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.
