Joseph Clifford :
Anyone who is familiar with grand jury procedure knows full well, if a prosecutor wants an indictment he will get it, because in the grand jury the prosecutor is the only side to make a presentation. It is a one sided show with no defense to challenge anything that is said or presented. Any prosecutor, no matter how incompetent, can get an indictment if he wants one. To support this well-known contention consider the following. In 162,500 cases prosecuted by U.S. attorneys from 2009 to 2010, grand juries voted not to return an indictment in only 11, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics-equivalent to one in 14,759 cases, or 0.0068 percent. A University law professor said: “If the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn’t get one, something has gone horribly wrong.”
In the Michael Brown grand jury, one wonders if the prosecutor brought out the fact that Officer Wilson fired 12 shots. Not one, not two, but twelve. There is no justification for firing 12 shots when one will do. Seven shots hit Michael Brown, 2 in the head. Either the police are using totally excessive weaponry, or Officer Wilson overreacted, or both. Experts are now challenging some of Officer Wilson’s statements and procedures since testimony has been released, but in the grand jury there is no way to cross examine the officer. Grand juries are a farce and any lawyer knows it.
The outrage of the black community is more than justified because mainstream media hides the extent of the problem. Almost 500 black men were shot down in the streets by police around the country. The death rate in the streets of this country for blacks being shot by police is higher than the death rate for US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same period, so one could easily presume there is a war on black males by the police in this country. Consider the following:
A Utah man was killed by police after calling a suicide Hotline.
In a SWAT raid, police drooped a “flash grenade” into a baby’s crib seriously burning and wounding the baby.
After calling 911 to get help for a 26 year old male who had locked himself in a bathroom and threatened to kill himself, the SWAT team showed up, knocked down the door, and shot the man in the head 11 times.
In New Mexico, a SWAT, team shot and killed a homeless man for “illegally” camping in a remote area.
22 Year Old With Down Syndrome was severely beaten by police For “Bulge In Pants”, which was his colostomy bag.
A man accidentally triggered his medical alert at 5:00 a.m. while in bed. Police showed up, broke down the door, and killed him, after assurances by relatives and alarm company that the man was ok.
It is not only at the state and local level that over armed police overreact with death resulting with immunity. In the past 20 years the FBI has not found any wrongdoing in over 150 FBI shootings. Even when an innocent man who was the wrong man, was shot in the face and the FBI awarded the victim 1.3 million dollars, the shooting was officially justified by the FBI.
Police are virtually unaccountable for murder, and this has occurred for a number of reasons.
Court rulings in the past 20 years insure that police are held to a different standard than citizens. All a police officer has to do is claim he felt his life threatened, and almost every shooting will be found to be a “good” shooting; a defense citizens are not entitled to. Because of the nature of police work, courts have ruled it is not proper to second guess their spit decisions, which helps with their immunity. We have over armed police with military style weapons and tactics, and it is human nature, if you dress a person up like a soldier, and give him the weapons of war, he will use them.
We have developed a new tradition of worshipping the military, and police ride that coattail. Just as the military can do no wrong, and is rarely found guilty of torture, murder, massacre, killing innocent women and children, so too are police treated by society. We have foolishly put the military on a pedestal, and allow police to have their place on that pedestal. The writers of the constitution would be absolutely horrified at the honor and tribute that citizens render the military, for the founders feared the military and fought long and hard in the constitutional convention to prevent a strong military.
The founding fathers considered it a necessary evil, but it had to be contained at all costs. Certainly not to be worshipped as it is today, but to be feared and limited.
We recruit the wrong kind of individuals to do police work. “Peace” officers should have tremendous people skills and be highly trained in passive peace keeping techniques. Instead we give recruits extra credit for having served in the military, which, like it or not has one main job, i.e. to kill people.
Angry blacks have a reason to be angry. They are fair game and can be shot almost daily by police with impunity. If Michael Brown had been killed in a war, the shooter would have been guilty of a “war crime”, for in war it is illegal to kill someone who has surrendered. Not in black American neighborhoods. There is no “justice” for black people, the number of black deaths by police, the rate of black incarceration, and the rate blacks receive the death penalty, scream loudly, that either we have a very racist society or we have a broken system, or both.
(Joseph Clifford lives in Rhode island and has written a regular column for an online newspaper and has contributed many articles to various RI newspapers. His articles deal almost exclusively with American Foreign policy.)
