And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority
This is not going to end well:
A former police officer who is white was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter Thursday in the killing of an unarmed black man in Oakland, California.
Johannes Mehserle, who was a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer at the time of the incident, was convicted in the shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant on a California train platform on January 1, 2009. Mehserle, who was on duty at the time, said at the trial that he intended to draw and fire his Taser rather than his gun, CNN affiliate KTVU reported.
Mehserle got four years, maximum. Did the jury watched the damned video:
Four years for casually pulling your gun and murdering someone. It’s good to be a gangsta.
*** Update ***
Mehserle will do less time for shooting & killing Oscar Grant than Plaxico Burress is doing for shooting himself in the leg…
Corner Stone
Reliance on Tasers, as well as severe budget cutbacks for training, etc, have led to a lazy response from police.
And this is the inevitable result.
Lev
I was in Oakland a week after that happened. I was mainly in office buildings and couldn’t really discern the mood too much, but there was a protest march that happened right after I got out of there. I don’t think it got too ugly, but it was good that I got out when I did. The other people there were nervous.
It was just sort of surreal. I took the Yellow Line into the 19th Street station, which is where the shooting happened, and there was hardly any sign of it. Everything was cleaned up, everyone was going about their business. Oakland is a strange town, to be sure.
Hunter Gathers
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
A real gangsta-ass nigga plays his cards right
A real gangsta-ass nigga never runs his fuckin mouth
Cuz real gangsta-ass niggas don’t start fights
And niggas always gotta high cap
Showin’ all his boys how he shot em
But real gangsta-ass niggas don’t flex nuts
Cuz real gangsta-ass niggas know they got em
And everythings cool in the mind of a gangsta
Cuz gangsta-ass niggas think deep
Up three-sixty-five a year 24/7
Cuz real gangsta ass niggas don’t sleep
Politically Lost
I disagree with the verdict and believe it should have been voluntary manslaughter at a minimum.
However, I do not look forward to the possible destruction of businesses and personal property of those that had nothing to do with this whole terrible matter.
trollhattan
I will not be going to my fav East Bay pizza establishment the next day or three. Just sayin’
http://www.zacharys.com/oakland.html
Ben
“I wasn’t going to murder him, I was only going to electrocute him!” is one hell of a defense to murder charges. But apparently it works well.
Toast
Isn’t there a line in a movie (or maybe a song?) about the police just being the biggest, baddest gang in the world?
Lev
@trollhattan: Hey, there’s a Zachary’s here in San Ramon that I’ve never tried! Guess I’ll have to go now.
JK
Jury added a gun charge so he is at 5 years minimum, 14 max (3-10 for gun charge, 2-4 for involuntary manslaughter).
Should have at least been voluntary at the least, but just wanted to remind you of the second charge he was convicted of.
Mnemosyne
@Politically Lost:
They had a story up on Yahoo! News the other day and it looks like the community is working really hard to keep everything peaceful. The big concern is anarcho-kiddies coming in from out of town to stir things up, but they’ve been holding town meetings regularly since the crime happened, so they’re actually pretty hopeful that the violence will be held to a minimum.
stuckinred
First the victims uncle doesn’t blame the jury because they didn’t see all the evidence. Then he said he didn’t understand how they could render such a verdict.
http://cbslocal.img.entriq.net/htm/DayPortCBSPlayer.html?categoryID=130,129,142,140,122,151,143,117,136,172,6,147,155,119,134,154,128,160,127,158,173,121,120,139,126,174&limit=10&[email protected]&adInsertionInterval=2&bannerAdConDefID=27&defaultPreviewImage=http%3A//cbslocal.img.entriq.net/img/PartnerPlayer/samplepreviewimage.jpg&domain=kpix.dayport.com&imageDomain=kpiximg.dayport.com&limit_default=10&conDefID=10&videoAdObjectID=26&logoAdConDefID=9&logoAdObjDefID=25&hitboxAccountID=DM540528JHCB&hitboxDomain=cbs5.com&siteName=KPIX%20TV&callLetters=KPIX&isLiveStream=true&version=20071003
Kiril
Can someone help me out? This idea that he confused his gun for his taser just sounds screwy to me, but I’ve never handled a taser. Does it feel similar in your hand? Do you have to cock a taser? Would someone tase someone in the head?
Amanda in the South Bay
@Kiril:
You got me. I thought that was why they wore the taser on the hip opposite their gun.
Comrade Kevin
@Kiril: No, no and no.
stuckinred
Taser
JMC_in_the_ATL
I’m kind of sure this will make me sound heartless or cynical, but unless the guy is going to be kept out of general population, it doesn’t matter how long he’s in for, he’s got a death warrant once his new neighbors find out who he is.
suzanne
@Kiril: My friend’s Taser is the approximate size and shape of a pack of cigarettes. Not even remotely handgun-like. But maybe police have something completely different.
Tom Hilton
My son lives in West Oakland. He’s expecting it to get ugly. And yeah, he’s pissed off about the verdict.
Larv
Okay, I watched the video, and I can’t tell a damned thing from it. I didn’t watch the whole thing, just the shooting itself. Is there something that happens earlier to make it clear that it’s intentional? What am I missing?
argystokes
It’s awfully hard to tell what happens in the video posted above. A much better video can be seen here
Amanda in the South Bay
Arrgh, I’m sitting here in a computer lab at school listening to a bunch of middle aged tough white guys defending the verdict and being all douchebagy.
Now they’re talking about how horrible minorities and blah blah blah.
