A Reasonable and Justified Manner? A Profoundly Bigoted Lens

Stephon Clark, 22, another unarmed American citizen
shot and killed by police

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra's announcement on Tuesday, that his office will step in to oversee the investigation into the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Stephon Clark by two Sacramento Police Department officers last Sunday night, does address some concerns expressed by outraged community members about the ability of SPD to conduct an impartial investigation into its own officers.

But it's hard to say how much comfort that's going to bring Clark's family members considering he was shot multiple times for holding a cell phone.

As more detailed information about this incident begins to trickle out, a familiar narrative from the Sacramento Police Department is already beginning to unfold - the now familiar claim that the two officers who fired 20 shots at Clark (including shots fired when he fell to his hands and knees) did so because they feared for their lives.

The two officers were reportedly called to the scene in response to someone reportedly breaking the windows of cars in the neighborhood, when they confronted Stephon Clark in the backyard of the home where he lived, they claim he advanced or moved towards them with something in his hand.

Seconds later an officer yelled "Gun!" and the two officers fired 20 shots; the object in Clark's hands turned out to be a cellphone.

He was shot about 60 seconds after the SPD officers on the ground first encountered him - adding to the already-suspicious fatal shooting is the fact that one of the officers can be heard telling another to mute the sound on his body camera immediately after the shooting, right before the audio cuts out.

The arc of this investigation is obviously going to take a long time, especially given the growing media attention, mounting public outrage, and the involvement of the state attorney's office.

But one of the things that troubles me about this shooting is that the officers themselves claim that they were sent to the scene in response to reports of a man breaking car windows.

21-year-old Isaiah Malailua 

Now that's clearly a crime warranting a quick police response, but is that the kind of situation that calls for discharging a weapon?

The violent response of the two Sacramento PD officers to a black man holding his cellphone in his own backyard is remarkably different from the Chicago PD's response to an armed white man arrested in Chicago's Union Station on Friday.

According to an article by Chicago Tribune reporter William Lee, a California man named Isaiah Malailua (pictured left) was arrested at an Amtrak ticket counter wearing a bullet-proof vest and carrying a 9mm handgun.


Authorities quickly apprehended him after police K-9 dogs detected the odor of explosive residue on a duffel bag that belonged to Malailua that was found in another part of the station.

Now obviously I'm not suggesting that Chicago authorities should have just yelled "Gun!" and started firing in the middle of a crowded train station - they did the right thing, they located him, surrounded him and took him into custody.

The point I'm making here is that the officers who arrested Malailua in Chicago knew he was potentially dangerous because a Greyhound bus ticket with his name on it was found inside the duffel bag with the explosive residue on it that was detected by the K-9 - they also found police SWAT gear inside the bag that he'd apparently stolen from the NYPD.

So they knew who he was, and when they found him at the ticket counter he had a handgun on him and was wearing a bullet-proof vest - that's got "potential mass shooter" written all over it.

Considering recent events and the fact that Malailua was inside a crowded major urban transit hub, authorities on the scene could have been justified in shooting him, but they didn't.

What role did Malailua's skin being white have to do with how the Chicago authorities treated him?

Stephon Clark's brother Stevante leads a protest chant
during a City Council meeting Tuesday night

Contrast his arrest with the Sacramento PD's response to reports of someone breaking car windows in a neighborhood last Sunday night - where they shot and killed Stephon Clark about a minute after encountering him.

In Sacramento, the SPD had no idea who Stephon Clark was - they saw his skin color and flipped the fuck out.

Now if I was a cop, and I'm not, a report of a suspect breaking car windows on the street could sound like garden variety juvenile vandalism.

Or worse, maybe someone under the influence of heroin, crystal meth or crack desperately looking for a quick score to sell something to get high.

It's hardly the modus operandi of a professional car thief, so someone breaking car windows sounds either desperate or stupid - it makes a lot of noise, attracts a lot of attention in a neighborhood after 9pm at night, and it increases the chances of getting busted by the cops.

Does that sound like a situation where you go in with a gun drawn ready to fire shots at the first person you see?

Or does it sound like the kind of situation where it's better to ascertain who it is and what's going on?

