“These Assholes, They Always Get Away”

Despite deciding to exit his vehicle to chase down a young black man in a hoodie who fit his personal definition of a criminal interloper, and then killing him, self-appointed Defender of Gated-Community Virtue George Zimmerman remains a free man.

Tapes of Zimmerman's conversations with 911 dispatchers immediately prior to his pursuit and murder of Martin are revealing. Not only do we hear Zimmerman lament “these fucking coons,”ⁱ we hear the kind of enough-is-enough vigilante frustration that's usually reserved for Clint Eastwood movies: “These assholes, they always get away,” Zimmerman says. That's a better description of Zimmerman than of burglars, and it certainly doesn't apply to his victim. Trayvon Martin will stay dead. And now Zimmerman joins a hallowed American tradition - those who kill unarmed brown people out of some combination of fear, anger and sheer incompetence always seem to get away with it.

Johannes Mehserle, an officer of Oakland's BART transit system, claims he thought his pistol was a taser when he fired it into Oscar Grant's back while Grant lay face-down on the platform a couple of hours into 2009. Two-and-a-half years after his arrest, Mehserle walked free. A two-year sentence and a release for time served may be a piss-poor excuse for justice, but it's the closest the American justice system has come, in my lifetime, to punishing this kind of crime. That he saw the inside of a cell at all makes Mehserle's case exceptional. These assholes, they always get away.

Sean Bell was leaving his bachelor party in Queens in 2006 when five NYPD cops, led by plainclothes Vice officer Gescard Isnora, fired 50 bullets into his car, killing Bell and wounding two of his friends. Isnora, who is black, had called in the other officers to the parking lot for fear that a shooting might occur after overhearing an argument between a member of Bell's party and someone else. Rather than think that as a plainclothes man, accosting a car full of people who'd just allegedly been in an argument, he might appear the aggressor, Isnora shouted “gun!” when someone in the car appeared to reach for...something. Moments later, Bell was dead.

No one in the car was armed. The only shots fired at the scene came from police sidearms. Isnora and two other shooters were acquitted of criminal charges, with the judge determining that prosecutors had failed to prove the officers' actions were unjustified.

These assholes, they always get away.

Timothy Stansbury's crime? He opened a door at the wrong moment in 2004, and NYPD Officer Richard Neri Jr. was so startled that he shot and killed Stansbury. Seriously. That's what happened.

And what happened to Neri? Asshole got away.

Orlando Barlow was shot while on his knees by a Las Vegas cop who decided he was only pretending to surrender. Acquittal. Amadou Diallo was shot 19 times while menacing officers with a wallet and a pager. Acquittals all around!

All this to say nothing of the countless unjustifiable killings of Americans of every skin tone by overzealous police hopped up on Drug War chatter and paramilitary equipment in need of use. Where those killings are the predictable result of terrible policy, your run-of-the-mill killing of an unarmed brown person has no such obvious cause-and-effect.

There is one commonality however: fear. The shooter in these cases almost always explains his actions as a justifiable response to being afraid of the person they killed. This, from a Heather McDonald article defending the NYPD in the wake of the Diallo case – for she bravely walks the “in defense of police misuse of lethal force” beat – is illustrative:

Nothing that is known of the case to date suggests that the shooting was anything but a tragic mistake; the officers acted in the good-faith, though horribly mistaken, belief that they were under deadly threat. "The majority of officers, because they’re not in combat often, feel extreme fear," explains Robert Gallagher, a former Street Crime Unit officer and one of the most decorated detectives in history.

What McDonald holds up as a justification of police actions in the “horrific” slaying of Diallo is the officers' fear. And it is this notion – that fear can excuse the bad judgment (at best) or malice (at worst) that left a brown body lifeless – which links these killings by police to the murder of Trayvon Martin.

George Zimmerman seems to have pursued Martin out of anger, but says that Martin was the aggressor and his use of lethal force was necessary to defend himself.ⁱⁱ In other words, after he chased the kid down and tussled with him, he got awfully scared, and that fear pulled the trigger.