I need a drink.
jeff
I’m no expert (at all), but I have a kind-of good impression of Oakland, and I won’t be surprised to see relative peace prevail. Four years is not, perhaps, sufficient, but it also ain’t nothing.
matt
http://isoaklandburning.com
stuckinred
\@jeff: Are you serious?
sidereal
For what it’s worth, which is absolutely nothing, after watching the video, I believe that the cop intended to tase the kid rather than murder him. Grant’s on the ground, getting cuffed, the cops are all in a little, controlled pack, nothing particularly violent’s going on. Unless the cop is a rampant psychopath with a career death wish, he’s very unlikely to murder someone just lying in front of him for no gain.
But it just goes to reinforce the idea that if you’re given a responsibility that includes deadly force, you have to be absolutely perfect. No fuckups, or people die. And cops aren’t perfect. A large number of them are scumbags.
DonkeyKong
Reading about the case, the verdict is a correct one.
That said, trials like these are loaded with real historical frustration and rage at many things, the cops being just one.
The OJ trial was about an ex husband harassing then killing his wife. Horrifically common. That didn’t matter. The trial became a vehicle for other things.
I’m one block from City Hall and can hear the helicopters circling. I’m leaving downtown before it gets dark.
Nothing will happen until dark, then something will happen.
MattR
In looking for the Jon Stewart stand up clip about taking his cat to the vet, I came across this bit about his political activism (including protesting the Rodney King verdict)
stuckinred
Here’s the Oakland African American newspaper after 4 cops were killed (after the Bart killing) Police 2 Oakland Residents 4
“On March 21, 26-year-old Lovelle Mixon was murdered by Oakland police after allegedly killing four of them on MacArthur Boulevard off of 73rd Avenue in East Oakland.”
stuckinred
@DonkeyKong: LA or Oakland?
Mnemosyne
@Larv:
You seem to have missed the part where the guy is handcuffed and pinned to the ground when the cop pulls his gun and shoots him in the back.
MAJeff
@sidereal:
There may be plenty of good cops, but you’ve just laid out why I don’t trust the police. (That, plus I’m a gay man and I know they haven’t exactly been our friends, either.)
Comrade Kevin
@stuckinred: What’s your point?
DonkeyKong
Oakland
stuckinred
@Comrade Kevin: “have a kind-of good impression of Oakland, and I won’t be surprised to see relative peace prevail” right
SeanH
Kiril,
Your instincts seem right to me, it’s pretty damn tough to buy the taser story.
sidereal
And to answer Kiril’s questions more accurately than previous attempts, yes police Tasers often have pistol grips as a google image search for ‘police taser’ will reveal. No, you don’t have to cock it, but if you’ll notice in the video that shows the shot, the cop didn’t cock his pistol either, so clearly he had a round chambered, which I believe is SOP for cops. And no, you don’t tase people in the head, but that’s irrelevant, since Grant was shot in the back, which is right where you’d tase someone.
Comrade Kevin
@stuckinred: Yeah, that paper is run by a group of kooks. They no more reflect the people of Oakland than Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Comrade Kevin
@SeanH: I don’t think using that publication as a source is a very good idea.
stuckinred
@Comrade Kevin: Hey, I’d love it if no one else got hurt.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
Followed by the part where the other cops try to confiscate the camera phone from the bystander who is shooting the scene.
Keep in mind that in Illinois and a couple of other states, the person(s) filming anything that police officers do at any time (including if the officer is engaged in criminal activity) while in public in even on your property can be charged with a felony in the same class as rape.
Vince CA
I read that he can serve 5 to 14 years.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/08/BAM21EBDOD.DTL#ixzz0t8iKf2qv
MAJeff
@celticdragonchick:
F.T.P.
celticdragonchick
@Vince CA:
I would be astonished if he didn’t get the maximum or close to it. Also, there is always the possibility of federal civil rights charges.
stuckinred
@Comrade Kevin: BTW, my best friend lives on Prince, I think it’s right on the Bezerkely Oakland line.
Hunter Gathers
@Vince CA: He’ll be out in 2. Bet on it.
Kryptik
The taser excuse never came off as particularly serious or effective. The fact that people buy it shocks and saddens me. This was murder, plain and simple, I’m sorry.
stuckinred
@Kryptik: Yea, maybe we can have a blogger jury.
mclaren
At least the bastard got convicted of a felony, which means he can never work as a cop or a security guard again.
I was seriously expecting the jury to find this murderer NOT GUILTY.
Jim C
@celticdragonchick:
An important fact to keep in mind.
Also keep in mind that 4 years for 1 person is better than Illinois, 3 years for 3 people, in the final analysis.
celticdragonchick
@MAJeff:
Yeah.
I really do try to keep in mind that they have a hard job and (hopefully) generally try to do the right thing…but it always seems that the first instinct many officers have is to cover up the dogshit that gets thrown on the fan when one of the thin blue line fucks up.
More and more, it really does seem like officers can basically “make up” laws on the spot and arrest you for anything they feel like…especially if you are actually having the temerity to demand your rights as a free citizen to engage in things like filming public acts in public places (like oil spills and dieing animals, or police officers shooting prone African Americans or soldiers and marines on leave).
Hal
You should try reading the SFgate comments on this case. Amazingly hate filled rhetoric, all the while decrying “reverse racism” (which I guess is the Welfare Queen of the 21st century) and thuggery on the part of Black people in Oakland.
stuckinred
@Hal: Reading newspaper comments is about as informative as reading blogs.
fucen tarmal
@Hunter Gathers:
roll; up your windows mr bolton, people can hear you.
