Addendum to a botched drug raid

Here is a link to the actual warrant for the botched drug raid. The article states that the warrant had been uplifted to Scribd, but when you check the link you will find that the warrant has been removed from the site. I guess there is a limit to Art Acevedo's transparency when the shit hits the fan.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the police seized 18 grams of marijuana and 1.5 grams of cocaine from the house. That's right, a little more than half-an-ounce of weed and little powder.

So here's my question, did the police kick in the wrong door or did they just flat out lie in the warrant application? It's one or the other.

What say you, Joe Gamaldi?

Anatomy of a botched drug raid

Last month five officers from the Houston Police Department were injured - four were shot - in a drug raid gone incredibly wrong. At the time we were barraged with statements from HPD that the police raided the house, shot the dogs and killed the residents, Donald Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, because a confidential informant told them the couple had heroin and guns in the house.

Joe Gamaldi, the head of the local police union, claimed the police had targets on their backs and that he was sick and tired of people claiming the police were the bad guys. He even threatened to keep tabs on those who criticized the police. Woo-hoo! Over here, Joe!

The local media - never ones to look too deeply into any story involving the police - ate it up. The local media never once questioned the reliability of the informant or the rationale behind a "dynamic" entry.

But there was a problem. There was no heroin in the house. There was a small amount of marijuana and cocaine. There were rifles and shotguns, but there was no evidence that they were obtained illegally.

Neighbors and relatives told anyone who would listen that neither Mr. Tuttle nor Ms. Nicholas were involved in the drug trade. Neither had any convictions for drug activity. Neither had any convictions for violent behavior.

Police Chief Art Acevedo (doing his best to play a prevent defense) told the media that police had received a tip from an anonymous called that there were guns and heroin inside the house. Police then sent their informant into the house to get some heroin. They claim he came out with the drug and a tale the house was a veritable Wal-Mart of heroin.

If anyone knows how this shit works in Houston, it should come as no surprise that the officers went to a judge in the municipal courthouse (where the primary business of the day is traffic court) to find a judge who would sign the warrant without asking any pesky questions about probable cause or the need for a "no-knock" warrant. Needless to say, they found a very pliant judge on Lubbock Street.

Since the jump-out boys were from narcotics, no one was wearing bodycams at the time of the raid. I get it. The last thing the police want the public to see is just how much of a shit show these raids turn into.

And now an unnamed officer involved in the raid has been relieved of duty pending an investigation into the botched raid.

For those of y'all keeping score on this, the search warrant said the police believed that heroin and handguns would be found in the house. Neither were.

If anyone out there has any delusion that the police follow a rigid procedure in obtaining evidence, drafting a warrant application and discussing with a judge why the warrant needs to be served, you may now put your glasses back on and witness just how this process works.

In reality the warrant applications filed by the police - and prosecutors - are fill-in-the-blank cookie-cutter forms where the affiant cuts and pastes the basis of his suspicion. This suspicion can rarely be backed up by anything resembling articulable facts. These affidavits are presented to judges who preside over traffic courts who sign them without raising any questions.

The result is what happened in Houston last month. This should be Exhibit A in a lesson as to why the war on drugs has been an abject failure.

See also:

Blakinger, Keri, et al. "Houston police officer connected to deadly raid, shootout relieved of duty," Houston Chronicle (2/8/2019)

Reigstad, Leif, "A no-knock raid in Houston led to deaths and police injuries. Should police rethink the process?" Texas Monthly (2/12019)

Blakinger, Keri and Stephen Tucker Paulson, "Police identify powder recovered in deadly drug raid" Houston Chronicle 2/2/2019)

Blaming the victim, Texas style

This is a video that Texas now requires all high school students to view. Its purpose is to "teach" students how to interact with the police.

But, in reality, it serves to give the police any number of excuses when they make the decision to pull their weapon and shoot someone.

And I don't want to hear that constant refrain that being a cop is a hard job. No one was forced to enter law enforcement. Everyone who attended the academy made the decision that's what they wanted to do.

The State of Texas has made the decision to side with the police when it comes to the shooting of unarmed black men. Texas has decided that the blame falls squarely on the victim of police violence because they didn't act in a certain manner. This mindset lets the police off the hook when they turn a situation confrontational. It lets them off the hook when they decide to draw their weapon.

It's the classic game of blame the victim.

Part of the problem is that law enforcement loves to play soldier. Local departments are dressing their officers in uniforms that look like fatigues. They are carrying military-style weapons. Departments are handed surplus military gear like it's candy.

