Quote:
Originally Posted by Max Goodman
In this case, I don't find it plausible that he was killed by someone who was angry that he worked with the police.
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I find it plausible that someone who had already shot him in the foot, and who had fatally shot his friend in the same incident, might have come back to finish the job, as Joshua Brown's father says Joshua feared would happen.
But I also find it plausible that others who wished Brown harm might have taken advantage of the fact that there was another suspect, too, to deflect suspicion from themselves. Which is why there needs to be a thorough investigation.
And is also why many people, myself included, think the Dallas Police Department needs to hand over that investigation to an independent agency. It's not a good idea to give a group of police officers, who might have had a motive to retaliate against someone who helped convict one of their own, the opportunity to sabotage this investigation and to frame someone else.
I was one of the speakers at
this San Diego City Council committee meeting last month. I supported the proposal of Women Occupy San Diego to replace San Diego's currently-toothless Community Review Board on Police Practices with an independent commission, with its own attorneys and investigators and subpoena power, and I spoke in opposition to the City Attorney's pathetically watered-down alternative. At the same meeting, a San Diego Police captain (not the chief of police) gave an update on how SDPD officers in the field are complying with the reporting requirements of California's Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (AB 953). He mentioned that the officers had not previously been collecting data about that, so it has been impossible to recognize patterns that might indicate implicit or explicit bias in policing, and to address those problems with better training and disciplinary action.
I mention this because in the public comment period after the police captain's presentation, which seemed to me a very good idea to increase police accountability, three people of color took the stand to say that they vehemently opposed having officers collect any data on the perceived race and identity of the members of the public with whom they interact, because in their opinion all officers are racist and can't be trusted not to falsify reports to their own advantage. All three speakers said that they and their friends have experienced multiple stops by the police and demands for identification, for no apparent reason other than being a person of color in public, but they suspected that if data is now collected from these encounters, it will always be altered so that the police will be able to "prove" that any accusations of racial profiling are unsubstantiated. They directed their comments not to the City Council members, but to the largely Black and Brown audience, encouraging them to never, ever cooperate with the police in any way, because doing so "aids the oppressor" and rewards the police for demanding more information from members of their community than they demand from whites.
That's how badly the relationship has soured between the police and certain parts of the Black and Hispanic communities in San Diego.
So I can easily believe that someone in Dallas might be upset enough about someone cooperating with a police investigation to retaliate with violence. Even when that investigation is looking into the shooting of an unarmed Black man in his own apartment by an off-duty white female police officer.
(Then again, I can also believe that someone else might have a motive for intimidating future witnesses from testifying against white police officers. It has happened before.)