Granted it was dark out, but responding SPD officers had a police helicopter hovering overhead that had guided them to the general location, and based on the audio that was released, the SPD officers didn't identify themselves as police officers when they encountered Stephon Clark.

If you haven't already seen it, take a look at this body cam footage when the two SPF officer come upon Clark in his grandmother's backyard - it's not bloody or anything, you can't see the actual shooting.

No charges: Baton Rouge PD officers Blaine Salamoni
and Howie Lake, II

The officer's first words at 9 seconds into the video sound like "Show me your hands! Gun!" 

He's out of breath and says the words so fast it's hard to hear what he's saying - plus the police helicopter is hovering overhead.

About 6 seconds later the officer yells, "Show me your hands-Gun-Gun-Gun!" and both officers just start firing shots.

It's the initial contact that's troubling.

In some ways it reminds me of the initial contact that Baton Rouge PD officers Blaine Salamoni and  Howie Lake, II demonstrated when they first encountered 37-year-old Alton Sterling in front of the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the early morning hours of July 5, 2016.

The two officers were responding to an anonymous caller alleging a man was waving a gun around in front of the store, they pulled up, approached Sterling (who was known to sell CD's outside the store), interrupted a conversation he was having with two women and told him to put his hands on a car.

Not having done anything illegal and not knowing what the officers wanted with them, Sterling protested and tried to pull away - at which point one of the officers pointed their loaded gun at Sterling and said:

"Bitch, I'm gonna kill you." 90 seconds later Alton Sterling was shot dead at point blank range while on the ground pinned on his back by both officers - Salamoni fired six shots from his weapon.

There was no, "Police officer, we need to speak with you." or "Show me your hands!" or "Freeze! Police officer!"

Alton Sterling seconds before
being shot by Salamoni

They literally pulled up, pointed a loaded handgun at his head and said, "Bitch, I'm gonna kill you."  - and they did.

The last time I blogged about Salamoni and Lake back on May 5, 2017 was just after the Department of Justice under Jeff Sessions announced they would not pursue criminal charges against either man.

As you likely heard, on Tuesday Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced that the state would not be filing criminal charges against either Salamoni or Lake.

This despite the store owner Abdullah Muflahi saying that Sterling was not waving a gun or threatening anyone, and never brandished a gun or threatened the two officers with it at any point.

Muflahi, who witnessed the shooting, says Sterling had no idea why the two policemen were even there when they threw him on the hood of a parked car and tasered him before wrestling him to the ground.

In an April 15, 2012 op-ed in the New York Times published two months after the violent racist psychopath George Zimmerman stalked, attacked then shot and killed teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, journalist and author Brent Staples observed:

"Young black men know that in far too many settings they will be seen not as individuals, but as the 'other', and given no benefit of the doubt....Society's message to black boys - 'we fear you and view you as dangerous' -  is constantly reinforced. " 

In his lengthy statement to the press on Tuesday, after stating that probable clause (rather than an actual crime), the presence of drugs in his system and resisting an arrest for something which he was never informed, were all contributing factors in Alton Sterling being shot and killed, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry concluded "that both officers acted in a reasonable and justified manner in the shooting death of Mr. Sterling."

Writer Brent Staples

The question now facing the Sacramento City Council, the California State Attorney's Office and the Sacramento Police Department is one which members of the community who protested during a City Council meeting on Tuesday night have already raised:

Were the two Sacramento PD officers who fired 20 shots at Stephon Clark while he was in the backyard of his own home acting in a "reasonable and justified manner"?

The answer, which must come from a court of law, will obviously take time to articulate and materialize.

But it should be viewed in the context of the words of Brent Staples from his op-ed written in the wake of Trayvon Martin:

"Very few Americans make a conscious decision to subscribe to racist views. But the toxic connotations that the culture has associated with blackness have been embedded in thought, language, and social convention for hundreds of years. This makes it easy for people to see the world through a profoundly bigoted lens without being aware that they are doing so."

It's that lens that lies at the heart of the death of Alton Sterling, Stephon Clark, Trayvon Martin and so many other men of color in this country.

Tried, convicted, sentenced and executed in a span of minutes - far from any court of law, denied the right to legal counsel guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and brutally silenced before having the chance to testify on their own behalf.