Hal
According to the SFGATE site, he could get 5 to 14 years, so I don’t think he’s been sentenced yet….
“Former BART police officer faces five to 14 years in prison in the shooting death of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009.”
jeff
I thought my comment pretty mild. Anyway, I also won’t be surprised if relative peace fails. I still think my hope for relative peace (the comparison may have eluded the person who disagreed, but it’s to the LA riots 20 years ago).
stuckinred
@jeff: It was very mild and I hope you are right (the first time).
Bill Section 147
@Comrade Kevin: The point is there is a really stupid article on a website that purports to be the Black People’s news. And because this exists it is proof that something or other.
It is like how after September 11th Ward Churchill was suddenly the spokesman for liberals and the intelligentsia and the college-educated-hates-America club. And so after his coronation as the guru of the left any shit you want to say about the left is gold and OK and was all the proof you needed that we hate America – or real America.
Sadly the fucktards never remember that the majority of people in this region were horrified at the shooting of the four cops. And this includes the majority of Black People. You also have to ask yourself why stuckinred is up on the Black People’s News Sites. Really, he reads that shit. Damn. I have lived in Alameda County and worked and done business in Oakland for 25 years and I have never heard of this great site.
It is really indicative of the lack of an understanding of justice that anyone thinks a trained law enforcement officer needs to taz a person lying on their stomach with handcuffs on. But even here, on a reasonably intelligent blog, you have people posting that somehow it is all all right. They are of the same mindset as those who take the writing of POCC Minister of Information JR to heart.
KDP
@jeff: I agree with you, Jeff, and the positive changes are due in part to the work of groups like Youth Uprising. Facebook page with video PSA promoting non-violence here. Oakland is a beautiful city that has a bad reputation.
YU is open tonight to provide a safe place for Oakland and Alameda County residents to speak their minds. There is an active community of non-violence advocates who will be working to ensure a peaceful night.
My sincerest condolences to the Grant family on their loss.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
The videos don’t show the fight in the middle of a crowded, out-of-control, chaotic mess going on before and around the shooting, and they don’t fully show another officer screaming obscenities and racial epithets, clocking some of the people who had been fighting, and ordering Mehserle to arrest Grant. Grant was being (but had not yet been) handcuffed when he was shot. One hand was free.
None of that excuses what happened. There is no excuse.
What Mehserle did makes no sense no matter how you look at it. It makes no sense that he would intend to murder Grant, it makes no sense that he would lose his self-control enough to willfully kill him in front of a huge crowd, and it makes no sense that he would mistake his taser for his service revolver. Looking for a rational answer here is beside the point, because it was not a rational act. People act irrationally sometimes. Lots of people on that train platform did. When they do, and they have guns, bad shit happens.
We got the hell out of our office a block from Oakland City Hall as soon as we heard there was a verdict – nobody wants to get trapped. Thousands of people were streaming out of their workplaces to go home. I wished we all could have stayed and just stood still, en masse, in front of all the small businesses, government buildings, and public property that suffered the most last time around and that are going to take the hardest hits. If everyone I saw leaving did just that, there would be no damage tonight. Unfortunately, the rational calculation for any one person is that it makes no sense to do that.
Hal
Too true. I always have to remind myself of the cartoon, where the guy’s wife is asking when he’s coming to bed, and he replies in a minute, “someone on the Internet is wrong.”
Corner Stone
@Kiril:
Among other things, this is a result of severely reduced training for local police forces.
This blog and it’s “tiny pen1s” mantra notwithstanding, anyone who’s ever been trained to handle a firearm can do so in complete dark and even with stressors involved.
The addition of a taser has meant that scared, undertrained men and women have a “relief valve” to reach for to give them a chance to slow things down.
Tasers should be removed from the duty carry roster.
stuckinred
@Bill Section 147: Shit man, I just googled the case and that came up.
sherifffruitfly
(shrug) That’s far more than most white cops get for shooting black folks.
Funny how we enjoy spouting lies like “it’s not race, it’s class” so much, thereby enabling this continued bullshit.
Mnemosyne
@jeff:
I disagree with the comparison to LA — there was, at least, a conviction in this case, even if it was on a greatly reduced (and almost laughable) charge. The cops in the Rodney King case were found not guilty, which was kind of the last straw after seeing the beating on videotape for a solid year on the news.
(Edited for clarity, though I think I may still sound confused. Basically, I think that any violence in Oakland will be minimal and certainly not on the scale of the LA riots.)
Corner Stone
@Bill Section 147:
stuckinred also really, really hates FDL and has escaped there yet he continues to obsessively read it and bring their actions here.
Just food for thought.
stuckinred
@Corner Stone: Yea, I’m the only goddamn one who ever mentions FDL, right?
KDP
More links on the promotion of a peaceful response:
CS Monitor
Local North Oakland community blog
Corner Stone
@stuckinred: Well, you, eemom, Nick and Mike Kay.
That’s like an All Star team of assholes you’re on son.
celticdragonchick
@Hal:
Here are a few from SF Gate:
Hate, authoritarianism and culture war grievance win every fucking time.
Empathy and basic human decency don’t stand a chance.
stuckinred
@Corner Stone: Here’s what you do, you see one of us post, don’t read it. What business is it of yours anyway?
fucen tarmal
transit cops everywhere can kiss my ass.
M.B.
Constant reader, nearly never commenter here: I live in the Bay Area and my husband works close to where the shooting took place. I agree with Comrade Colette Collaboratrice that none of it makes much sense, but I do think it’s just a bit too facile to call this intentional murder. I really don’t think Mehserle (complete idiot) capped the guy (in the back, btw) because he hates black kids or something like that. I think he was scared and confused and dumb and made a horrendous mistake.
