Absolved Again: Betty Shelby's Acquittal

Tulsa PD officer Betty Shelby acquitted in the
shooting death of Terrence Crutcher

If not for the intense mainstream media focus on the latest of the seemingly endless stream of ethical bombshells coming from the White House last week, the acquittal of Tulsa PD officer Betty Shelby probably would have garnered far more attention than it did.

With racial polarization in America already enflamed by the enraged delusional rhetoric of the Trump campaign, 40-year-old Terrence Crutcher's violent death caught on video on Friday September 16, 2016 horrified the nation.



If you recall it dominated the news cycle heading into that weekend eight months ago, compounded by nervous media rumblings about racial unrest.

That's an interesting term when you think about it, isn't it? "Racial unrest."

As if the default state of racial tensions in a nation founded on an agrarian economy based on enslaved African labor, is somehow at "rest".

The dash-cam and helicopter videos, as well as recordings of police dispatch radio transmissions, that were quickly released by the Tulsa PD three days after the incident on Tuesday September 19th arguably made many restless - regardless of their ethnicity, socio-economic background or religion.

The facts of Terrence Crutcher's shooting were at once disturbing and familiar to people around the globe - an unarmed man of color being shot and killed by an American law enforcement professional for reasons that didn't seem to warrant the use of deadly force.

Tulsa PD officers Betty Shelby and Tyler Turnbough were only doing their duty when they responded to multiple 9-1-1 calls from motorists at 7:36pm reporting an SUV stopped in the middle of a two-lane road with the driver's side door wide open and a driver, Crutcher, who was walking around outside the vehicle acting oddly.

Terrence Crutcher with his hands raised seconds
before being shot by Betty Shelby

One driver stopped to ask if he needed help and claims that Crutcher replied that he thought his SUV was about to explode.

When Shelby arrived she quickly recognized that Crutcher was under the influence of some kind of substance.

He didn't seem coherent, he ignored her commands and casually walked away from her and Turnbough with his hands raised.


He never threatened them or charged them.

He just didn't listen to them.

But as toxicology reports would later show, it's possible he wasn't able to actually understand them as he had both PCP and TCP (a hallucinogen and psycho-stimulant even more powerful then PCP) in his bloodstream at the time of his death - a Tulsa PD homicide investigator claims to have found a vial of PCP inside Crutcher's SUV.

But was Crutcher "wacked out" on PCP to the degree that he represented a physical threat to the officers at the scene as Tulsa PD and Shelby's attorney seemed to suggest?

Or did his skin color and physical size magnify the sense of danger that Betty Shelby said she felt that prompted her to shoot him while he was standing next to his SUV with his hands in the air?

Take a minute to look at the helicopter footage taken just moments before Crutcher was shot, he's walking slowly away from the officers with his hands in the air - if you're queasy about that kind of thing you can't actually see him being shot though when the helicopter comes around you can see him laying on the ground with blood on his shirt.

Betty Shelby (right) with her gun on Crutcher
as he walks away from her toward his SUV 

As you can see from the dash cam video image at left taken from Tyler Turnbough's police cruiser just after he pulled up to the scene to assist Betty Shelby, she had her gun drawn on Crutcher and he was walking away from her with his hands up.

He wasn't running, he was walking.

Officer Turnbough quickly pulls up to offer assistance and as the two approach Crutcher near the back his SUV, Turnbough tasered him and Shelby shot him in the chest.

The bullet she fired broke four of his ribs and pierced two of his lungs.

He died in the hospital several hours later.

As the autopsy report states, "The cause of death is penetrating gunshot wound of chest with musculoskeletal and visceral injuries. The manner of death is classified as homicide."

Two days after the video was released showing Crutcher with his hands in the air, even Donald Trump (while polling at historical lows with African-Americans) weighed in on the Crutcher shooting saying he was "very troubled" by the shooting and speculated that Betty Shelby had "choked" because she was scared.

From the time that she was charged with first-degree manslaughter, Shelby's attorney did everything possible to characterize Terrence Crutcher as some kind of dangerous raving lunatic on PCP with a prison record for selling crack - they even talked about Crutcher being obese, (as if the fatal gunshot wound to his chest wouldn't have killed him if he'd been thin.)

But the problem is Officer Shelby didn't know any of that when she drew her handgun and later fired the shot that killed Crutcher, she only knew that he was an African-American who was acting strangely after parking his SUV in the middle of a road.

If she was so scared, why didn't she just wait for backup?

If you watch the video, there are two other officers responding to assist her and Turnbough as she fires that shot - and Crutcher isn't in an elementary school parking lot or in a mall, he's wandering around his SUV parked in the middle of a rural stretch of road surrounded by woods.

Terrence Crutcher with his son

Had Crutcher turned suddenly towards Shelby, or rushed the officers her shooting him in the chest would at least make some kind of sense.

But he had his hands in the air and he was walking, not running, away from her.

From my point of view, her decision to shoot him was a totally unjustified use of deadly force in a situation where it wasn't warranted.

Therefore she should have faced at least some kind of legal responsibility for taking his life.

But the court ruled there will be no legal repercussions for her pulling the trigger.

She will soon return to duty.

The outcome of this trial represents yet another example in a disturbingly long line of American law enforcement professionals who've shot and killed unarmed African-American boys or men, only to be absolved of legal responsibility for their actions in a court of law based on a specious legal argument that the officer's fears of a situation or threat that did not actually exist - was justification for taking someone's life.

At the core lies an unresolved examination of the complexity of how racial bias influences the thinking and decision making of members of law enforcement under stress.

This case, and many like it, seem to elevate the presence of that stress or fear above the life of innocent citizens - many, like Terrence Crutcher, who were unarmed when they were killed.

Officer Betty Shelby

Step back for a moment and consider this case in the context of the Tulsa Race Riot.

In which an enraged mob of white citizens aided by local police intentionally set fire to the prosperous African-American section of Tulsa known as Greenwood and systematically beat, stab, lynched and shot at least 300 innocent black Americans over the course of May 31 - June 1, 1921.

