March 21, 2012

Trayvon Martin, RIP

The fatal shooting of unarmed Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida named George Zimmerman is a reminder that way too many people get shot in America for screwed-up reasons or for no particular reason other than adrenaline and testosterone. I don't know what happened in this particular case, but it reminds me of a local case I made myself familiar with that featured a lot of instant decisionmaking that turned out bad. 

A few years ago, I noticed a single paragraph in the local news blotter about a fatal shooting of a teenager in a local parking lot by a multi-departmental law enforcement task force of plain clothes officers who were "debriefing" after a drug raid at 9:30 on a Thursday evening. The police spokesman implied that the parking lot was a notorious drug trade area, and asserted that the dead young man had tried to run over the plainclothesmen while they were brawling with another man they had accosted for peering into parked cars. 

Wait a minute, I thought, that's dubious-sounding. First, I was peeved at the cop spokesman for demeaning local property values by claiming that everybody knows this parking lot is a drug mart. No, it's a nice parking lot with excellent lighting, a private security guard driving around in a golf cart, a constant flow of cars and respectable pedestrians at all hours, especially on a Thursday evening because the lot serves some fairly fashionable restaurants and bars. I've walked through that parking lot maybe a thousand times in my life. I've never seen any criminal activity there, whether drug dealing or breaking into cars, just bad driving. I had never once felt in any danger in that lot from criminals, but I've almost been run over more than a few times there by drivers zooming for the rare open parking space. Fortunately, when that happened, I wasn't packing any serious heat, so none of the bad drivers wound up dead. 

The more I looked into the official story, the less plausible it sounded. The victim / mad dog would-be vehicular murderer was a kid who had just graduated from high school, where he played in the string section in the school orchestra. His friends set up a Facebook page in memoriam and it was full of testimonies to his gentleness of his character from his many friends in orchestra and band, plus his friends' parents, and his teachers. There were zero gang-type testimonials saluting a fallen comrade, as you'll so often read in the comments to the LA Times homicide database.

My wife and I started playing amateur detective, both on the Internet and in person. I emailed the lawyer that the mother had hired to tell him that as a long time resident the official story sounded fishy to me, and gave him leads to look into. I didn't like the idea that I or my family might get shot by cops in the local parking lot with no open investigation or discussion in the press.

Exactly a week after the killing, my wife and I walked down to the parking lot to see what it looked like on a Thursday at 9:30 pm: what I recalled or what the police spokesman said. It looked like a place that cops would choose to debrief after getting pumped up in a drug raid, not because they could be looking for more criminals while they debrief, but because there are a few nice-looking would-be starlets around at that hour to ogle. (In this neighborhood, however, most of them are married.)

While my wife and I were standing in the parking lot, we noticed another middle-aged couple standing in the middle of the parking lot looking around in bewilderment and grief. "Those are the parents, I bet." And they were. They had come to talk to people who worked there at that hour, in hopes of finding out more about what had happened to their child. There were no video cameras recording the parking lot, in part because it's such a low crime area that there is little need for surveillance video. The police had not yet let the parents' lawyer talk to the one certain eyewitness, the man whom the out-of-uniform cops had attacked for looking into car windows.

The poor mother told us the cops hadn't notified her of her son's death for 12 hours. (That would have given them lots of time to get their stories straight, sober up, or whatever.) A week later, nobody had yet released the names of the shooters to her. We did our best to console the parents, and to tell them that as local residents who didn't have a dog in this fight, just a sense that some kind of injustice was going down, we thought they should press their investigation and seriously consider a lawsuit. 

Over time, more facts turned up that I won't go into here, including the only eyewitness, whose story made the cops look bad, but he had some credibility problems of his own. I don't know exactly what happened during the last few seconds of the kid's life, but it sounds like there was a good chance that various kinds of cops closed ranks for a whitewash.

A long time later, the D.A. issued a report exonerating the shooters, and then the mother filed a $10,000,000 wrongful death lawsuit, which hasn't yet been resolved. A year ago, my wife and son marched in a memorial demonstration to remember the kid and to call for a fair civil trial.

I'm keeping this story vague for a variety of reasons, such as not wanting to be tied to annoying about five different law-enforcement agencies. At one point I spent about a half-hour on the phone with an LAPD detective because neither of the shooters was LAPD. I pointed out that as a taxpayer for the LAPD, I wasn't crazy about other agencies "debriefing" on LAPD turf. But he didn't buy my rather blatant attempt at driving a wedge into the general cop fraternity, and got a little hot under the collar. Also, I don't want my quite peripheral participation to be a distraction in the upcoming civil trial of the mom's wrongful death suit. So, just a warning: if you uncover the name of the victim, I won't approve a comment linking to it. I don't mind you looking, but I want to keep the story anonymous for now.

Let's get back to Trayvon Martin for a moment and the question of race. Kevin Drum asserts in Mother Jones that it's a story of a ""black kid in Florida who got shot by a white..." and complains Fox News isn't giving this case wall to wall coverage, unlike less racist networks, because it was "black kid in Florida who got shot by a white..."