My husband and some of his friends were riding BART that night in Oakland and it was completely frightening and out of control on many cars and in many stations in Oakland. There were drunk kids with guns, fights, etc. Ever been trapped on a BART car full of drunk and rowdy Oaklanders? I have, and wouldn’t want to be there again. Mehserle had been in this atmosphere for some time. Also, don’t forget that not long before this incident four or five Oakland cops had been gunned down in cold blood in a single incident in approximately the same part of town…
Sooo…yeah, what Meserle did was incredibly stupid and horrible; and he obviously doesn’t have the constitution to be a police officer and carry a gun if the circumstances of that night were enough to bring him to doing what he did…but it’s too easy to just ignore the extenuating circumstances and blame the bad guys in blue suits. Oakland IS a very complicated and sometimes screwed up place. Law enforcement have a tough job there and they are understaffed and underfunded. That is to say nothing of the injustice that many of the kids who live in these neighborhoods suffer. Any way forward must acknowledge both facts.
Bill Section 147
@stuckinred: Don’t google nothing about teh Jooz then because all hell will break loose.
I am in Oakland once or twice a week. With everything that happens in that town there are always opportunists who go in looking for some action. When I lived in Berkeley in the 80’s you didn’t need any gathering much larger than 50 people for the Sparticists Youth League to show up. Didn’t matter if the protest was about text book pricing or Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. My favorite part was them handing out their ‘newspaper’ at every opportunity. I actually got to read a screed that contained the lines, “…while the Rockefellers sleep in their silk sheets…” and that is why today I am a soshalist.
The community has invested a lot of time in preparing the city for the expected result. Actually a lot of angry people were expecting acquittal. I have some friends who are police officers and they worked in LA during the King incident. They were pissed at that verdict. Bad police work and down right horrible police work hurts us all. Basically the message is out there that if a white cop has you down he can shoot you.
Corner Stone
@stuckinred:
It’s hard to ignore over the sound of you loudly fapping away at some deranged comments at FDL.
“Oh boy, here they come!”
celticdragonchick
@sherifffruitfly:
No, not even that.
What I keep seeing in comments at newspapers is “THEY HAVE IT COMING, BY GOD!!!!!!”
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read comment after comment to that effect when the victim was a badly mentally disable African American man (with the mind of a ten year old) who was also deaf and dumb and had stomach cramps in a bathroom in Mobile, Alabama.
Of course, the police had to tear gas him and bash him a few times, and then charge with the usual assortment of whatever they thought would be entertaining to a judge. Of course, the cop lovers raced to defend the boys in blue and remind us all that anything that happened to the man was his fault, by God…
Authoritarian projection and just world theory. A match made in hell.
stuckinred
@Corner Stone: You use a screen reader huh?
Justin
“Taser confusion” is a problem that was identified years ago and addressed in several ways (including by BART cops):
1. Tasers are worn on the opposite side from the gun, requiring a cross-draw.
2. Tasers in use by cops generally and BART specifically weigh half as much as a loaded pistol, and are twice as bulky. They may have a pistol grip, but the feel is totally different.
3. Tasers also have bright orange or yellow pieces that are very visible to the user, especially one aiming along it.
In the case of Mehserle, “taser confusion” is a bullshit, kitchen-sink defense for something that is absolutely indefensible (and from multiple camera angles). He didn’t have a taser on that night, and hadn’t all week. He’d been trained specifically in the new ways of carrying tasers that are designed to prevent taser confusion, and hadn’t been a cop long enough to have carried a taser any other way.
Mainly, the defense argued taser confusion because there was no other possible explanation they could offer of why Mehserle blew Grant away.
Bill Section 147
@celticdragonchick: It is hard not to vomit. Everyone of those comments is from a self-identifying egalitarian who would never judge someone by the color of their skin. To them, racism only exists in the hearts of blacks and the minds of liberals. They don’t hate black people because they are black…they hate them because black people are thugs.
I think its time for an editorial demanding that black people apologize for Oscar Grant. He had no right to take that officer’s bullet.
stuckinred
@Bill Section 147: That was sort of what I had in mind. There’s dudes that would love the cover of a riot. I was listening to the victims uncle and he encouraged people not to trash businesses with the victims picture in the window. I’ll let Corner Stone explain that.
Elie
@Amanda in the South Bay:
That dude is a hot property once in prison… there will be more than a few who set their caps for him. That is almost worse than actually getting shot…being in constant fear that any minute someone is going to “get” you — and that can vary from being stabbed by some toothbrush all the way to being shot… his head is going to be turning around as on a turret for a long long time…
Darkrose
@celticdragonchick:
And remember, kids: this is liberal northern California! No racism here!
Andrew J. Lazarus
I’m a Berkeley resident, and I’d say the verdict seems about right. The Taser-by-mistake defense is plausible. It’s not clear how a jury could conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Mesehrle, incompetent transit cop, had formed a conscious intention to kill one of the drunken, noisy passengers who had been pulled off the train.
I’d say we’re looking at about a 10-year sentence, and that’s a long time.
Most of the professional window-busters aren’t fighters against racism. Something went wrong in their toilet-training that makes them like to break glass.
Darkrose
@Elie: You’re assuming he’s going to spend a day in jail. I won’t be surprised at all if he gets probation.
jeff
@stuckinred:
Thanks, and I’m sure most everyone agrees. IF a small number do stupid shit, I’m just certain the press will draw broad conclusions which are utterly unwarranted.
