and another), and as far as daily police work goes, revenue-creation via citation writing is nearly as important to cities as breaking up domestic disputes and reporting stolen cars. Point being, we don’t need the extra height, weight and muscle of an adrenalized 28 year-old male wearing his first badge and clutching his service revolver in his lap as he patrols … friggin’ southwest Minneapolis … to achieve enforcement results equal to what we’ve got now.

It’s impossible to imagine how the women (the British in the old joke about Europe) could do any worse.

The boys could then have more time to concentrate on getting their Italian act together.

 

 

 

 

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.