Why is that so often good enough? Why is there such a broad portion of America prepared to nod along with that explanation and then go about their business? Maybe a lot of America thinks it's perfectly natural to be afraid of a black man in a hoodie, to be angry at his obviously-criminal presence in your neighborhood, to want to bring him to justice (or the other way around). Maybe a lot of people think that's an appropriate, reality-based reaction to black men. Who do we go see about that?

George Zimmerman may have wanted to be a cop, or fancied himself the unofficial sheriff of The Retreat at Twin Lakes, but as a civilian his crime is perhaps less disturbing than police gunning down unarmed men. Those crimes violate the “protect and serve” premise we're supposed to rely upon. But it isn't “less disturbing,” is it? Based on the information available, it's much worse. It's a murderous pursuit based on race and fear, featuring careless behavior with a loaded gun. And where the excuses made for our country's persistent failure to punish lawmen who kill innocents are grounded in the dangerous nature of police work, in 2012 we're told that the civilian who chased and shot Trayvon Martin was defending himself. Standing his ground.

These assholes always get away.

Postscript:

Assume for a moment that Zimmerman's reported version of events – he broke off his pursuit, was attacked by Martin, and then shot him – is correct. We could argue about the appropriateness of Zimmerman's choice to use lethal force in that circumstance, but what remains indisputable is that the initial decision to pursue Martin for the crime of black hoodiedness, while carrying a gun, was born of fear and vigilante frustration. Those are not acceptable reactions or behaviors, either morally or (when their final outcome is a life taken) lawfully. Yet they are given credence and legal shelter by the local PD.

The federal investigation into those officers' actions is welcome, but it can't make anyone here whole. A quote from Adam Serwer's profile of the DOJ lawyer in charge of watching the detectives in this case seems relevant:

"There was a lot of lawlessness in the Dominican Republic," Perez says. "What my parents taught me was that the hallmark of a thriving democracy was an effective and respectful police force."

Indeed. And while sweeping judgments of the effectiveness and respectfulness of American policing as a whole based on the anecdotes presented above would be mistaken, we remain a nation where the misuse of lethal force against an unarmed brown person can be excused by the fear the killer felt in the moment.

i If you hear “fucking goons” on that tape, I ask you how that's meaningfully different-- he'd decided a young black man in a hoodie looking around at things was a goon/criminal, for certain, and that he should take his gun and track this goon down. That's better how?

ii As Julian Sanchez and Jon Blanks have eloquently noted, we don't yet know if it's true that Martin ended up on top of Zimmerman, or how the latter came to fire his weapon. This lack of clarity owes primarily to the conduct of the Sanford police, who failed to test Zimmerman for intoxicants, and of the State's Attorney, who let him go even though the lead investigator reportedly thought he should be charged with manslaughter. Some parts of Zimmerman's account have witness corroboration, and some crucial bits do not, but anonymous police sources seem eager to feed the notion that Zimmerman's actions were in legitimate self-defense. I'm not sure how that washes with his initial profiling and pursuit of Martin while armed.

después de casi un mes...

Sorry all that it´s been so long. The last three weeks has been progressed at jungle-movie-waterfall pace. It seemed like there was still a ton of peaceful time to enjoy ahead of us, and then we turned the bend and started to ask each other, "Do you hear a sort of far-off hissing sound?" And then a couple days ago we got close enough to see the rapids and imagine the rocks and aligators. And then yesterday-- and this was really scary-- I caught this really strong dose of clunkymetaphoritis, and it´s just been completely ruining my past 15 hours.

At this point I´m not going to put up more pictures on Blogger. When I get back I´ll go through them all and open a Picasa account for the best of them. It´ll be worth the wait, I promise.