Gian
As I understand it, the BART police had just gotten tasers and were poorly trained enough to have taser and firearm on the same hip. To say at the beyond a reasonable doubt standard that this met the legal elements of a murder, and not a poorly trained cop who pulled the wrong handle from the hip. but the lack of training would’ve made it tough to argue that taser use would’ve bee against training as well. BART hired trained and armed this cop
stuckinred
@Darkrose: Uh,
“Mehserle was placed in handcuffs and taken away after the verdict. ”
where ya think they took him, Disneyland?
Elie
Though this is totally unexplainable in some ways, in other ways, it is not uncommon.
We are not much different than our first cousins the chimpanzees who regularly go in small bands to murder individuals or weak groups. It has been documented over and over and is hard wired in some primates. We are designed to be territorial and to predate the weak — and who is “weak” at any point in time varies. That hard wiring for that kind of opportunism teamed up with being hyped up with adrenalin and a person’s individual pathology, can lead to catastrophe.
The only override that we have to that deep mid brain programming are higher synaptic inputs layered in over time from education and training. I think that others upstring have stated the decreased level of training for Oakland police officers these days. Individuals also have their unique “breaking points”.
This aint, unfortunately, anything new. When I was growing up in Chicago, my parents stressed to us over and over to avoid these group mayhem situations because things like this happen all the time in those conditions. Wrong place, wrong time is a horrible refrain we hear way too often…
I still wouldnt want to be that police officer entering the “cage” of State prison. His life may not be worth a damn — being targeted by other “bands” with similar instincts…
Bill Section 147
@stuckinred: Not really the cover of a riot…there are those who will try to make the riot to exploit the cover. There are also those who start riots so there can be intervention.
Lysana
I’m checking into local newsfeeds, and so far, it’s going OK in Oakland. Protests have been peaceful. This is a live feed of the area of Broadway and 14th, which is the one place anything will blow up if it does.
stuckinred
@Bill Section 147: Agents provocateurs! Actually I happened to have been in Berkeley the day after the Chicago 7 Verdict. Got sort of hairy on the Ave.
sidereal
You know, traditionally it’s been paranoid white racists that proclaim that ‘the blacks’ are going to riot whenever something happens to an African American. I’d think carefully about whether I want to put myself in that company.
Maybe the minority residents of Oakland have more class than you give them credit for.
xian
i’ve lived in oakland for 20 years. it was a little tense the night of the rodney king verdict but i don’t anticipate too much trouble tonight.
good local coverage: http://oaklandlocal.com/
wasabi gasp
Cops really need to work on accidentally killing more white kids.
Gian
of note, the @sidereal:
few things from the wire stories:
Fallout from the shooting was swift in Oakland after the videos were shown on television and the Internet. The shooting and the nearly two weeks it took to arrest Mehserle sent the city into a tailspin of violence as downtown businesses were damaged, cars were set ablaze and clashes erupted between protesters and police
(I’d venture to say the fear is not necessarily motivated exclusively by racists, but that experience with this specific case just might be a factor)
as for the sentencing range, there was a true finding on the use of a gun which adds a lot more potential prison time:
The jury had a choice between murder and lesser charges of voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. The jury found that Mehserle didn’t mean to kill Grant, but that his behavior was still so negligent that it was criminal.
Involuntary manslaughter carries a sentence of two to four years. The finding on use of a gun could be used to add as much as 10 years to a prison sentence. The next hearing was set for Aug. 6.
The jury included eight women and four men. None listed their race as black. Seven said they were white, three were Latino, and one was Asian-Pacific. One declined to state their race. They left the courthouse under tight security.
___
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100709/ap_on_re_us/us_train_station_shooting
Hob
@Gian: You understand wrong. Mehserle’s Taser was on the opposite hip from his gun. How hard is it to look something like that up in one of the 10,000 news articles on this case?
Bubblegum Tate
@M.B.:
I sure have–the worst time being this past NYE. It was way out of control.
Today, I left work early and hauled ass to the BART station so I could get from SF back to Oakland before the shit hit the fan. Rarely are Pittsburgh/Bay Point trains so crammed to the gills at 3:45 on a Thursday afternoon.
Hob
@Andrew J. Lazarus: If you’re stating as a fact that Grant was a “drunken, noisy passenger”, I don’t know how you think you know that. The cops said he was disorderly, eyewitnesses said he wasn’t. His blood alcohol level, as reported by Mehserle’s lawyer, was 0.02%– which wouldn’t make most people even noticeably tipsy– and he may also have been on a painkiller which, if it had any effect, would’ve been sedating.
The whole thing was based on a report of some people fighting on the train, which the cops didn’t witness. They detained Grant and the others because they matched the following description: African-American men, possibly wearing black clothes. Seriously.
Gian
@Hob:
seeing as some have suggested here that he wasn’t even wearing a taser at all, I apologize for being just as well informed as they were. per the SFGate’s article
it was on the left, the gun was on the right, and he was trained in the month prior…
(from that story)
The defense put much of the blame for the shooting on poor training at BART – particularly Taser training, which Mehserle received a month before the shooting – and on the character of Grant, a parolee who had spent time in prison.
_____
if you’d like to google, Ivory Webb, you can find a an african american sheriff’s deputy who shot a Latino Iraq war vet, for getting up, when being told by Webb to get up, the vet lived, and the jury walked webb with not guilty verdicts.
that was on video too and can be found with an easy google search.