And in this effort to have a War on Drugs - or whatever other evil is the flavor of the month - police officers adopt an "us v. them" attitude. The police are on patrol. The news media refers to ordinary citizens as civilians - so as to differentiate them from the police.

Now don't get me wrong. The police have always been used to enforce the social order. They were the front line defenders of Jim Crow in the South. The images of Bull Connor turning the police dogs on civil rights protesters can never be erased from the mind. The police have been used to bust strikes. They have been used to deny people their right to assemble peaceably and petition the government over their grievances.

I don't think we should be surprised that such a video becomes must-watch propaganda in Texas. There are more than enough wing nuts in the state legislature and Board of Education who love the idea of a police state (while telling their supporters how evil government is). Not surprisingly, the video left out the most important instruction in how to deal with the police -- not being black. Until we can sit down and discuss the racism at the core of policing, nothing will ever change.

Perhaps police officers should have to watch a video to teach them how to interact with people of color.

Let's have some smoke with that whitewash

Oh, and you just thought the drama surrounding the killing of Botha Shem Jean by an off-duty Dallas police officer was over. How wrong you were.

In an ongoing attempt to justify the unjustifiable, the Dallas police obtained a search warrant to look for evidence of drugs -- in Mr. Jean's apartment. That's right. Instead of treating Amber Guyger as any other defendant charged with killing someone, the police went to a judge and obtained a search warrant -- signed by a judge -- giving them permission to search Mr. Jean's apartment for drugs. A judge had to read the affidavit and agree that there was probable cause to believe evidence of a crime would be found in Mr. Jean's apartment -- and that said evidence was relevant to the investigation of his murder.

And, of course, once the cops found some marijuana in the apartment, the media were alerted and the stories began popping up around the state that weed had been found in Mr. Jean's apartment.

Now let's step back for just a second here. Any marijuana - or any other illegal items - found in Mr. Jean's apartment are completely irrelevant to the investigation of the killing because Ms. Guyger said the lights were out in the apartment when she entered it and shot and killed Mr. Jean.

She wasn't carrying out a raid. She wasn't executing a search warrant. According to her story she walked into the wrong apartment and shot Mr. Jean thinking he was an intruder in her apartment. Besides, the possession of small amounts of marijuana is a misdemeanor -- it's not a capital offense.

The point in obtaining the warrant was to gather "evidence" that would make Mr. Jean look like a criminal in the public's mind. Suddenly he goes from innocent victim to a black drug user or dealer. Now the cops and prosecutors will point out every time they are asked to comment that illegal drugs were found in Mr. Jean's apartment in an attempt to divert attention away from the facts that an unarmed black man was shot and killed in his own apartment by an off-duty cop.

Such a tactic will also divert the public's attention from the fact that Ms. Guyger was allowed to leave the scene and was free to discard or destroy any evidence of the crime. We will never know if she was under the influence of drugs or alcohol because any evidence of intoxication has already been pissed, sweated and breathed away. I'm sure the cops and the District Attorney would be more than happy if the public would quit paying attention to the ridiculous story Ms. Guyger told investigators and that was subsequently used in the arrest warrant.

No matter what smokescreens the Dallas police erect, never forget that Mr. Jean was in his own apartment minding his own business when a cop entered, barked orders at him and shot him to death.

The only good thing to come from this situation is the public's realization that the police will go to whatever lengths they need in order to cover up for one of their own.

And people still don't understand why Colin Kaepernick knelt.

Whitewashing a police shooting in Dallas

Did y'all hear the one about the off-duty cop who walked into the wrong apartment and then accidentally shot the person who actually lived there? How about the part where she wasn't arrested afterward and was free to go back to her place? And what about the arrest affidavit that was just a retelling of her story?

Hysterical, isn't it?

Amber Guyger is a four-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department. On the evening of September 6 she supposedly returned home to her apartment in the Southside Flats. Somehow she ended up on the wrong floor and inside the apartment of Botham Shem Jean. She claims that she inserted her key (which contained an electronic chip) into the lock of the apartment door but the door was ajar. She entered. When she heard someone she yelled at them to stop and then she fired her gun and killed Mr. Jean.

The story is beyond absurd. How did she end up on the wrong floor? She lived there. She knew what floor she was on when she exited the parking garage. Her claim that the door to Mr. Jean's apartment was ajar doesn't hold any water, either. According to the affidavit, when she pushed open the door the lights in the apartment were off. She claims she turned on the lights after shooting Mr. Jean.