Seen through that historical lens the acquittal of Betty Shelby is particularly troubling on a number of levels.

It suggests the deep-seated racial prejudices that sparked one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history almost 96 years ago, still resonate in the minds of some - in Oklahoma and beyond.

Even some who are sworn to protect in serve.

Was Officer Betty Shelby conscious of her own internal racial bias back on September 16, 2016?

We may never know that answer, she herself may not even know or understand that.

But we do know that last week, a court of law in Oklahoma absolved her of any legal responsibility for taking a human life.

Based in large part on the internal fears that she herself testified prompted her to fire the fatal shot that took the life of Terrence Crutcher.

A son, brother, cousin and father - another name on the long list of The Counted.

Jordan Edwards & Cops Using Cars As License to Kill

Jordan Edwards, shot & killed by Balch Springs PD

Given the high profile announcements of bold policy changes from America's revamped Department of Justice over the past few weeks, the DOJ's silence in recent days has been deafening.

Particularly in the wake of the shocking death of 15-year-old Mesquite High School freshman Jordan Davis late Saturday evening in Texas at the hands of police officer Roy Oliver.



As multiple media outlets, including the Dallas News, are reporting, Jordan was one of what witnesses said were about a hundred teenagers who were attending a party at the home of a woman named Lisa Roberson on Saturday night in Balch Springs, Texas about 15 miles from Dallas.

Roberson was out of town, and like millions of other American teens (including your's truly) have done on occasion, her son threw a party.

But problems arose when large numbers of teens began milling about in neighbor's driveways on Baron Drive, and a resident named Dora Daniels called police because she was concerned about underage drinking.

When members of the Balch Springs PD arrived, teens naturally began scattering and at some point multiple witnesses heard what sounded like gun shots - which, given the conservative Republican-majority Texas state legislature's efforts to allow people to openly carry firearms virtually anywhere in public, isn't all that surprising.

Hearing the shots, Jordan Edwards, his two brothers Vidal and Kevon and two other friends jumped in a car and tried to drive away, but according to witnesses, a Balch Springs PD officer Roy Oliver approached the vehicle and was heard cursing loudly before he fired three shots from a rifle into the passenger side window - striking Davis in the head and killing him.

Edwards two brothers and their two other friends were roughly handcuffed and arrested as their brother and friend lay bleeding in the front seat of the vehicle.

Heartbroken parents Charmaine and Odell Edwards
at a press conference on Monday 

The specifics of this latest example of excessive use of force by police against a young unarmed man are painfully familiar to most Americans.

Jordan Edwards wasn't committing a crime.

He was unarmed and he'd done absolutely nothing to threaten or harm anyone, including the police officer who shot him in the head with a rifle.

The officer who shot him initially tried a tactic familiar to Americans too:


He lied to investigators to try and make it seem like he "feared for his personal safety" in order to try and justify taking the life of an unarmed American child.

The unnamed officer's initial claims that the car in which Edwards and his friends were driving had reversed and was somehow moving towards him in an "aggressive manner" were publicly, and to the Balch Springs PD's credit, quickly dismissed as bogus.

As Liam Stack and Christine Hauser reported in the New York Times yesterday, Balch Springs PD police chief Jonathan Haber announced that a review of video evidence showed that the car in which Edwards and his friends were driving was moving away from officer Oliver when he fired the fatal shots - not towards him.

Sound familiar? It should.

Remember back in July of 2015 when Seneca (South Carolina) PD lieutenant Mark Tiller shot and killed 19-year-old Zachary Hammond in the parking lot of a local Hardee's after the kid tried to drive away in the wake of a buy and bust operation?

19-year-old Zachary Hammond 

Hammond's 23-year-old date had unknowingly sold a small bag of weed to an undercover cop, when Lt. Tiller ran up to the vehicle with his pistol drawn, the poor kid panicked and tried to drive away.

Tiller fatally shot Hammond in the back and in the side, claiming he'd been forced to kill Hammond in self-defense because he feared the scared 19-year-old was going to run him over.


But a 42-second clip of police dashboard video of the incident showed that Hammond's vehicle was not only slowly trying to drive away, Tiller actually made multiple efforts to put himself in front of the vehicle.

Watch it for yourself, does that look like Hammond is purposefully trying to run Tiller over?

I'm not saying it was right for Hammond to try and flee, but neither was Tiller's decision to shoot and kill a scared kid who obviously terrified of being busted with weed in the car - he didn't deserve to be shot for that.

Investigators eventually ruled that Tiller had acted in self defense and he faced no charges.

The very same week that Hammond was shot in South Carolina back in July of 2015, the world was reacting in horror to the video footage of former University of Cincinnati campus police officer Ray Tensing shooting unarmed motorist Samuel Dubose in the head at point blank range while the motorist had his hands in the air.

Tensing, who was famously wearing a black t-shirt with a Confederate battle flag on it under his uniform when he pulled Dubose over for a missing license plate, initially told investigators that he'd been forced to shoot Dubose because the driver was dragging him along with his car.

But body-cam footage showed that the only reason that Dubose's car was moving was because Tensing had inexplicably shot the man in the head, forcing Dubose to slump forward and hit the accelerator.

Balch Springs PD officer Roy Oliver

While nothing can be done to bring back the victims of these flagrant and totally unjustified uses of deadly force, the rapidly expanding use of video technology on police vehicle dashboards and on the officers themselves is slowly starting to shed light on the propensity of some members of law enforcement to try and shield wrongdoing behind false allegations that a driver was trying to use a car to hurt or kill them.

The speed with which Balch Springs PD chief Jonathan Haber has moved to expose Roy Oliver's lies and fire him from the force is a clear indicator that, to a degree, technology is helping to pierce the Blue Wall of Silence that has shielded some members of law enforcement from facing responsibility for their actions.

But it's not just technology in this case.

After the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and so many other young unarmed Americans, there's also a growing recognition taking place.

Not just amongst the families of the victims, but also amongst law enforcement professionals, judges, local and city officials and the public at large that something is dangerously wrong with the way that some cops interact with young men.