It might simply be that juries like cops, and are empathetic toward them.
also of note the exposure for the BART shooter is reported as 2-4 years plus 10 for the gun use, which is more than the athelete in another jurisdiction with different state laws got for his gun offense
Cacti
I’m just surprised he wasn’t awarded a medal and extended a speaking invitation to the next GOP Convention.
Lysana
That live feed link I gave is now pointing at the fog rolling in.
Oh, yeah, we got us a big ol’ riot.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
Fuck. The crowd just looted the Footlocker store and the Asian-American Bank on Broadway in Oakland, and now they’re lighting fires. And the cops are just watching them. Fuck.
asiangrrlMN
@wasabi gasp: Ditto this. I don’t know if the cop murdered Grant on purpose or not; I am more disheartened by the people trying to excuse/rationalize what he did. I am sure there are way more good cops than bad ones, but being a minority, I have had to deal with a disproportionate amount of bad ones. It has left me very wary of the police.
Jim
Don’t feel too bad. Four RCMP repeatedly tasered a confused and exhausted passenger in the Vancouver airport a couple of years ago. He died. The four officers lied to investigators and (under oath) before a royal commission of inquiry. The attorney general of British Columbia investigated and declined to lay charges. After the commission reported, he agreed to reexamine the case. So far: 1 dead, 0 charges.
wasabi gasp
@asiangrrlMN: I think you’ve misunderstood me. I hate kids and it’s only fair that cops kill more white ones.
Corner Stone
@Cacti: Yet.
Corner Stone
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
Everyone likes new kicks.
Hob
@Gian: What a lame, defensive, sarcastic non-apology. By “some here”, I guess you mean Justin @77, who was indeed very wrong about that. I don’t know why he said that, but to use it as an excuse for you to spread more (totally different) misinformation makes no fucking sense at all. You certainly had no trouble looking up news stories to bolster your position that Oakland is riot-prone and that racism wasn’t a factor in this case; are the actual facts of the killing less important to you?
Grisha
It looks like most of the looters are the usual Berkeley Hills rich kid anarchists who break stuff at every protest in the Bay Area. The local media have practically been begging for riots. I live in Oakland and while it has been quite eerie today, most of the city is calm.
Hob
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice, @Lysana: All the reporting I’m seeing is that there were 1200-1500 people protesting downtown for over three hours, with no violence other than someone throwing rocks and a police car running over someone’s foot; until about 8:30 when a much smaller crowd broke into a FootLocker, and then at 9 someone ripped off a bank. A half-hour after that, the cops had dispersed just about everyone and arrested some people.
If there’s better info from someone who’s there, please post it, but otherwise it’s not cool to make everyone think there’s a huge riot going on.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Hob:
Not there – just watching on TV like most other people, as I had the sense to leave Oaktown hours ago. I think your assessment was correct until about half an hour ago. It’s a small riot, not a huge one. Windows have been broken and there’s been some looting at a few businesses on Broadway between 12th and 19th (a jewelry store, Sears), there’s a good-size trash fire in the middle of Telegraph, and there are a bunch of smashed car windows. There have been dozens of arrests and cops clearly have not finished clearing the area – live coverage this second shows more police in riot gear moving in as well as thick smoke still rising. It really looks pretty limited, but not quite over.
And as usual, it looks from the coverage and pix on Twitter like most of the trouble is the Black Bloc assholes who came in from Berkeley and SF to smash stuff.
someguy
@stuckinred:
As it should be. Cops are right wing and cop-on-black-person violence is almost never unintentional. This is just one more white person basically getting off real light for just killing one more black person. It isn’t acceptable any more than torture is acceptable. It’s racism coupled with abuse of power. The attempts above to rationalize it as some confusing situation that’s morally ambiguous are sickening. I’ll presume that enough of you are afraid of black people and used to cops putting on the good face around you that you’re suffering your own confusion and ambiguity about the out of control cops here. I don’t see any ambiguity here.
Hob
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Thanks. Bleah. Hope that’s the worst of it. I know my friends on that side of the water are all safe at home, but the town doesn’t need to get any more fucked up.
Zuzu's Petals
@KDP:
I lived in Elmwood, just off Ashby, for three years back in the ’80s. I loved heading into Oakland for just about any and every reason imaginable…it really is an underappreciated city.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
It’s gone viral. Stupid fuckers are apparently now looting the Whole Foods over on Harrison, almost a mile from the main action. I was planning to go shopping there after work tomorrow, because that’s the kind of arugula-eating, reusable-shopping-bag-snob elitist I am. Broadway and Telegraph are completely trashed and there’s graffiti all over the place, as if Oakland needed more of that.
I think the distinction between the many peaceful protesters and the few self-styled anarchists and looters is important, but that’s going to be cold comfort to the business owners and taxpayers who have to pay for this mess.
And of course all of this will surely bring Oscar Grant back to life and magically convict Mehserle of first-degree murder, right?
Steeplejack
@sidereal:
Why even tase the guy?! He is totally under the control of the police and poses a threat to no one.
Tasers are the most direct, in-your-face evidence that we do now live in a police state. When they first came on the scene they were marketed as a “humane” alternative to shooting someone with a gun. From that they have morphed into a casual “attitude adjuster” that the police use on anyone who (they feel) gets snippy with them. People like drunken PGA fans, 10-year-old kids and old people in bed.
Next time you read about someone getting tased, perform this thought experiment: tell yourself, “Oh, back in the old days the cops would have had to shoot them.” Yeah. They would have had to shoot some guy who got drunk and belligerent at a golf tournament. Some kid who was acting up and “out of control” at a day-care center. Some demented 86-year-old woman who “assumed an aggressive posture” in her sickbed.