So we are to believe that she got confused, went to the wrong floor and then stuck her key in the door of the wrong apartment. Please. Apartment doors have numbers on them. The apartment was in an interior hallway. She claims the lights in the apartment were out and that she heard someone stirring about. Really? Someone's going to leave their door ajar in the middle of the night and rummage around their own apartment in the dark?

Not buying it, Ms. Guyger.

But at least your buddies on the police force did. They let you go home without slapping cuffs on your wrists and taking you in. They allowed whatever substances were in your body to be eliminated before anyone had a chance to make an official observation. Then they bring in the Texas Rangers for cover who draft an arrest affidavit that is nothing but a rehash of your own bullshit story.

After being taken to jail, Ms. Guyger was able to post a $300,000 bond -- meaning someone had to plop down at least $30,000.

And just why does the arrest warrant mention that they police were looking around Mr. Jean's apartment for narcotics? Is it time to paint the victim of a police shooting as a criminal so that white folk can brush their hands of the matter and go on to their white bread world?

Now just imagine had Ms. Guyger not been a police officer. Would she have been allowed to go home? No, she would have been arrested. They certainly wouldn't have been given two or three days to destroy any incriminating evidence. Would the police ask her for her account of what happened and then use that account in their arrest warrant? No, an investigating officer would have noted the facts and would have drawn his or her own conclusions.

In the end it likely doesn't matter because the DA - or whoever presents the case - will tell a grand jury the "facts" as related by Ms. Guyger and will then nod, wink and tell the grand jury to do what they think is right - which is code for no-bill this fucker as quickly and quietly as possible.

Meanwhile Mr. Jean is dead and his family and friends will be left to mourn a life that was taken without reason and without repercussion.

Internal investigation? What internal investigation?

In 2015, the family of Darryl Mount, Jr., filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Saratoga Springs, NY, then Public Safety commissioner Christian Mathiesen and seven police officers, including the police chief, Gregory Veitch.

In August 2013 Mr. Mount was running from the police in downtown Saratoga Springs when police approached him after seeing him assault his girlfriend outside of a bar. He ended up at the bottom of a 19 foot scaffold with injuries that would prove to be fatal. He was taken to the hospital in a coma from which he never awoke.

Chief Veitch and Mr. Mathiesen denied there was any validity to the family's claims that the injuries had been inflicted by the police. In fact, Chief Veitch told the public that the department's own internal investigation concluded that there had been no police misconduct.

So far the tale is unremarkable. A black man dies in an encounter with the police. The police conduct an internal investigation. No one crosses the thin blue line and the officers in question are cleared. The DA's office is put on notice that the ball's in their court now.

The only problem is, there was never an internal police investigation conducted to determine whether there were any acts of police misconduct that night. There was a police investigation conducted - to determine whether Mr. Mount should be charged with attempted assault, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

We know there was no internal investigation conducted into the incident because Chief Veitch admitted that he lied to the press in a sworn deposition taken pursuant to the wrongful death suit. The lawsuit also turned up an e-mail in which Chief Veitch said it was important to give he public the impression that the police department was concerned with the allegations - even though they weren't.

When asked why he didn't conduct an investigation, Chief Veitch claimed it was because no one had alleged any incident of police misconduct. That is, except for family members at the hospital who made the allegations to Det. Tim Sicko. Det. Sicko, in turn, relayed the allegations to Chief Veitch.

Chief Veitch, despite his department's own General Order Section 25, failed to conduct an internal affairs review within 45 days of the allegations. Famed forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht reviewed the medical records, X-rays and photographs and came to the conclusion that Mr. Mount's injuries were more consistent with being beaten than falling from a scaffold. The forensic medical examiner used by local police, Dr. Michael Sikirica, issued a report supporting the police department's claims of no misconduct after reviewing statements from various witnesses and medical records - he never reviewed the photographs of Mr. Mount's injuries nor the actual X-rays or CAT scans.

This case illustrates why some type of external review board is necessary for investigating allegations of police misconduct. Any such board must have subpoena power to compel the production of witnesses and documents. The system in Saratoga Springs didn't fail. It did exactly what it was supposed to do - provide cover for the police. Only this time we got a peak behind the curtain.

h/t Scott Greenfield

Let the beatings continue

For those of y'all who live in Donald Trump's fantasy world, this is the reality of why Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the playing of the national anthem.

This is the reason that organizations such as Black Lives Matter exist.

This is the reality that people of color find themselves in in this country.