But in the case of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, it's also the character of the young man himself that's led to the swift removal of Roy Oliver from the force for his actions last Saturday night.

The Mesquite High School body and the Texas community in which he and his family lived has been devastated by his death.

This is a kid who was a straight A student with an excellent GPA, and a great personality who was also a gifted student-athlete who was just getting ready to start a new football season and an exciting new chapter in his life.

This was a kid who'd left an impact on people he knew, including the Mesquite HS football coach who said of Edwards:

"You create a checklist of everything you would want in a player, a son, a teammate, a friend and Jordan had all that. He was that kid." 

There must be consequences for taking that away without just cause or reason, but as the Edwards' family attorney Lee Merritt said in response to the news of Oliver being fired, that's not enough.

The road to justice for Jordan Edwards, his family, his friends and his community is going to be a long one, and there won't be any help from Jeff Sessions' Department of Justice - so it's going to be up to the local and state courts to hold Oliver accountable for his actions.

In the meantime, instead of a high school freshman roster, Jordan Edwards joins the tragic list of the The Counted in America.

Chad Robertson, The DOJ's "Pull Back" & Trump's Blind Eye

Shot in the back: Chad Robertson with his family

With each day, it seems as if the Republican politicians frantically tugging at the strings of power in Washington are turning the clock backwards to a darker place.

Attorney general Jeff Sessions has already indicated that the Justice Department under the Trump administration will "pull back" on using the power of the federal government to hold members of law enforcement responsible for the unjustified killing of innocent unarmed U.S. citizens.

While that is reflective of Session's history as an opponent of civil rights activists and voting rights (for people of color and immigrants), it certainly doesn't bode well for Chad Roberston's family to obtain justice from the legal system.

Amidst all the confusing clutter of mainstream media attention focused upon America's resident Deporter-in-Chief over the past few weeks, the deadly shooting of Chad Robertson by Amtrak police in Chicago did not garner the level of media attention it probably merited.

You certainly haven't heard Sean Spicer whining about "under reporting" over THAT particular case in any of his contentious, invitation-only White House briefings lately.

(But it's a safe bet that Spicey won't be complaining about the media "under reporting" tonight's bombshell Washington Post story about records showing Sessions lied under oath during his Senate confirmation hearings about his having been in contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential race...)

Any number of local Chicago and midwestern media outlets ran the AP text of the story about Robertson's death, but it felt like the questionable circumstances warranted more extensive mainstream media attention given the ongoing epidemic of members of law enforcement making the decision to shoot at unarmed African-American and Hispanic men for no justifiable reason.

Sadly, Robertson's death was yet another case of a member of law enforcement making a deadly decision to fire a handgun at a person based on a false allegation of the victim having a weapon that never actually existed.

Amtrak transit officer LaRoyce Tankson

According to an article posted two weeks ago on the Chicago Sun-Times Website, Robertson, 25, and two travelling companions were on a one-hour layover stop at Chicago's Union Station during a February 8th Megabus trip from Memphis to Robertson's home town of Minneapolis.

As the three of them were walking around inside Union Station, they were approached in what the Robertson family attorney Douglas Hopson called an "aggressive" manner by two Amtrak transit officers.

Robertson and his friends then exited Union Station to walk to a nearby restaurant to get something to eat.

When the two Amtrak transit officers followed the three men to the restaurant, they continued to harass the three passengers and demanded to search them - when Robertson, who feared for his life, began to run away at about 8:45pm, officer LaRoyce Tankson dropped to one knee and fired a shot and missed.

He fired a second shot that struck Robertson in the back, the bullet lodged in his spine and left the father of two a quadriplegic.

He died in the hospital seven days later.

Tankson was subsequently charged with first-degree murder by Cook County prosecutors and was held on $250,000 bail - but he was released pending a March 9th court appearance.

Now Tankson's attorney claims Robertson and his two friends were confronted by Tankson and his partner for smoking some marijuana in public - and a small amount was found on him after he was shot.

But does that really justify shooting the guy in the back while he was running away?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions

But remarkably, yesterday, as the New York Times reported, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Department of Justice would begin to pull back from efforts to monitor police departments and officers accused of the excessive use of deadly force.  

Despite the Justice Department's own report that identified racially biased policing as widespread and systematic in Chicago.


And despite unarmed 25-year-old Chad Robertson having been shot in the back by a federal transit officer while running away less than a month ago, Sessions, now the nation's top law enforcement official, reasons that:

"We need (to), so far as we can, in my view, help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness."

So in Sessions' mind, decreasing Justice Department scrutiny of overt cases of unarmed people being shot by police is the way to help them "get better"?

Does that make sense to you?

In the hermetically-sealed ideological bubble of Trump-world, that kind of asinine thinking, codified by the unapologetically white supremacist worldview held by the White House's top domestic policy advisers including Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, it does makes sense.

In the real world it doesn't.

Jewish tombstones overturned in Philadelphia [Getty]

In the real world that kind of thinking essentially condones criminal conduct by some members of law enforcement.

And worse, it also reassures them that if they "make a mistake" and shoot and kill an unarmed person for no real reason at all, the Department of Justice under Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions won't hold them accountable for their actions.

Sound absurd?

It is, but it's part of the Republican vision for the American landscape.

And remember folks, that's the approach to police reform of a president who yesterday actually had the gall to publicly insinuate that the horrifying wave of recent bomb threats to Jewish schools and community centers, and the heinous and offensive desecration of Jewish cemeteries were the fault of Trump's "opponents".

Not the cowardly devotees of Breitbart News who openly play footsies with anti-Semitic and white supremacist beliefs like some kind of sick religion.

Nope. The delusional ass-clown who currently occupies the Oval Office would have you believe that his "opponents" were the ones who entered a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia the other night and spent hours toppling over hundreds of tombstones.

 The same president who last night asked the members of Congress and the American people to "embrace this renewal of the American spirit." willfully turns a blind eye to the anti-Semitism his own campaign brought out of the shadows.

Repulsive acts of hate that are taking place around the country in front of our own eyes.