Fucking bullshit. And this verdict is bullshit.
Steeplejack
Hey, Anne Laurie, if you’re up, please unmoderate my previous comment. Otherwise I will have to go riot and break some shit. And that’s unseemly for a middle-aged honky.
nice strategy
It should have been voluntary manslaughter IMO.
Advocates demanded that the prosecutor bring 1st degree murder charges, which the judge dismissed. From the beginning, they have assumed bad faith and tried to turn a crime and tragedy into a proxy case about police-community relations.
The BART police did crummy work before and after the shooting, which didn’t help matters. That doesn’t prove that Mehserle intended to kill Oscar Grant, of course.
Curiously, to convict on the gun enhancement, the jury had to reject the taser defense. I agree with the family attorney that this looks like a compromise verdict.
I can’t read into Mehserle’s soul; I wasn’t there for his breakdown on the stand, like the jury was. A panicky moment of rage can be both an accident and a serious crime. 10-14 years would be fair. 4 is too few.
Grant’s family have not been the most sympathetic victims in the history of crime. The 1st degree charge was way out of line. They have avoided fanning the flames while also tapping into and promoting the outrage, a tricky balancing act that I can’t really hold against them even though I’d like to believe I’d handle it differently.
I just don’t think Mehserle’s life should be completely ruined to pay for the accumulated incompetence of the entire scene he was a part of that night. It seems to me that many people want him to pay for the accumulated frustration over the Oakland police dept. That’s not justice. That’s revenge.
nice strategy
2 quotes from the Chronicle:
Officials said the main instigators appeared to be organized “anarchist” agitators wearing black clothing and hoods.
Many of the most aggressive demonstrators smashing the windows of banks and shops were white.
—
About 100 people at Youth UpRising, one of the speakout centers, watched Grant’s uncle Cephus “Bobby” Johnson on television from Los Angeles saying that he felt the family had “been slapped in the face by this system that has denied us true justice.”
—
Really just a bunch of winners all around this case.
joseph
Just so. You only need to subsitute ‘white country’ for white person and ‘dark skinned country’ for black person and you have the identical recipe for American foreign policy, with similar rationalizations.
As above, below.
stonetools
I am not all that surprised. The cop was white , after all.
I wonder what would be the result if a young black man shot a white cop in the back and claimed he did it by accident. I imagine that all the folks so sympathetic to the cop in this case would be sneering at the defense and calling for the death penalty.
But hey, a white cop shoots a black man in the back while he is down on the ground and its all, we sympathize with the cop. After all, white cops are justified with using whatever force necessary to control “those people”.
tootiredoftheright
“After all, white cops are justified with using whatever force necessary to control “those people”.
”
You may want to do some research. Black cops as well as black civilians are far more likely to shoot and kill unharmed and undangerous blacks then whites are.
Blacks are more likely to be killed by other blacks then by whites.
William Teach
What, no follow up post, John, about the rioting that occurred last night, rioting by people who are generally on your side of the political spectrum?
edmund dantes
@sidereal: That’s part of the fucking problem. If nothing vioent is going on, if the kid is cuffed, why would you take the chance of the guy having a heart condition and jolting his heart to stop?
Tasers aren’t non-lethal. They are less lethal. The officer had no reason to pull his taser and taser the kid. So he’s even more responible for his actions since he can’t cleaim heat of an uncertain moment. The guy was down and controlled. He was doing it for a sadistic kick. Unfortunately he was so incompetent he didn’t realize he pulled his gun. He didn’t mean to kill the guy, but he meant to torture the guy. If you intend to injure someone and they die as result (even though it wasn’t your intention), normal people would be facing high end manslaughter or low end murder charges.
jh
@tootiredoftheright:
A. Go fuck yourself (maybe this is harsh, but fuck it, I don’t care) Police culture itself is sick. From my experience, it dehumanizes people in the communities that are supposedly being served and almost always works to perpetuate an unjust social order in which minority lives are cheap.
B. There is a huge difference between being killed by a criminal or another civilian and being killed by a police officer, as there is a far greater chance that your killer will be prosecuted and sentenced appropriately if they aren’t a cop. Being a minority male makes this especially true.
C. There is long, rich tradition in this country of white officers and other authorities killing unarmed (or armed for that matter) black men for specious reasons that reaches back the 17th century. This phenomenon reached near epidemic rates in the Jim Crow era where law enforcement would routinely collude with terrorist groups and vigilante mobs in killings.
B and C are what make this current scenario infuriating.
jh
PS,
As someone said on these boards many, many years ago, the first time a group of minority police officers beat, kill or otherwise harm a greatly outnumbered, unarmed white man on video will be the last time.
Jernal
At the beginning of that video, does the guy in the gray hoodie have a gun in his hand? It sure looks like one to me.
Craig
However you read this incident, it is a horrifying indictment against tasers in the hands of cops.
Suppose the officer did mistake his gun for his taser. It’s not entirely impossible: people act stupidly when they’re under stress, especially when they don’t have adequate training and experience. So you give these semi-cops six hours of training before you send them out to contain violent crowds with two objects in holsters–each roughly the same size, shape and weight*–one of them explicitly meant to kill people and one explicitly not.
From the standpoint of psychology, this doctrine is insane.
If the officer really “mistook” his gun for his taser, then let’s be clear about what happened: he wanted to inflict pain on the person he was arresting, and tasing is the approved way to do this. The victim was on the ground with his hands behind his back, but the officer was mad. In another time, he would have given his victim a few good kicks, maybe broken a rib or two, but that is frowned upon these days. As a cop, you can hurt people when they piss you off, but you can’t leave a mark. That’s the real reason tasers are carried.