So what´s been going on exactly? Well, after Dad & Josh left I went to Barçelona for a weekend with my roommate Eddie and our friend Rebecca. It was a ton of fun. E & I got two-day passes for a hop-on-hop-off tourbus, which was a good way to decide what we did and didn´t want to spend time seeing. It´s an insanely large city-- if I hadn´t been to Istanbul, I would´ve spent this whole post raving about the overwhelming nature of metropoli-- and three days just doesn´t do it justice. Still I feel good about the trip & about how we spent time. We did some random walking around through the city center on Thursday afternoon, and then hung out and cooked dinner in the hostel after doing a lap on the sightseeing bus. It was cool to see the Olympic Stadium, although I didn´t go in. I vividly remember seeing the torchlighting for the 1992 summer Olympics, and it was neat to see that actual torch from a hundred feet away.
On Friday we went back around on the bus and stopped at various things we had wanted to see, including La Sagrada Familia and the Gaudi Park, and walked up Las Ramblas past dozens of human statues. Saturday was more leisurely and included a long bike ride through Las Ramblas, along the oceanfront, and through a park near the Arc de Triomf. It was a great deal of fun, and we left very very early the next morning to come back to Granada.

Since Barça, I´ve been done to Roquetas del Mar, a beach town near Almeria. That was a lot of fun also-- nothing particularly interesting to recount, but a lot of laying on the beach and throwing a football and drinking and karaoke singing. Good times. That was my last trip, and we´ve been reabsorbing Granada since. I took my last final today (all three went just fine) and so I have a couple days to enjoy myself and fill up my memory card with pictures. Should be a bunch of fun....

Should´ve done this a week ago...

So it was very strange to be in Spain when the Virginia Tech shooting happened. Right off, let me say-- all the heart I can biologically afford to part with goes out to those families (all of the families, including the parents &c of the perp), and I was extremely relieved to hear three days afterward that my friend who goes to VT is fine.
Part of what´s strange about being out of the country for the event would I think have been the same for any real national trauma involving multiple senseless deaths. That is, the sickly feeling that always rides around in the space between my spine and stomach after something like that happens...well the feeling is still there, but it´s different. I remember walking around for a few days after the Columbine shootings, and for about three weeks after 9/11, moving along with my life but unable to shake that shapeless, bilious pathos from my gut during any waking moment. In the few days after the shootings at Tech I found myself strolling around happily, chatting with friends, taking pictures, generally living as I have for the past months in emotional as well as logistical terms. And then I would see a newstand, or catch a TV newscast, or do the rounds of the web news I like, and it would hit me and stay with me for an hour or so, and then be gone again. Somehow that´s a lot harder to deal with.
The other part of being here at this time is not strange, but infuckingfuriating. There appears to be an unwritten rule governing Spanish media demanding that a space of no more than 3 minutes (on TV/radio) or 3 column-widths (in print) shall exist between coverage of anything to do with that day´s violence and the same ´discussion´ of American gun policy. This same rule applies in a less formal way to conversations with Spaniards. I´m exhausted with trying to explain my perspective on gun control (short version: There´s a fuckload of guns in our country, and most of the weapons used to commit crimes are unlicensed anyway, and there´s no money for enforcement against those even if there were political will for stiffer gun control regs at even the state level let alone the federal level, so put down the dreampipe and recognize that guns will be prolific among american citizens for the duration of our existence as a nation, and cater your policy objectives to that reality; also, nobody needs an assault rifle, I don´t care what you´re hunting, and we CAN better enforce against illegal high-rate-of-fire weapons, so let´s do that-- oh wait, the assault weapons ban lapsed).

I´m not kidding, that´s the short version. So since I just ralphed a bit in my own mouth while having to type that out in short form, let me give you something which I think makes a HELL of a lot more sense with respect to the sub-phenomenon of school shootings, especially mass school shootings. It´s a transcription of part of Jon Stewart´s comedy performance at the Wang Center (he spends about 5 minutes having fun with the name) in Boston last fall. Mr. Stewart?