Sadly, we can also expect the current attorney general to turn a blind eye towards the epidemic of racially biased policing in America which violently and unfairly condemned Chad Robertson to the unfortunate ranks of The Counted.

Who's Ignoring Domestic Terrorism Based On Race?

One of the faces of domestic American terrorism:
racist killer Adam W. Purinton

Earlier today Donald Trump was quick to take the stage at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland to rant about deporting brown-skinned immigrants.

As the New York Times reported, Trump's rambling CPAC speech "included a promise to throw illegal immigrants 'the hell out of the country' and a recitation of his law-and-order campaign promises." 

Right-wing hot-air rhetoric custom tailored to his overwhelmingly white conservative audiences that are replete with coded racist overtones and the intentional vilification and "othering" of people with dark skin.


45 has been big on pedantic inflammatory blathering about kicking people off welfare, simplistically characterizing cities like Chicago as vast post-apocalyptic wastelands and his incessant finger pointing at terrorist attacks abroad; both real or, as in the case of Sweden, imagined.

But interestingly, the White House has been virtually silent about a recent act of violent domestic terror that resulted in the shooting death of an innocent person of color and the wounding of two other people.  

On Wednesday night patrons at a popular sports bar in the affluent suburb of Olathe, Kansas called Austin's Bar and Grill were watching a Kansas Jayhawks basketball game on TV when witnesses heard 51-year old Adam Purinton yell out "get out of my country" before he pulled out a gun and began shooting at two Indian men.

According to an article on the Huffington Post, 32-year-old Alok R. Masadani and 24-year-old Ian P. Grillot both suffered gunshot wounds, and a third man of Indian descent named Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot and killed.

Grillot, who is white, did not know the the two locally-employed engineers from Hyderabad, India, but according to an Aljazeera.com article bartender Garret Bohnen said in an interview, "From what I understand, when he [the gunman] was throwing racial slurs at the two gentlemen, Ian stood up for them." 

Like other terrified patrons Grillot hid as Purinton fired nine shots, but then he attempted to subdue the gunman as he tried to escape, but was shot in the chest.

Victims Masadani, Kuchibhotla (center) and Grillot

Purinton fled across state lines and eventually found his way to an Applebees 70 miles away in Clinton, Missouri where he allegedly told a bartender that he'd "just killed two Middle Eastern men."

It took the White House two whole days to comment on the shooting, by the time Sean Spicer offered a statement about the incident earlier today, it was to insist the shooting was not related to Trump's anti-immigrant fear-mongering.

At a press conference on Thursday an FBI spokesman said the agency is still trying to determine if the senseless attack was motivated by racial bias.

By any definition the shooting that took place in a crowded bar on Wednesday night has all the characteristics of a terrorist attack.

So where's the heated condemnation and muscular anti-terrorism rhetoric from the White House?

Maybe that righteous indignation only applies when the attacker is Muslim and has dark skin.

Perhaps the problem for the White House in this case is one of perception since Purinton, a 51-year-old white American male who looks exactly like a textbook definition of a Trump supporter, doesn't fit into the current White House definition of "other."

Regardless, what's becoming clear about the High-Chair President is that sometimes his silences can be just as revealing as his endless Twitter messages and rambling speeches.

For the past two weeks he's done little but blather on about terrorism and the danger that unprovoked attacks based on hatred pose to innocent people.

But for 48 hours this week the same guy who watches television all the time and Tweets about crap as meaningless as a retail chain not carrying his daughter Ivanka's fashion accessories, says nothing about a white American man hurling racial slurs at and then shooting two innocent Indian men minding their own business at a crowded bar full of patrons - while yelling "get out of my country"?

I mean honestly, who does that sound like? Same guy who told the audience at CPAC earlier today that he planned to throw illegal immigrants "the hell out of the country"?

Why don't Trump and Spicer mention domestic terror
attacks against people of color in America?

Remember a few weeks ago when Trump stood in front of an audience at the U.S. Central Command and leveled false accusations about the media underreporting incidents of terrorism?

Specifically he said:

"It's gotten to the point where it's not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it."


Later that day, in what can only be described as a case of the chaotic Trump administration trying to coordinate their flagrant (and frequent) lies, White House press secretary Sean Spicer cited "several instances" where he claimed the media had not adequately reported terrorist acts committed or supported by the Islamic State.

The White House released a list of 78 terrorist attacks that it claimed were underreported.

In response to those wildly unsubstantiated accusations leveled by the White House, on February 7th the BBC published a list of the 78 incidents and carefully detailed the ones they had reported on - all but 12.

Well the media is reporting on the terror attack that took place in Olathe, Kansas - but this time it's Trump who isn't talking about it.

Srinivas Kuchibhotla and his wife Sunayana Dumala

Last week Trump spent at least three days talking about a terror attack in Sweden that never happened, but in three days he's said nothing substantive about an actual terror attack that actually did happen on American soil where one person was killed and two injured?

He's got some balls using ten minutes of his CPAC speech earlier today talking about "fake news media" being the "enemy of the people".

And thus Srinivas Kuchibhotla, yet another unarmed innocent person, joins the ranks of The Counted.

According to the latest statistics from GunViolence.org that number now stands at 2,320 for 2017.

2,320 human lives, and it's only February 24th.

Just remember folks, one of the first pieces of legislation the Republican-majority House and Senate went after was overturning an Obama administration order that made it tougher for people with mental illnesses to obtain firearms - think about that when Purinton tries to plead insanity.

Who's the real "enemy of the people" in this country?

Justice for Sam Dubose & Ray Tensing's T-Shirt

Ray Tensing (left) and victim Samuel Dubose

Donald Trump's latest stream-of- consciousness Tweet this morning suggesting that people should be jailed or loose their citizenship for burning the American flag offers a troubling glimpse of the president-elect's views on Constitutional protections.

Particularly given that the Supreme Court has firmly established that burning the American flag is protected by the First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

So what's going to become of the growing nationwide calls for more police accountability for officers who use excessive and deadly force in situations where it's unjustified?