The post-facto B.S. the cops came up with about the victim’s conduct are utterly unconvincing–he went from being “restrained” at the time of the shooting to “resisting.” Uh-huh. Well, we don’t have video of _that_, but we do have video of the officer throwing racial epithets at his victim just slightly before killing him. If his aim wasn’t to kill, it was to hurt, badly, a person who was in custody and not a threat. Fantastic people we have watching over us.
*”Roughly”–in the heat of the moment, the difference between one pound and two is easy to miss.
Epicurus
Say, why don’t we just throw out this whole pesky “jury” thing anyhow, and just try people in the comments section of your favorite blog? Or maybe we just skip right to the lynch mobs…cripes, yes, it was probably a shitty verdict. But dog damn it, we have to use the system we’ve got, because we haven’t got anything better. I am so sick and tired of every idiot with a keyboard second-guessing the decision of twelve others, who were given the responsiblity of adjudicating this case. Folks, one more time, a trial is not a horse race or a baseball game. You are not rooting for losers and winners, you are (hopefully), making a very tough decision based solely on testimony and evidence given in open court. That is all. If you don’t like the result, feel free to complain about it, but that does not give you the right to destroy other people’s property. End /rant.
Andrew J. Lazarus
@Zuzu’s Petals: Are you related to the Zuzu of the flower store? (I know her—and I live in the Elmwood.)
d
thanks for posting on this
tootiredoftheright
@jh:
“. From my experience, it dehumanizes people in the communities that are supposedly being served and almost always works to perpetuate an unjust social order in which minority lives are cheap.
”
And how the minority treats the police isn’t any better. Let see you have the not reporting of crimes and even minorities saying they would just move if they found out a neighbor was serial killer. Not report said killer nor even do vigilante justice or warn anybody else just move out of the neighborhood. You have a culture that doesn’t understand basic things such as not talking back or yelling when told to do something by a police officer, or that you don’t get things out of your pockets unless asked too since that same gesture is the pull out a weapon gesture from a pocket. American police would love to be able to do what the police in Canada and the UK and other countries namely put on gloves and take the person away for a beating interrogation since there will be no marks on the police officers hands.
tootiredoftheright
@jh:
Minority police officers have been around for over a hundred years. Whites do get killed by the cops especially unarmed ones. Search around there are videos of this on tape.
nice strategy
+1 to Epicurus (#128).
Outraged people ought to read the Chronicle editorial: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/c/a/2010/07/08/EDU01EBK43.DTL
I’m going to amend my earlier comment: the Grant family has behaved poorly throughout much of the process. The police needlessly escalating things on New Year’s Eve was tragic; the family insisting on 1st degree murder charges and disrespecting the jury has been asinine.
There is never justice when someone is killed for unrighteous reasons, only an approximation of justice, and playing this like a proxy case for all police misconduct in Oakland has made matters worse.
Liberals with an awareness of racial codes ought to listen to Grant’s uncle for a while. Yeesch. And if you really want to cringe, you can find clueless people who think Mehserle is now a victim. Best to ignore them, as they are retroactively imposing their dislike of demagoguery onto the facts of the case. Bottom line: Mehserle was guilty of a crime, and most everyone else involved (other cops, Grant’s uncle, and arguably Grant himself) are guilty of poor judgment. But they weren’t on trial.
LT
I don’t know if the verdict was correct or not, but from the many times I watched the videos at the time of the shooting, the officer plainly did not know it was his gun. Right after the shot, he puts his hands to his head. You can almost hear through the scene, “Oh my God. What just happened.” I can see the shock on his face. He shouldn’t have drawn even a taser, and he deserves punishment, no doubt, but I honestly believe his explanation.
That said, the focus needs to be on the fact that a young innocent man was needlessly killed.
jh
@tootiredoftheright:
Bullshit.
How “the minority” treats the police is a direct result of countless incidents of police malfeasance. Period.
I grew up in one of those communities where people were reluctant to report crimes or call the police for any reason, mainly because rather than do any serious policework and attempt to find actual perpetrators, cops would almost certainly randomly round up and harass anybody who fit a broad description of the suspect.
Guilt notwithstanding, if it wasn’t you, it’d be someone you knew and there would almost certainly be some kind of mistreatment (beatings were the norm) in the cards for any poor soul who got caught in the dragnet.
At some point the cure becomes worse than the disease.
As far as the your position that people should not be allowed to sass the police ever for any reason, or pay with bodily harm, I once again invite you to go fuck yourself.
And as for the silly notion that police in the US are holding back compared to their foreign counterparts goes, I’d laugh if weren’t such a willfully ignorant position to hold.
There are literally thousands of documented cases (which means the undocumented cases are even greater in number) of police brutality, excessive force, torture, extrajudicial killings, evidence tampering, perjury and other crimes at the hands of police officers, right here in this country.
And that’s not even counting my personal experience as a law abiding African-American male with no criminal record who counts in his own family a number of cops and people affiliated with the criminal justice system (my grandfather was a bail bondsman).
My great uncle was NYPD IAD in Queens, NY in the 1980s and for this very reason, he was more terrified of the police than any of us.
Darkrose
Arrest stats per Sgt. JD Nelson of Alameda County Sheriff: (On KRON 4 News this morning):
78 arrests total
19 people from Oakland.
28 people from Bay Area, but not from Oakland.
19 people from California, but not from Bay Area.
12 people from out of state
But of course, it’s those crazy black folks in Oakland rioting.