"How can you get solutions when the people that are solving the problems aren´t really interested in solving the problems, they´re interested in whatever their own superstitions are, and putting those across as ideology, and just that being it? Prime example, all these school shootings. We´ve been having ´em now for years and years and years, and every time we have them we have town meetings and people from all over and congressmen and senators and they gather together and they talk about America´s Values, and our values, and what´s gone wrong. And the solution, there´s two solutions they always come to.
One from the right: ´We must put God back in schools. We must post the ten commandments back in school!´ What the f- What will that do? Will someone will come to a school with an AK-47 and stop at the front office and go ´Oh thou shalt not kill. Well isn´t my face red...´ If you think posting the ten commandments is gonna stop school violence, then you think ´Employees must wash hands´ is keeping the piss out of your happy meal. It´s not. It´s a ridiculous idea that is a salve on a gunshot wound. And on the left, they have an equally brilliant idea. ´Remove guns! Because then human nature will flourish!´ But you know what they forget about?
Crazy. You can´t remove crazy, we need real solutions to help crazy. If you remove the guns, the only effect will be a ten-thousand-percent increase in bludgeonings. There are sick fuckin people out there, and it´s not the guns´ fault, and it´s not rock music´s fault, and it´s not rap music´s fault, and lack of God. It´s adolescence and perspective. And what we need to do is teach fifteen-year-olds that high school ENDS; and that whatever weakness they have now that makes them prey turns around and gives them uniqueness and success later in life. What they need to stop school violence are field trips, and not to planetariums and museums and bullshit like that. Take high school sophomores on field trips to 25-year high school reunions. Done.
Walk ´em around the room. Show ´em the whole thing turns around. ´See that fat, bald, sad, crying, pathetic fuck? Captain of the football team. The only place they call him captain now is Long John Silver´s, kind of a sad story.´ Done!" -js


Also, it´s worth noting that a day where only 30-odd people turned up dead in Iraq would probably be about average, and that even when FIVE TIMES as many people are killed in a single day of violence it is barely front-page news. Wildly different circumstances and situations and I do not intend to in any way minimize the horror, the tragedy, the utterly disgusting infliction of one man´s psychosis on dozens of innocent peers that took place last week in Blacksburg. I do think it´s worth noting that while our lives as American civilians are punctuated far, far too often with violence on small and large scales, generations of Americans have shaped a society in which that kind of violence has a place, like it or not. Unlike the Iraqi people, we have not had a state of not just civil war but civil war played by the rules of engagement of TERRORISTS (read: none) inflicted on us not intentionally through craft but unintentionally through incompetence, laziness and ideological purity.

Again...all the horror and sympathy and therapy I can manage is being broadcast by my brainwaves to the VT community; MK, I´m thrilled to know you´re ok, even if I haven´t heard it from your own voice.

Random updates & beach pictures

Hey all. Been a while again...apologies. In my defense, there´s not a whole lot to report. Not that´s it´s been a banal couple of weeks, mind you-- I´ve been having a great time. But there have been no grand voyages, no breathtaking daytrips, no borders crossed since the end of spring break. The few days of Semana Santa processions that I saw upon return from Istanbul were worthwhile, and I´ll put up some pictures of them as well. The only other trip I´ve made was to the beach at Nerja, about an hour and a half from Granada. It´s a beautiful strip of coast. Swathes of brown-grey beach dotted with umbrellas are broken into shortish chunks, partitioned from one another by hulked formations of rock. Despite their impressive silhouettes, most of these rocks seem ready to crumble underfoot-- they are composed primarily of small stones and shells sedimented together with sand by centuries of surf. It´s a nice town, more or less what I expected from a coastline that has been progressively built up over about a half-century. I´m looking forward to seeing some other beaches when Josh & Dad are here.