Considering that Trump's pick to head the EPA denies the existence of climate change, his pick to head the Dept. of Education supported a law to allow child labor, and his pick to head the Department of Justice opposes both voting rights and civil rights, it's fair to ask how the incoming administration and F.B.I. are going approach the slew of unjustified killings of unarmed innocent people of color by police in this country.

How will a Trump administration impact egregious police brutality cases on the local and state level?

For example, will justice ever be served for the senseless and violent death of Samuel Dubose in Cincinnati at the hands of an overzealous campus cop back in 2015?

After the first trial ended with a deadlocked jury earlier this month, earlier today a new judge, Hamilton County (Ohio) Common Pleas Judge Leslie Ghiz, was assigned to the case.

Her first decision will be to rule on the prosecutor's request for a retrial in a new location.

Judge Leslie Ghiz replaces Judge
Megan Shanahan

According to an article posted on Cincinnati.com this afternoon, Ghiz is a non-nonsense Republican former Cincinnati City Councilwoman and assistant prosecutor who is respected by attorneys and has a reputation for handing down tough sentences.

As an assistant prosecutor she was known as being a friend of  law enforcement, but that's generally true for any prosecutor.

Will she grant the motion for Tensing's retrial?

Millions of people watched the video of former University of Cincinnati campus police officer Ray Tensing shooting Samuel Dubose in the head at point blank range while the unarmed motorist was in the driver's seat of his vehicle with his hands raised over his head.


Last year I posted a blog on July 30th to try and make sense of the outrage I felt at seeing yet another unarmed man of color shot and killed by a law enforcement officer for no reason.

The facts of this flagrant case of excessive use of force remain as troubling as they were confusing when the incident happened last July 19th when Tensing stopped Dubose for not displaying a front license plate properly.

Based on the audio and images taken from Tensing's body-cam the two appeared to be having a relatively civil discussion over Dubose wearing his seatbelt when Tensing suddenly pulls out his gun, points it at Dubose's head and fires - killing him instantly.

Watch this three-minute edited version of the body-cam video of the moments leading up to the shooting for yourself - does it appear that Dubose is in any way even remotely acting aggressive towards Tensing?

And don't worry, the actual shooting portion is so shaky that it's too difficult to actually see the gunshot to the head - but you can hear it.

Ray Tensing shoots unarmed Sam Dubose in
the head while his hands are raised.

Video still frames (pictured left) definitively showed that Dubose was seated behind the wheel with his hands in the air when Tensing fired the shot.

Totally contradicting Tensing's initial bogus claim that Dubose was attempting to drive away and that Tensing was being dragged and was forced to shoot Dubose to save his life.

It's hard to see it in the video, but look at the image, both of Dubose's hands are in the air at the moment Tensing fires his gun.

Tensing's attempt to use the same ambiguous rationale so often used by members of law enforcement who shoot and kill unarmed people for no discernible reason, that he feared for his life, was not only contradicted by the video evidence, his motivation for shooting Dubose was also called into question based on a strange piece of evidence that wasn't revealed until the case went to court.

During the course of the trial, prosecutor Joe Deters revealed to the stunned courtroom that when Tensing followed, stopped and then shot and killed Dubose, he was wearing a t-shirt under his police uniform with an image of the Confederate battle flag on it and the words "Great Smoky Mountains".

Does the fact that Tensing was wearing a t-shirt with the image of a Confederate battle flag on it under his uniform during the unjustified shooting death of an unarmed African-American man pulled over for minor civil infraction serve as some kind of "smoking gun"?

T-shirt Tensing wore when he shot Samuel Dubose

Not in a court of law, no.

But it does call into question the issue of motive for the shooting; particularly given the fact that Tensing was a campus police officer.

Take a look at the t-shirt (pictured left), we live in a free country and campus police officers can certainly wear what they want to; regardless of what any of us think.

But members of law enforcement, be they campus police officers or real cops, must be held to a higher standard given that they are licensed to carry and use firearms.

Given that members of law enforcement are expected to perform their jobs with a degree of objectivity and fairness, does it seem right for an on-duty officer to wear a t-shirt with a Confederate battle flag on it?

What if the t-shirt had a swastika on it?

Or how do you think that same jury would have voted if Tensing was an African-American campus police officer and Dubose was an unarmed white motorist and it was shown that the officer was wearing a t-shirt with a Black Panther logo or an image of Malcom X on it?

Family & friends of Sam Dubose comfort one
another after his funeral last July. 

From my perspective Tensing certainly has a right to wear that t-shirt on his own time, but by wearing it on duty (even under the uniform), it clearly raises questions about his impartiality as a law enforcement officer.

Unfortunately for Dubose's family, friends and advocates of justice and human rights, a mistrial was recently declared after a jury in Ohio remained deadlocked on whether or not to find Tensing guilty of murder or manslaughter charges.




But prosecutor Joe Deters has been adamant about holding Tensing accountable, and I don't think anyone who watched the video of an unarmed Dubose being shot in the head at point blank rage while his hands were up after being pulled over for an improperly displayed license plate would agree that it's fair that Tensing's first trial ended in a hung jury.

Obviously many people are anxious to hear how Judge Leslie Ghiz rules on the motion for Tensing's retrial, perhaps Samuel Dubose has a better chance of receiving some measure of justice from a judge who runs a tighter courtroom.

According to the Cincinatti.com article, not long after she won her seat on the bench, Judge Ghiz said in a radio interview that she wanted to be known as the "Velvet Hammer"; - we'll see if she lives up her reputation for tough sentences.

For the sake of both justice and human rights, let's hope she does.

A Bomber Gets Wounded, An Innocent Guy Is Shot & Killed

Rahami being taken into custody

Like millions of other people, I applaud officers Angel Padilla and Peter Hammer, the brave members of the Linden (NJ) Police Department who found Chelsea bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami sleeping in the entranceway of a Linden bar, and managed to take him into custody yesterday after a shootout.

Given the circumstances it's remarkable that they captured him alive to be questioned.

By all accounts, both officers had every right to use deadly force on the 28-year-old Rahami, but they kept their composure and maintained their professionalism. 

