|
|
Remember that weird, problematic case in which the off-duty officer, in plainclothes, pulled out his gun and chased a guy who may have broken into his car, and then other cops came and shot that off-duty cop? News from the New York Times: A grand jury in Manhattan has voted not to indict a [...]
The most surprising aspect of the verdict in the killing of Sean Bell, the unarmed Queens man gunned down when police officers fired 50 bullets at his car on his wedding day, was that the verdict hinged on credibility. I worked as an an investigator for New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board for two years. Those of you who know it exists likely think of it as an ineffectual institution that only goes after police when they say naughty words, but it has been given more teeth as an agency through the years after high-profile incidents like Diallo and Louima. It is an all-civilian organization charged with investigating complaints of misconduct. By law, it must investigate, or make an attempt to investigate, every case that comes its way. The CCRB investigates everything from accusations that an officer used a curse word inappropriately to improper execution of a search warrant to improper use of deadly force. I’m 99.9 percent sure there’s a bloated Sean Bell case file sitting on someone’s desk, though, for complicated legal reasons, these kinds of investigations are put on hold when there’s a criminal trial. We were asked to examine the credibility of each complainant and each officer, and our investigations sometimes turned on those assessments. But here’s the problem with that: police officers will almost always seem more credible. More…  Yesterday we linked to a roundtable (yeah, yeah, we know) on NPR’s News and Notes moderated by Farai Chideya. During the conversation, Desmond Burton, a.k.a. Afronerd, made a comment about the shooting death of Tarika Wilson by a SWAT team, associating Wilson’s name and biography with the sad end of her life.
He backed up his support of the name comment by pointing to the bestseller Freakonomics. The book contains a chapter entitled “Would A Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?” which examines (among other things) the roles names — and distinctively black names — play in the trajectory of children’s lives. He defended his statement in the comments section of the News and Notes blog.
Well, what exactly did the authors of Freakonomics say, anyway? We grabbed a copy we had lying around to peep game. (Like, literally on the floor in the hallway, fam.) More… On The Blogger’s Roundtable on NPR’s News and Notes, Lauren Williams of Stereohyped, Jozen Cummings of King, and Desmond Burton of Afronerd, discussed the controversial police shooting of unarmed woman 26-year-old named Tarika Wilson and her 1-year-old child in Lima, Ohio. But, well, okay. We’ll let you read. Burton: … In looking [...] |
|
|
Copyright © 2010 PostBourgie - All Rights Reserved |
||
Top Posts