This is what those promoting the inherently racist line of Blue Lives Matter would like you to forget.



What was this man's crime, you ask? The police were called to an apartment complex in Phoenix on a domestic violence call. The man in the video had nothing to do with the alleged incident. Even though he wasn't involved in the incident, he cooperated with the police. He leaned against a wall. He allowed officers to frisk him. He answered questions. But when he was asked to sit against the far wall and he just squatted, that's when the police had enough and assaulted him.

If you think this same shit doesn't occur all over this country then you are either blind, ignorant or a racist.

So the next time you hear Donald Trump, or some other windbag, throw shade on black athletes who protest peacefully during the playing of the national anthem, just remember this video.

And one other little thing, instead of being arrested and charged with assault, the officers involved are on a paid vacation.

h/t Stefania Okolie

Turning the tables

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   ACLU‏Verified account @ACLU May 8
   
   Federal hate crimes laws were passed to correct the centuries of inaction and injustice that too often was the response to violence based on immutable traits and identities, including race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability.
   44 replies114 retweets289 likes
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   ACLU‏Verified account @ACLU May 8
   
   There's no possible interpretation where being a law enforcement officer fits that definition. Congress should vote this down quickly and decisively.
   35 replies98 retweets316 likes
   
   
   
   
   
   

These tweets were posted by the ACLU on May 8, 2018 as a reaction to a Senate bill that would classify violence against police officers as a hate crime. Such a law already exists in Louisiana.

Apparently the irony of the situation was lost on the leadership of the ACLU as this is just the latest logical extension of the push for hate crime legislation over the years. I've written before on why hate crime legislation should be found unconstitutional and how it's just a bad idea.

For every offense that someone wishes to attach the label "hate crime," a criminal act was already committed. If a person yells out a racist epithet and then shoots and kills the target of his ire, he's looking at a murder charge. There is no reason to try to enhance the sentence because of what he said beforehand.

With the right in power, the state's backlash against Black Lives Matter is in full force. There are plenty of dog whistles - from Blue Lives Matter to US flags with a blue stripe to ribbons to support law enforcement - about our everyday lives. The next step is to make it a hate crime to attack a police officer.

Never mind that assaulting a police officer is already a more serious offense that assaulting someone on the street. Never mind that killing a police officer makes you eligible to get the needle. No. We need a law that we can use against folks who have the temerity to stand up against police brutality and racist killings.

And this is how you do it. You give the same people who cower under the table when faced with charging a police officer for killing an unarmed black man yet another charge they can use against a person accused of assaulting a police officer.

Two cities. Two men. Two very different outcomes.

Cops aren't racists.
Every situation is different.
If you just follow orders, you won't get shot.
White folks get shot, too.

Wednesday afternoon in Brooklyn, police received three separate 911 calls about a man walking down the street pointing a metal object at people. When police arrived at the scene, they saw Saheed who met the description they were given. The man took what the police called a two-handed shooting stance with a metallic object in his hands.

Four officers fired on Mr. Vassell, striking him a total of ten times. None of the officers were wearing body cameras. He died at the hospital.

According to his father, Mr. Vassell was bi-polar and had been "sick " for some time. Other people who knew Mr. Vassell said he was well-known in the neighborhood and didn't bother anyone. One resident told a reporter that all the police officers in the neighborhood knew Mr. Vassell.

The metallic object in Mr. Vassell's hand was a shower head.

The officers never gave Mr. Vassell the opportunity to comply with their orders. They shot and killed another unarmed black man.

A week ago yesterday, in Louisville (KY), police responded to a domestic violence call. As police approached the door, Oscar Walters picked up an air rifle and pointed it at officers. Then he fired it, shattering the glass in the front door. After fleeing the house, Mr. Walters resisted arrest and refused to obey orders from the police.

Officers eventually tackled Mr. Walters, though one officer suffered a fractured wrist, arrested him and took him to jail.

Need I even point out that Mr. Walters was white?

Saheed Vassell was shot and killed for pointing a pipe at people on the street. The police never attempted to subdue him - and they never attempted to determine what he was holding in his hand. Mr. Walters shot at police, ran from them, resisted arrest - but is still alive.

Stephon Clark was standing in his backyard holding his cellphone when he was shot and killed by multiple bullets fired by police officers. Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 students in Parkland (FL) but was taken out alive.

The tangents running through these cases is clear and the longer we try to ignore it, the more killings we condone. It's very telling that NFL owners and wingnuts are more concerned with a man kneeling during the national anthem than they are at the scores of unarmed black men shot down by the police.