As WABC reported Rahmi almost immediately opened fire on officer Padilla after he was awakened by the officer who recognized him as the bombing suspect.

Despite the fact that Rahami ran into the street firing shots, the officers managed to shoot and wound the suspect; ensuring the opportunity for members of law enforcement to interrogate the suspect for critical information on the bombings in Chelsea and Seaside Park.

That's a pretty significant contrast to the way that members of the Tulsa Police Department treated 40-year-old African-American motorist Terrence Crutcher last Friday night when they came upon his vehicle stalled in the middle of a road and shot him dead. 

Terrence Crutcher walks away with his hands raised

Credit should obviously go to the leadership of the Tulsa PD for releasing the video to the public as quickly as they did to demonstrate a willingness to conduct an open investigation into the shooting.

Unlike the Chicago PD who waited over a year to release the video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot multiple times as he was walking away from officers.

From what we know, the case of Terrence Crutcher is very different, it's still light out as you can clearly see from the video still above.

Now if you haven't already seen the video you should take a look at it for yourself, I've watched the dash cam footage from one of the Tulsa PD vehicles that approaches the scene after the first officer is already in contact with Crutcher. 

But I think people need to watch the overhead police helicopter footage and listen to one of the officers as he casually remarks that Crutcher "looks like a bad dude, he's probably on something".

It's clear that three different officers standing shoulder-to-shoulder are within about twenty feet of Crutcher as he's walking away from them slowly with his arms clearly in the air.

Officer Betty Shelby

He doesn't rush them, he makes no attempt to flee or any sudden movements that suggest he's reaching for a weapon; but one of the officers tasers Crutcher, and then another officers fires a shot from a hand gun.

According to an NBC News article, the lawyer representing officer Betty Shelby, the white Tulsa police officer who fired the shot that struck and killed Crutcher, Shelby claims Crutcher wasn't responding to police commands and then walked to the side of his vehicle - again, slowly with his hands up.

But as Crutcher family attorney Benjamin Crump observed,  images taken from the helicopter video footage clearly show the driver's side window was rolled up, so clearly Crutcher wasn't reaching inside the vehicle as was initially reported.

From what I read about officer Shelby, she doesn't seem like a bad cop.

I do think find it interesting that her Tulsa PD officer husband was inside the helicopter that took the clearest video of the scene; though the Tulsa PD claim he wasn't the officer heard on the radio saying that Crutcher "looks like a bad dude."

There's still so little known about what prompted that deadly shot, and obviously an investigation will reveal more information, but I do think it says a lot about how race, ethnicity and unconscious (or conscious) bias affects how some members of law enforcement in this country view African-Americans as "threats".

Like that officer in the helicopter, he's hundreds of feet in the air over the scene, yet he makes the determination that Crutcher (a church-going father who'd supposedly just come from a night class at Tulsa Community College) is a "bad dude".

What was he basing that on?

In the same year (2015) that Dylan Roof, the white gunman who walked into a South Carolina church and shot and killed nine African-Americans at a Bible study in cold blood (and who was beaten up in jail back in August), was taken into custody by police without incident - Walter Scott, the unarmed black motorist who was shot in the back by former officer Michael Slager after being stopped for a faulty brake light and trying to flee, was killed on the spot for a minor civil infraction.

The list of unarmed black Americans killed by police is disturbingly long, and Terrence Crutcher's death in Tulsa makes it longer.

Seems to me that if officers in Linden, NJ can take a suspected terrorist responsible for detonating explosive devices designed to kill large numbers of people into custody without killing him, four officers in Tulsa should be able to detain an unarmed man with his hands raised walking slowly around a stalled vehicle parked in the middle of a road.
  
But this is America, and for some police officers, perhaps perception is more important than logic.

Bombs & Bullets By The Light Of The Full Moon

Gov. Cuomo & Mayor de Blasio inspect the explosion site

Back when I used to work as a bartender in an Irish Pub on West 81st street in New York, there were a few regulars who worked as cops and firefighters.

One of my favorite regulars was a guy named George who worked as the on-call social worker at the emergency room of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Based on the kinds of people we dealt with at our respective jobs we all knew that the arrival of the full moon each month always coincided with an uptick in unusual behavior.

Violence, people having meltdowns, random encounters with really weird people; that kind of thing.

It was to the point that one of them could walk into the bar with a haggard or exhausted look on their face and I could look at them and say, "Full moon?" and they'd just nod and sit down for a drink and explain some kind of incident they'd experienced on the job.

The full moon for September that took place on Friday was a Harvest Moon, meaning it's the full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox, but as astrologers note, the effects of a full moon can be felt anywhere between one to four days before or after the actual full moon.

Donald Trump's decision to publicly announce on Friday that he was officially accepting the long-established fact that the President of the United States was born in Hawaii after spending five years fanning the flames of discredited Birther theories was about as bizarre as him having the gall to lie and and say Hillary Clinton started the Birther-thing.

I know I'm not the only person still shaking their head over some of the senseless violence and unusual events that have taken place over the past three days.

Particularly the explosive device that was detonated on Saturday night in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan and a smaller device that exploded Saturday morning near the location of the scheduled Seaside Semper Five 5K charity run benefitting U.S. Marines that was scheduled to take place in Seaside Park, New Jersey.

While it's way still too early to be able to definitively tell who was responsible for the two explosions, CNN is reporting that the man dressed in a security guard uniform who said something about Allah and asked at least one person if they were a Muslim before going on stabbing rampage in a Minnesota mall on Saturday before being shot and killed by an off-duty police officer was acting on behalf of some kind of ISIS splinter group.

Tulsa cop shot unarmed Terrence Crutcher on Friday

Things turned deadly in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Friday for reasons that had to do with a very different kind of terror.

According to a statement from his family, 40-year-old Terrence Crutcher (pictured left, center) was driving home from a class at Tulsa Community College when the SUV he was driving stalled in the middle of a two lane road.

Tulsa police responding to a different emergency saw the SUV and stopped.