So that was two weekends ago. This past weekend Sebi was at a wedding, Eddie was with some friends at a rented mountain house, Bart was hanging out with his parents, and I was living the bachelor life in Granada. It was fun. I could have made more of it, certainly, but it was way relaxing to sprawl out on the couch & watch soccer (most of it bad soccer-- La Liga games are usually on premium cable channels). Think of it as an independence recharge-- there are a ton of things I love about Spain, several attitudes I prefer to their American counterparts, but I could never jamas get used to the invasive motherliness that seems to define generations and generations of Spanish women.

The weekend before Nerja was spent recovering from and longing for Istanbul. Megan and her boyfriend were in town after what sounds like a fascinating but stomach-churning week in Morocco. The three of us went up to the Puerta de la Justicia-- the main entrance to the Alhambra-- to see a procession leaving the fortress to make for the Cathedral.

These are from the Saturday Alhambra procession...cool stuff. They had to take the float apart to get it through the arch, and then reassemble it to carry it down a really long hill, march around the city for about 5 hours, and then carry it BACK UP THE HILL at about 1 am. Oh, and it´s solid silver. And it rests on the crown of the carriers´ heads. Good times.

It´s hard to get clear shots of the hoods at night. (these were from a different procession, the night before-- good friday. very sad. not supposed to clap when they pass). These guys look like ghosts, which is actually a good thing because if I´d gotten them in tight focus they´d look like Klansmen.

A lot of kids make balls out of the wax drippings from the thousands of candles that accompany these processions.

Fınally some pıctures

Moon rises over (I think) the Atik Ali mosque.
St. Anthony's church in Taksim, Istanbul-- a very hip district that's home to most of the theaters involved in the Istanbul International Film Festival, as well as several European embassies.
Gilded cage (actually, it's solid silver) from the Topkapi palace. Couldn't take pictures of the majority of the treasury exhibits, but the simplest things in the no camera zones make this look like a pile of poop.
Section of the old Roman aqueduct that runs through the city. I've got better pictures of it than this, you'll see them some other time.
This is the bellydancer who comes to the hostel twice weekly. Picture says a thousand words.

The main dome of the Suleymaniye Mosque, one of the places I stopped on my leisurely walk Sunday morning and afternoon. Beautiful. Stunning. I think I liked the interior here more than that of the Blue Mosque.

Not quite sure what's going on here, but it looks cool. Also from Sunday AM.

Some folks on the street in Istanbul make their food money by selling trays of birdseed to tourists, resulting in huge flocks of pigeons. Sometimes this works out awesomely for the rest of us. I'm pretty sure that this is Nuruosimaniye Mosque in the background.
This is taken in Asia, on a stop for lunch during our Bosphorus boat cruise aboard...

THE GOOD SHIP DOĞANYURT II, piloted by trusty (that is, licensed) Captain Omer. This was a lot of fun, and the weather was great until the last hour or so.

Rumelihisari Fortress, as seen from the Bosphorus. Actually built before the Ottoman's conquered Constantinople, and used to mount tower guns and control shipping through the Bosphorus. Probably not too long passed between completion of the fortress and the fall of Constantinople to Mehmed II. Industrial district, seen from the boat....

If Carmen Sandiego ever stole Istanbul, this is roughly what the heist would look like.
I was psyched about this picture even before I bought a postcard yesterday sporting the exact same composition in slightly different lighting. That's Sultanahmet, or the Blue Mosque, which lends its name to the entire historic district. Good times. Very rare for a mosque to have 6 minarets.
I took this from atop the Galata Tower, in a district across the Golden Horn from where I'm staying. I really like this picture.