Now, in the case I investigated, I wasn't particularly sure from the unusual last name and his picture whether the victim was Anglo (in the L.A. sense of non-Hispanic white) or Hispanic. He was a dark-haired, dark-eyed kid who could have been Anglo white or light-skinned Hispanic. After meeting the mother, I figure he was Anglo. I only today found out the names of the two officers who shot him (the law enforcement agencies kept that covered up for a long time, perhaps in fear that the other members of the victim's string section in the orchestra might try to extract revenge upon them by, I don't know, playing out of tune under their windows). I'm guessing both shooters are whites.

Compared to Trayvon Martin, this shooting got very little initial coverage in the local press and zip in the national press. On the other hand, the kid's classmates from his mostly middle-class high school organized online in a variety of fairly effective ways and kept the story alive so it has kept popping up in the press, although never with a big splash. Online commenters kept prodding the L.A. Times and L.A. Weekly to look into the case more, which they've done in bits and pieces as events unfolded, but never making a big story out of it. You can follow the unfolding of the story with Google but you likely would never have noticed it if you were just a casual reader of the local news. I've never heard of any controversy over the case making the local TV news.

Basically, news organizations are quite dependent upon the criminal justice system to feed them the facts of crime stories, and when the cops want a story to get underplayed, they just keep the flow of facts to the bare minimum.

There has been no national interest in my local story whatsoever, and no outside organizations have taken an interest, presumably because of the lack of a racial angle.

On the other hand, the amount of self-organizing citizen activism has been above average. One black commenter on the web said something like this to the victims' friends, neighbors, and teachers, "Wow, you white people just won't let this go when one of your own gets shot by the cops. If this had happened in the 'hood, it would have been forgotten by now."

White people don't have anybody to stand up for them qua white people, but they are also pretty good at standing up for themselves.

The Trayvon Martin case sounds a lot like this fiasco, although the shooter, being an amateur neighborhood watch pseudo-cop has actually appeared to have gotten less protection in some ways than the professional cops in my local case, whose very names we couldn't learn for a long, long time.

The dead youth in Florida being black, the story fits the eternal hunt for Tom Wolfe's Great White Defendant, at least until you get a look at the shooter. The shooter's father calls his son Hispanic, and, indeed, he looks a little like the guy who don't need no steenking badges in the Treasure of Sierra Madre

Moreover, in Florida, there's a long tradition of Latinos in positions of authority shooting African-Americans in dubious circumstances -- that set off two or three major black riots in Miami in the 1980s. I don't think anybody remembers these riots anymore.

As Bonfire of the Vanities pointed out in 1987, most day to day routines of the criminal justice system consist of dealing with minority screw-ups brutalizing other minorities. It's boring and depressing work. So, there is a deep hunger for the occasional man-bites-dog story of a white brutalizing a black, which leads to people like Kevin screwing up and getting the race of the shooter wrong. 

218 comments:

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Anonymous said...

“He was doing average in school, a little bit better when he was at Carol City and then I had him transferred,’’

So the kid was an honor student by the standards enunciated in "Bonfire of the Vanities"?

Truth said...

Svigor, I've answered your questions multiple times now. I would estimate 5 times over the years. It's just that I have not answered them the way you would like me to.

It's really as simple as that.

Anonymous said...

This has been bothering me, it keeps getting reported that Tray left his Dad's girlfriend's house during halftime of the NBA All-Star game but the game tipped-off at 7:37 and Tray had been declared dead at 7:30? So when did Slimm leave?

Also, where's the 7-11 security video?

Why did his family scub his Facebook photos?

ben tillman said...

Steve, if you're not familiar with it,you may want to check out the following blog that deals with police violence and obstruction of justice:

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/

Kylie said...

"You do not get a choice to decide where ANYONE ELSE gets to live."

We don't.

But you do.

Anonymous said...

I'm left wondering if Travon had purchased a Pepsi and Sweet Tarts if we'd even be having this discussion. And that is the real tragedy.

Dan in DC

Mr. Anon said...

"Svigor said...

How does a libertarian square his supposed beliefs with the fact that the gov't is violating people's right to decide who they hire and fire?"

"Truth" isn't really a libertarian. He's a race-man, pure and simple. Notice how he only opens his yap and disgorges his bountiful ignorance on threads about or that pertain to blacks. He has no interest in anything else.

Mr. Anon said...

"Truth said...

Well now, that's a violation of the 15th ammendment, you're going to have to take that one up with the Supreme Court, not here."

How does it violate the right to vote? "Truth" got his amendments mixed up. But as he doesn't really even agree with much of the constitution, I'm not surprised. Plus he is just generally in error about most everything.

Anonymous said...

You do not get a choice to decide where ANYONE ELSE gets to live.