According to a rather confusing statement from the Tulsa Police Department, officers saw Crutcher approaching their police vehicle and they asked him to put his hands up (whatever happened to "Good evening sir, is everything okay here?").

Now what happened next isn't really clear, but police claim that Crutcher "refused to comply with police commands", allegedly reached into his vehicle and one officer shot him with a taser before another officer fired a single shot that killed him.

Crutcher's family insist he was unarmed and that he was driving home from class; if the police pulled up and asked him to put his hands up, maybe he got mad and was reaching in his car to get his ID to show to the police.

(Remember Levar Jones? He was the African-American pulled over at a gas station by former South Carolina State Trooper Sean Groubert back in 2012, Groubert was caught on video ordering Jones to show his ID, when Jones reaches into his car to get his wallet Groubert shot him.)

Now I think if most people found themselves on a road with a stalled vehicle, your natural inclination would be to approach a police car for help right?

If you've ever blown a tire or been stuck on the side of the road at night, it's a little scary and when a tow truck or a cop shows up you're relieved to see them, and the natural inclination is to go towards them assuming they're there to help you, not kill you.

Jonathan Ferrell killed by police in 2013

In fact you may recall that three years ago almost to the day that's exactly what happened back in September of 2013 when 24-year-old African-American Jonathan Ferrell, a former Florida A&M football player who got into a bad accident near Charlotte, NC, crawled out of the back window of his vehicle and knocked on the nearby home of a woman to seek help.

She called the cops and told them someone was trying to break in, officers from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department showed up, saw the injured Ferrell running toward them for help and promptly shot him with a taser before shooting him multiple times and killing him.

By the way that incident took place on September 16, 2013 three days before the full moon.

Now I'm not ascribing all these events to the full moon, plenty of bad stuff happens when the moon isn't full, but I wanted to share the strange frequency with which unusual events tend to happen around the full moon - ask a cop or an EMT about it.

Like the bizarre shooting rampage that took place Friday night in Philadelphia that left an innocent woman dead and two police officers and three civilians injured.

Just this afternoon a man was shot and killed at the intersection of Stuyvesant Avenue and Marion Street the West Ward of Trenton, NJ; less than a mile from the spot where city Councilman Duncan Harrison called for action against gun violence last week.

And so 40-year-old Terrence Crutcher of Tulsa, Oklahoma joins the list of The Counted, one of 41 people killed by police in the United States this month - one of 772 to be killed by law enforcement this year.

Anyway, let's all hope that the two explosions that took place in New Jersey and New York on Saturday don't have anything to do with random acts of terror connected with ISIS; the full moon is nice to look at, but some of the things that happen under the light of that full moon aren't always so pretty.

Alton Sterling's Death - Use of Force Gone Wrong

Cameron Sterling & Quinyetta McMillan earlier today

Another July, yet another senseless death at the hands of overzealous police officers responding to a non-violent civil offense.

The world is once again stunned over video showing police officers killing a man who's already restrained on the ground.

Last night two officers from the Baton Rouge Police Department shot and killed 37-year old Alton Sterling after a confrontation escalated over, of all things, Sterling selling CD's outside of a small store. Not drugs or weapons. CD's.

Earlier today I listened to some audio excerpts from the press conference in Louisiana earlier this morning where Quinyetta McMillan, the mother of Alton Sterling's 15-year-old son Cameron, read a statement to the media about the impact of Sterling's death.

If you haven't heard it, McMillan read her statement with remarkable composure, but it was difficult to concentrate on her words with the sound of Sterling's son Cameron crying softly as he tried to cover his face (pictured above), watching this child, clearly traumatized over watching video of his father's violent death, brought this incident into a human perspective.

While preliminary reports indicate police responded to the scene based on a 911 call from what media reports have described as "an anonymous caller" reporting an armed man, during her press conference this morning Quinyetta McMillan insisted Alton Sterling was simply selling CD's.

Thus far there's no definitive evidence that Sterling had a gun or attempted to point it at the two officers who had him pinned to the ground.

Judge for yourself, if you watch the cell phone video taken at the scene by a horrified bystander, Sterling is standing by the front of the car arguing with the police officers, but there's nothing in his hand, nor is he threatening them with any kind of weapon.

While an investigation is just getting started, and all the facts are not yet known, the parallels between this case and the death of Eric Garner two years ago on July 17, 2104, are disturbingly similar.

Alton Sterling

Two heavyset African-American men, fathers of children with families, engaged in selling items of relatively little value to make a few bucks being confronted by white police officers who somehow escalate a remarkably minor civil infraction to the point that they feel the use of deadly force is justified.  

Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes on a street in Staten Island in the neighborhood where he lived.

After members of the NYPD confronted and attempted to arrest Garner, officer Daniel Pantaleo placed Garner in an illegal choke-hold even as he was already on the ground being restrained by other officers, rendering him unconscious - minutes later he was dead.

Despite the video evidence, a grand jury declined to press charges, Daniel Pantaleo is working the streets of New York as a police officer as you read this.

It's way too early to tell what the outcome of this case will be as far as the two officers being held responsible for Sterling's death, but a federal investigation is underway.

Baton Rouge PD officer Blane Salamoni 

But there were Justice Department investigations into the death of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray too - thus far no one was held legally responsible for their deaths.

The two officers have been identified as Howie Lake, II and Blane Salamoni (pictured left), and it is interesting to note that the New York Times reports that Salamoni's father Noel Salamoni is a captain of special operations on the Baton Rouge police force.

As I've often said in far too many entries on this blog, at some point this country needs undertake a serious examination into what is going on inside the minds of police officers who are so quick to resort to the use of deadly force in situations that don't warrant it.

Especially when the victim is a person of color in a nation in which entrenched racial bias in policing is a problem in police departments across the country.

It's hard to watch, but take a close look at that cell phone video, watch the officer nearest to the camera remove his handgun from his holster even as he's on top of Sterling.

Obviously I can't understand what was going on in his mind at that moment before Sterling was fatally shot in the chest and the back, but viewed from the standpoint of a civilian who has seen too many of these videos, did he think his life was threatened by a man already pinned to the ground by two officers?