For all the pontificating by the right over the sanitized version of Martin Luther King, Jr. we are taught in school, his work was left undone when he was struck down by a sniper's rifle on April 4, 1968. We still live in a divided society with little sign it will change anytime soon.

Two cities. Two men. Two killings.

Stephon Clark and Danny Ray Thomas didn't know each other. They lived hundreds of miles apart. Mr. Clark lived in Sacramento and Mr. Thomas lived in Houston.

But they were both black and they were both killed at the hands of police officers.

Police in Sacramento suspected Mr. Clark of breaking into cars. Deputies in a helicopter said they spotted the a man who resembled the uspect in a backyard and that he appeared to be trying to break into the house. That man was Stephon Clark and that backyard was his backyard.

Police approached. They told Mr. Clark to raise his hands. He did. He then began moving toward the officers. Thinking the cell phone he held in his hand was a gun, officers fired more than 20 shots and then waited five minutes before seeing if Mr. Clark was alive.

He was unarmed. He was shot and killed in his own backyard because someone in a helicopter thought he resembled a person who had been breaking the windows of cars. He was murdered by police for a a crime - which even if he committed - didn't warrant the death penalty.

Danny Ray Thomas was wandering down Greens Road in northwest Houston with his pants down to his ankles, talking to himself and hitting cars with his fist as they passed by. A deputy sheriff saw what was happening, stopped and ordered Mr. Thomas to stand still. Mr. Thomas continued to walk toward the deputy who then shot and killed Mr. Thomas in the middle of the street.

The deputy claims that Mr. Thomas had something in his hand at the time of the encounter but no gun was found.

He was unarmed. He was shot and killed in the middle of the street because he was engaging in bizarre behavior. He was murdered by a sheriff's deputy for a crime that didn't warrant the death penalty.

I'm sure there will be people who will read this and argue that the police weren't to blame for these deaths. They will claim that both men placed themselves in danger by their actions.

But that's not even the point. The police aren't driving into predominantly white neighborhoods and shooting white people at the slightest provocation. If that were the case then the wingnuts and wealthy folks living in gated communities would be out in the streets rioting. But so long as the victims of these killings are black, apologists for the police will look for any little fact to justify a cop putting a bullet in an unarmed black man.

Who ever said Jim Crow was dead?

Tennessee sheriff gets off on killing

Ordinarily, if you tell someone to shoot someone else - and they do - you're going to find yourself in hot water. But Sheriff Oddie Shoupe of White County (you can't make up this stuff), Tennessee is no ordinary person.

You see, Sheriff Shoupe was recorded telling officers to shoot a motorist rather than risk damaging police vehicles to run him off the road. The motorist, Michael Dial, was shot and killed by a deputy after his car ran into a ditch following a chase that rarely topped speeds of 50 mph.

“I love this shit,” Shoupe said, apparently unaware that his comments were being picked up by another deputy’s body-worn camera. “God, I tell you what, I thrive on it. 

“If they don’t think I’ll give the damn order to kill that motherfucker they’re full of shit,” he added, laughing. “Take him out. I’m here on the damn wrong end of the county,” he said.

Now Sheriff Shoupe is on the wrong end of a federal lawsuit alleging that his department violated Mr. Dial's civil rights and that Mr. Dial was the victim of excessive force.

The most shocking thing about this episode isn't that the sheriff said what he said, but that he was dumb enough to say it when his voice was being recorded. And just so there is no misunderstanding, Mr. Dial was pulled over for a traffic violation  - that's it. He was executed for committing a traffic violation.

Now whether you want to argue that Mr. Dial brought this upon himself by driving away from the scene is up to you. The point remains that he was gunned down for a traffic violation because the sheriff didn't want to scratch the paint on a patrol car. You may be a law and order type who doesn't think the Blue Lives Matter movement isn't a polite cover for racism, but there is nothing that Mr. Dial did that deserved the death penalty.

Now the files of every police shooting under Sheriff Shoupe need to be opened up and examined to determine if there is a pattern of this type of behavior in White County. Every officer involved shooting should now be suspect.

The language we use

I will never forget my English teacher from 7th grade. She drilled into our heads the evil that is the passive voice. If we wrote a sentence using the passive voice in a paper it came back to us with a F circled at the top.

Writing should convey action, she said. Subjects do things. Things don't just happen.