So Americans can't decide that non-Americans can't live within the borders of the United States?

I can't decide that other people can't live in my house?

B322 said...

That's because there is no discernible difference between the meaning of the two terms.

race=ethnicity


No discernible difference?

Surely we can discern the difference between the results of a DNA test on the one hand, and the answers to interview-type questions regarding what language you use in the home, where your parents were born, your religion, etc. A DNA test may determine if you are Caucasoid or Amerindian or Congoid, but it can't tell if identify as Hispanic or as Jewish or White.

I don't know what that means, but Zimmerman is not white regardless of whether that means ethnicity or race.

I can't say if Zimmerman identifies as White. I certainly wouldn't identify him that way. HIs family identified him as Hispanic, which sounds right to me. That is all ethic information and self-identification is a large part of that, while DNA is a comparatively small part.

DNA is everything to race. I can't say what a blood test on him would indicate. It would probably sort him as Caucasoid with a lot of Amerindian DNA or Amerindian with a lot of Caucasoid DNA.

(The Census Bureau lexicon on the whole thing is completely different and not particularly useful, IMHO. For on thing, he could choose ethnicity and race, which totally doesn't match up to how race is used legally in the US. You can't choose whether or not your ancestors were oppressed. In any case he would probably pick Hispanic for ethnicity and Other for race.)

Joe said...

"How many high IQ people are going to be entering the police force? Not many. But they still have a need for effective leadership and skill in the analytical positions that high IQ is going to bring. The absence of these people is noticed when these organizations start behaving incompetently, and perhaps this is a case in point.

How to fix this? Either have another great depression to force some high IQ people into these careers to "take one for the team", or make such careers as police work equally attractive for a few high IQ hires - with the offer of higher pay, cushier environment, less risk and more analytical work."


- Actually, I seem to remember hearing of a case where the police intentionally would not hire hire IQ people- I saw a tv documentary some years back about a man who, in the extensive screening that officers undergo, was turned down for a job. It turned out that it was because he had been given an IQ test and scored a 130 or thereabouts. They admitted it, indicating that they felt that higher IQ individuals would tend to get bored and become underproductive in regular police duties which apparently involve alot of routine paper work and foot or car patrol. The man raised a stink about it to a news organization, which did a tv piece on it. I remember that I got the impression at the time that it was a widely practiced hiring procedure, though whether or not they have changed their hiring practice or still go about it a bit more quietly, I don't know. I would imagine though that certain agencies, like the FBI as well as certain police categories such as forensic detectives, couldn't possibly impose such a limitation. Though putting an IQ cap on any police officer position doesn't seem like a particularly wise choice....

Eric Rasmusen said...

One of the many fascinating things about the Martin case is how the family's story got to the national media. As you say, Steve, the press needs stuff brought to it; reporters don't report, they rewrite press releases. So: who sent them the info?

My guess is that some local black politicoes heard about the Martin case, told the family they'd take care of it, and used their pre-existing contacts with expert media manipulaters. Your LA community people can't do as well because (a) they weren't set up in advance, and (b) they had no contacts with professional media manipulators.

This is a big reason to create a neighborhood association--- so you're ready for something unexpected like this. And your association should have contacts in both political parties.

Truth said...

Testing 1...2

ben tillman said...

Why did his family scub his Facebook photos?

I think we know now.

Svigor said...

You do not get a choice to decide where ANYONE ELSE gets to live.

So Americans can't decide that non-Americans can't live within the borders of the United States?

I can't decide that other people can't live in my house?


That's pretty much exactly what he's saying. He's saying that people of X persuasion don't have the right to sell their property only to people of X persuasion. I.e., no property rights. He's saying that ten people of X persuasion don't have the right to build a neighborhood and create a contract that states it is exclusively for people of X persuasion. I.e., no property rights, and no right to enter contracts. He's saying that a landlord does not have the right to decide how to administer his property. I.e., no property rights.

I guess he's right; he has answered my question, just not the way I'd like: directly and forthrightly.

Svigor said...

He's definitely saying there's no right to property. That's what "we decide how you decide who you hire and fire, or sell to" means.

Mike said...

The area you mentioned is about as safe as it gets Steve. My wife shops at the farmer's market across the road every weekend and we go to a cafe for breakfast on v. a couple of times a week.

Anonymous said...

That is an interesting concern, an unnamed agency or agencies, one of them Federal, were debriefing in the jurisdiction of the LAPD. And you object to that? If it is a Federal agency or agent involved in the shooting, is not the jurisdiction of the Federal agency nation wide? Does a Federal agency need the permission of a local police department to debrief? I am a big fan of State's Rights, but a State has no more authority over the Federal government than does the Federal government over a State. Both work in their own areas delininated by the Constitution, but their physical jurisdiction or presence certainly overlaps. Basically a Federal agency can brief or debrief anywhere it may legally be and a parking lot of a supermarket certain is not prohibited to Federal employees, or even the other State or local officers in the task force.

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