Or did the race of Alton Sterling unconsciously make him seem more of a threat than he actually was in the mind of the man who shot him?

As in many things, perception is everything, but in this case, from what we know so far, it seems perception was the difference between life and death.

Mistrial for William Porter & Jayvis Benjamin's Wait For Justice

Mistrial for Baltimore PD officer William Porter

It was a rather sobering day for those interested in seeing at least some measure of justice meted out by the Baltimore court system for 25-year-old Freddie Gray's gruesome death while handcuffed in the back of a Baltimore PD prisoner transport van.

Earlier today judge Barry G. Williams declared a mistrial after the jury remained hung on whether or not Baltimore police officer William Porter could be found guilty for charges including misconduct, manslaughter and assault for failing to respond to Gray's request for medical assistance and neglecting to properly fasten Gray into a seat belt to secure him in the back of the police van.

As Robert Lang and Tyler Waldman reported for the WBAL radio News 1090 Website:

"Porter testified that he did not put Gray in a seat belt, for fear he might grab his gun, even though Porter said that when he discovered Gray on the floor of the police van, he was having "an adrenaline dump," and was unable to move. Porter and other officers who testified described Gray as having suffered from "jailitis" where suspects try to fake an injury, hoping to be taken to the hospital instead of jail."

While I'm not a police officer, I doubt I'm the only person skeptical of a cop claiming he was worried about his weapon being ripped from his holster by an unconscious injured man laying on the floor of a police van.

Christie trashes Black Lives Matter on Face the Nation

Don't hold your breath waiting for conservatives like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to offer thoughts on what a mistrial in the Gray case might mean for the larger issue of the lack of trust between large segments of the public and police departments caused by the lack of accountability for officers who take the lives of innocent and unarmed people in custody.

Opportunistic reactionaries like the Christies and Trumps of this nation delight in embellishing their conservative street cred by unfairly and wrongly characterizing all protesters aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement (or anyone who protests the rampant abuse and killing of American citizens by police officers) as "anti-police" agitators who advocate the murder of police officers.

As Christie did on CBS during an October 25th interview on Face the Nation when he also clumsily tried to link President Obama to ongoing nationwide protests against illegal police killings in one of his many awkward efforts to pander to the right and prove his conservative credentials by trashing the President over - well pretty much anything.

The six Baltimore PD officers charged in Gray's death

Given the extent of the protests that gripped the city of Baltimore in the wake of Gray's death it's understandable that police are erring on the side of caution to prepare for any possible public reaction to the news of the mistrial.

As I write these words, NPR reports that protesters are gathering in front of the courthouse in Baltimore and chanting "No justice, no peace."

Which of course is their right to do under the Constitution.

But it's my hope that protesters in Baltimore remain peaceful and remember that beginning in January five other officers (pictured above) will face charges in court in Gray's death.

So at least there's still a chance that at least someone will actually be held legally responsible for a man's death while in police custody - a man who hadn't actually committed a crime.

Viewed in a larger context, the fact that State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby actually brought charges against the six Baltimore police officers within months of the incident has to be seen as a positive step.

It took well over a year for Illinois State's Attorney Anita Alvarez to file charges against Chicago PD officer Jason Van Dyke; which she finally did hours before the release of the video footage of Van Dyke emptying his pistol into 16-year-old Laquan McDonald as the teen was walking away from police officers.

Here in "the worlds leading Democracy", the wait for justice for African-American and Hispanic victims of excessive police violence can take even longer - if it happens at all.

Consider the case of Jayvis Benjamin, a 20-year-old college student who was shot and killed by Avondale Estates Police Department Sgt. Lynn Thomas back on January 18, 2013.

Jayvis Benjamin, killed by police in 2013

As an article in the New York Daily News by Shaun King reports, Benjamin (pictured left) was accused by police of having stolen a car when he allegedly ran through a red light and crashed into the yard of a home.

In what has become an all too familiar refrain in America, police officers claim Benjamin tried to attack an officer and Sgt. Thomas was forced to shoot Thomas in the chest, killing him.

But Benjamin was unarmed at the time.

His mother Montye Benjamin says the car he was accused of having stolen actually belonged to his grandfather and he had permission to drive it.

Benjamin also had no police record - so given these circumstances why no charges in the case?

Benjamin's mother says police have videotape of the incident, but they still refuse to release it.

DeKalb County DA Robert James

As King's article details, the prosecutor, DeKalb County District Attorney Robert James (pictured left), and police are coming under fire for dragging their feet in an investigation that's now stretching into almost three years.

For over a year James has been assuring Jayvis Benjamin's family and the media that a grand jury will review the case so what's up?

Is he hoping the case just goes away?

There's a hope that increased public interest in the case driven in part by the national media attention on the prosecutions in Chicago and Baltimore can function as leverage to motivate the DeKalb County DA to make a decision on bringing charges against Sgt. Thomas in the death of Jayvis Benjamin.

Time will tell but there's a sense that the longer they wait in DeKalb County, the more suspicious the absurd length of the investigation seems - two years and counting?

In the past, the refusal of police and the prosecutors they work with to release the video tape of Benjamin's death and the lack of charges of any kind being filed for his death may have once worked as a way to shield police from facing responsibility for the death of an unarmed civilian under murky circumstances.

But given the changes that have taken place in the wake of other high-profile police killings - the lack of action on the part of the DeKalb County DA comes off as the kind of bureaucratic foot-dragging that  blew up in the face of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuele and the heads of police departments in Chicago, Baltimore, Ferguson and elsewhere.

It's been an unreasonably long wait for the mother and family of Jayvis Benjamin to get some kind of closure, but in this age of the rapid evolution of social media the old adage that parents, grandparents and teachers have told generations of children rings more true than ever - the truth eventually comes to the surface.

In the interests of ethics, the public trust and the concept of justice, the DA Robert James and officials within the Avondale Estates Police Department don't want to be on the wrong side when the truth about Jayvis Benjamin's death finally surfaces in DeKalb County Georgia.