Istanbul part deux

Even when it's rainy, completely overcast, slightly foggy and more than a little cold, this city is incredible. Today I slept in an hour later than intended, as my ipod clock is still on Spain time. When I finally did get up and out, I headed to the Basilica Cistern. I don't think that this is the same underground waterway from the Bond flick, but it's pretty cool. Just like every other must-see tourist item in the historic district, it's a ten lira ticket for an unguided visit, and given that it only takes about a half-hour or forty minutes to see all there is to see I was a bit disappointed at the price. Nonetheless, glad I did it. Took a few good pictures, although I'm still not adept enough with the light metering on my camera to make them extraordinary. Incidentally, there'll be no pictures in this post as the computers in the hostel lounge are fossils and it would take forever to upload them. The wait for computers is bad enough without somebody clogging up the line with picture posting. Hopefully I'll be able to find a time up here when it's empty-ish to post some, but worst case scenario they'll be up when I get back to Spain. I think some of them are quite good, especially the handful I took of the Blue Mosque last night.
After the cistern I strolled about aimlessly for a time. It hadn't begun to rain yet, but there was no doubt that it would, so I put on my rain jacket. Decided to head across one of the footbridges to the other side of the Golden Horn (still Europe). I walked a winding route pretty much on purpose, eventually making my way to the Taksim district, a very polished shopping area with one wide main street that is home to several foreign embassies and also St. Anthony's church, a big impressive structure that is apparently not open to the public. In the mist and gloom and beginnings of a rainstorm, Taksim is quite magical despite its modern feel. It's also home to about a half-dozen Starbucks joints, so I stopped and had my first truly oversized cup of coffee since leaving the states. It was a real treat. I forgot my book at the hostel, so I had nothing to do but sit and write while sipping my coffee, and that was fun until my pen ran dry. At that point I headed back out into the street, taking pictures at many points on my walk down toward the Galata Tower. Another 10 lira ticket, a short elevator ride, two flights of spiral stairs and I was rewarded with a great view of the city. It is absolutely sprawling. The fog and greyness add to the effect, but I think the edges of the metropolis might still be invisible on a clear day. Took a few pictures, the quality of which I won't be able to evaluate until I see them on a bigger screen. Mostly I just stood and took in the height and the surrounding rooftops. It's a very cool spot. After descending I did a bit more winding, most of it on very steep inclines, before heading back to the hostel. I had decided it was time to get in touch with Dad's friend in Istanbul. This turned out to be a very frustrating project as Turkish pay phones don't take coins but claim to take credit cards. 30 minutes and many a curse later I gave up and bought a local phone card (a waste of a few lira since there's no way I'll make 50 minutes of local phone calls while here, but whatever). Couldn't get a hold of Dad's friend, however, so I decided to head back to the hostel and hang out in the terrace bar. The view from here is actually much more fun when the glass is covered with rivulets of rainwater. I've been up here since-- the cook makes a damn good Iskinder kebab (that's a local specialty, delicious tomato-based sauce over lamb garnished with yogurt...magnificent). I think I'm going to call it a night pretty soon, although I'll probably end up staying here for a few more beers with the couple of pals I've made. I love hostel travelling.

First day in Istanbul, by the numbers

Minutes waited in assorted lines in airport at 2 am: 47
Cost, in lira, of cab ride to hostel at 3 am: 35
Hours of sleep: 7
Jewels seen in Tokopi Palace (in karats): 4,000,000 (roughly. Now I know what the phrase 'jewel encrusted' means.)
86 Karat diamonds: 1
Swords: 23
Letters handwritten by Mohammed: 1
Carpet salesmen encountered: 2 (note: shockingly low. One of the two even took a solid 7 minutes of conversation before slipping in the question 'You like carpet?' And then he showed be to a delicious, cheap restaurant, despite my refusal to check out his shop)
Turks instructing me not to support Bush: 1 (seems low, but in terms of percentage of turks talked to, this jumps to 33.3333333)
Mosques seen (entered): 5 (1, but Sultanahmet/Blue Mosque should probably count triple. Astonishing.)
Calls to prayer heard: 1, but a tag-team operation of the 6 minarets of the Blue Mosque, the 4 of the Haya Sofia, and the 1 of the other mosque that was in view. Pretty impressive)
Kitties: 9
Puppies: 2, both sleeping
Moments of true awe: minimum 29
Pictures taken (kept): 200 (145)