And as the cases of Alton Sterling and Trayvon Martin both demonstrated, found complicit in their own deaths and cruelly forced into the unfathomable role of being silent witnesses for their own prosecution by a judicial system that views plaintiffs and defendants through "a profoundly bigoted lens."

There's nothing remotely reasonable or justified about that.

Justice For Alton Sterling & The Social Cancer of Hate In America

Uncharged: officers Blaine Salamoni & Howie Lake

From a purely legal standpoint, the likelihood that the Department of Justice was going to file federal charges against Blaine Salamoni and Howie Lake, the two Baton Rouge, Louisiana police officers who shot and killed 37-year-old Alton Sterling back in 2016, was slim to start with.

But from a human perspective, it's a rather poor reflection of the DOJ that Sterling's family had to learn that federal charges wouldn't be filed in the news.

According to a family spokesman, no one from the DOJ had bothered to contact the Sterling family by the time the Washington Post broke the story on Tuesday afternoon.

Given the high profile and delicate nature of the case, and its broader implications on the racial fabric of America, and the increased focus on the conduct of law enforcement, that's inexcusable.

Let's take a quick look back at what happened last summer.

At around 12:35am back on the night of July 5, 2016, officers Salamoni and Lake responded to an anonymous phone call reporting that a man selling CD's was waving a gun and threatening a homeless man at in front of the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge.

Despite the fact that the owner of the store Abdullah Muflahi later said that Sterling was "not the one causing trouble", Salamoni and Lake confronted Sterling, tasered him multiple times and slammed him on the hood of a car before wrestling him to the ground.

Sterling seconds before being shot

While both officers were on top of Sterling, pinning him to the ground, one of the two officers yelled that Sterling had a gun after seeing the butt of a .38 caliber handgun in his pocket during the struggle.

If you look at the photo on the left taken seconds before Sterling was shot, you can clearly see one of the officers' left knee pinning Sterling's left arm to the ground while pointing his handgun directly in Sterling's face with his right hand.

The other is pinning Sterling's thigh and Sterling is clearly on his back; does it look like Sterling is overpowering them?

Moments later Salamoni was heard yelling, "Lake, he's going for the gun!" and six shots were fired into Sterling's chest and back at point blank range, killing him.

Multiple witnesses said Sterling never made an attempt to go for his gun, and in an NBC News interview, the store owner Abdullah Muflahi said that  "Sterling never wielded the gun or threatened the officers."

Take a couple minutes and watch Muflahi's interview on MSNBC, he's the one who videotaped the incident from the angle seen in the photo above - he said he never saw Sterling go for a gun, and the handgun he had on him didn't even appear until after the cops had shot him and went into his pocket and took it out.

Muflahi said he knew Alton Sterling for six years and that he allowed him to sell CD's outside the store because he never caused problems of any kind.

According to evidence gathered during the course of the DOJ investigation, Chris Stewart, one of the attorneys representing the Sterling family, says that when Blaine Salamoni and Howie Lake first arrived at the scene of the incident last year, one of them walked up to Sterling, pointed a hand gun in his face and said, "Bitch, I'm gonna kill you."

That's the very first thing they said to Sterling, before ascertaining any evidence that he'd even done anything wrong.

Alton Sterling

They didn't ask to speak with him.

They didn't ask him if he'd threatened anyone, they didn't introduce themselves and say that had a few questions for him.

As Muflahi the store owner told MSNBC, they didn't even tell Sterling why they were there - they just pointed a gun at his face and threatened to kill him.

The subsequent protests that took place in Baton Rouge and elsewhere as thousands of people expressed outrage over the shooting were seen around the globe.

And tragically, Salamoni and Lake's actions led to the loss of more innocent lives, as two weeks later on Sunday July 17th an enraged 29-year-old former U.S. Marine named Gavin Long drove to Baton Rouge from his home in Kanas City and shot and killed three Louisiana police officers and wounded three others in a disturbing act of retribution.

Despite all that, and public pleas from the Sterling family to the DOJ, no one from the Department of Justice even bothered to contact them and explain why no charges would be filed in Alton Sterling's violent death.