I got the same lesson when I was on the student newspaper in high school. The passive voice was verboten because it said nothing. If you wrote in the passive voice you were lazy. It took a whole lot more verbiage to say nothing than it did to say something. A news article, or a story, is about someone doing something. That's what we want to read.

But that's no longer the case when it comes to the killing of unarmed black men by the police. Suddenly every journalist throws together as many sentences in the passive voice as possible in order to avoid stating who did what.

 A police officer never kills an unarmed black man. A police officer never shoots someone. Instead we read that an unarmed black man died after being shot. Or that he died as the result of a shooting.

"police kill man" (3 words) or "police tase man to death" (5 words) are exceedingly more efficient than "a person died after police deployed a Taser on the individual" (11 words)––a phraseology that exists solely to obscure the police's responsibility in killing someone.  

-- Adam H. Johnson

That language is used to cover up the truth. It's used to put the blame on the victim instead of the officer who pulled the trigger. And journalists do it all the time. Instead of reporting the facts, they repeat the police account of the incident. Instead of asking difficult questions, they blindly accept the official version. It's cheap and it's lazy.

Then the journalist proceeds to tell us that the victim wasn't a victim but a suspect or defendant or alleged prowler or whatever other words are used to convey that he wasn't a victim of police violence. We are told he had a criminal record - even though the officer who killed him didn't know it at the time he pulled the trigger. We are told he had a criminal record because it makes him less of a victim.

By the use of language, we are told that each of these incidents of police violence are isolated incidents, unfortunate accidents really, in which no one intended for anyone to die. It's like we are supposed to believe that the gun just magically jumped out of the officer's holder and fired itself as the officer looked on in stunned horror as an innocent person was killed. In reality the officer took his gun out of his holster, looked through the sight (or down the barrel) and made the conscious decision to pull the trigger.

But that's an account you will never read in your local paper because that is an account that puts the blame squarely on the person with the gun.

h/t Adam H. Johnson

Merry Christmas from the Bexar County Sheriff's Office

Kameron Prescott was a 6-year-old who lived in a trailer park in Shertz, Texas (just outside San Antonio). I use the word was because on the Friday before Christmas, deputies with the Bexar County Sheriff's Office killed Kameron while shooting en masse at a woman who was a suspect in a car theft.

Earlier in the day officers confronted the woman who was hidden in a closet. Supposedly she pointed a gun at officers and escaped their grasp. Officers conducted a manhunt and tracked the woman to the trailer park.

They opened fire with pistols and rifles when she attempted to break into the trailer in which Kameron lived. The woman was killed - but at least one bullet passed through the outer wall and struck Kameron in the abdomen. Kameron was declared dead after being taken to a hospital.

No gun was recovered from the woman who was the target of the officers' ire.

This incident brings a number of questions to mind. First, why were multiple officers opening fire at a woman in a residential area? Second, why were they firing at a person who had done nothing threatening at that point to police? Third, did no one ever stop to think that a stray bullet could penetrate the outer shell of a mobile home?

Of course the apologists for law enforcement will point out that the woman in question had pulled a gun on police earlier in the day. They will talk about how hard it is to be a cop and how they have to make split-second decisions and that it's not fair to second-guess their decisions.

To which I say - bullshit.

If white folks were being gunned down by police at the rate at which people of color are in this country, there would be riots in the streets of every suburb in America. It's because most people living in their little bubbles don't give a fuck if the police kill a person of color.

They may pipe up about what a tragedy it is that a young boy was killed but they won't think twice about the police shooting and killing a person who was suspected - but never convicted - of a criminal offense. They won't even think twice about the fact that car theft is a non-capital crime. They'll just spout off about how she brought it on herself by not co-operating with the police. Like that somehow justifies murder.

The next time you see a car with a sticker that says "Blue Lives Matter" or "Cops Lives Matter" take a look at the hue of the person driving the car. Those stickers are the "polite" way of saying that the person driving the car thinks it's okay for the police to kill people of color.

They might not be pulling the trigger, but they certainly don't have a problem with it. They are the same people who rail on constantly about what a bad person Colin Kaepernick is for protesting police violence during the playing of the anthem at NFL games. But race has nothing to do with that, does it now?

Meanwhile, no one will be charged with manslaughter or arrested. They might have a little paid vacation to "cool" down.

Kameron Prescott's family isn't so lucky. Nothing will ever fill the void caused by the acts of these officers. Thoughts and prayers will be nothing but an empty gesture made by a bunch of folks who want to appear to care.

This slaughter of innocents must come to an end.


Here is a link to the family's GoFundMe page to raise money for funeral expenses.