Considering that the DOJ's budget for fiscal year 2016 was $28.7 billion and they have at least 117,298 federal employees, you'd think they'd have the resources and presence of mind to make sure that the someone in the department visited, or at the very least picked up a phone and called the Sterling family to let them know.

It was only after news of no federal charges being filed went public on Tuesday that officials from the DOJ contacted the Sterling family to inform them on Wednesday according to Chris Stewart, one of the Sterling family attorneys.

Urban League CEO Marc Morial

All of this begs the very real question: is this an indicator of the Trump administration's plans for public policy in terms of federal oversight of state and local law enforcement in cases of clear excessive use of force by police, or racially-biased policing?

Is this the kind of interaction with the Department of Justice that people of color and Hispanics in America who've had their rights violated can expect under Jeff Sessions?

It would seem so according to "Protect Our Progress: The State of Black America 2017", the annual report issued by the Urban League on Tuesday that examines economic well-being, healthcare, education and criminal justice to gauge the outlook on quality of life for African-Americans for the next four years under the Trump administration.

From my perspective, the DOJ's bungled handling of delivering the news of the decision not to file federal charges against police officers Salamoni and Lake in the death of Alton Sterling is a reflection of the chaotic flip-flop hypocrisy of Trump's presidency.

Back on August 17, 2016 as he was polling at 1% with African-Americans, he gave a speech near Milwaukee after two nights of protests in the city after police shot and killed a black man - Trump said, "There's no compassion in tolerating lawless conduct for anyone."

In the same speech he said, "I'm asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today who wants a different and much better future."

But once he was in office his Department of Justice tried to undo agreements on policing reforms that had been carefully negotiated with police departments with histories of rampant racially-biased policing in cities like Chicago and Baltimore.

And Justice For All?

During the 2016 campaign he lambasted political opponents for being involved in military conflicts in the middle east, even though he himself said he supported military action in Iraq on the Howard Stern Show in '02.

Once in office he ordered the U.S. Navy to fire 59 missiles into Syria and dropped a massive bomb on Afghanistan.

Now he's sword-rattling with North Korea.

When Trump was trying to bash China to enflame disenfranchised American workers who've watched their jobs disappear overseas to vote for him during the election, he promised he would label China a currency manipulator within the first 100 days of being in office.

But on April 6th the Chinese government approved three trademarks for his daughter-wife Ivanka's clothing line - six days later on April 12th, just days after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump famously reversed months of anti-Chinese campaign rhetoric and announced that China was "not a currency manipulator."

The only consistent thing about Trump and his presidency is that he lies and changes his policy positions almost daily to suit his own needs.

And so while he tried to woo African-Americans with fake assurances that he would bring "law and order" to communities around the nation last year during the campaign, last week his Department of Justice decided not to use its vast resources to ensure law and order for Alton Sterling.

As Urban League CEO Marc Morial was quoted as saying about the prospects for quality of life for African-Americans under Trump according to a Washington Post article by Tracy Jan on Tuesday:

Alton Sterling's son calls for peaceful protests in
the wake of his father's shooting

"The social cancer of hate continues to metastasize, thriving in a climate conducive to hostility towards religious and racial minorities, permeating even at the highest levels of national discourse and threatening to further crack our fractured nation."

When Trump delivered his inauguration speech on January 20th, he said he wanted to unify the country.


So what's his goal with refusing to even comment on the Sterling case? Or the case of Jordan Edwards in Texas?

By willfully turning a blind eye to the epidemic of racially-biased policing in this nation, evidenced by innocent unarmed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards being shot in the head with a rifle six days ago by recently-fired Texas police officer Roy Oliver, he's allowing the social cancer of hate to spread.

Trump's the guy who finds time to Tweet about Arnold Schwarzenegger's crappy ratings on NBC's The Apprentice, but on cases of overt violence against ethnic and religious minorities? Silence.

By refusing to show even a shred of leadership on this issue, or use the power of the DOJ to ensure justice for all, Jeff Sessions and Trump are, as the dissident Soviet writer, teacher and activist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote, "ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

And so the task of holding Blaine Salamoni and Howie Lake legally responsible for killing Alton Sterling falls upon the state of Louisiana - that's an aspect of law and order that the Trump administration clearly wants nothing to do with.