New Year’s Day shooting of Oscar Grant at BART station in Oakland. Let’s talk about it.
Excerpt from The San Jose Mercury’s Opinion section…
OPINION: BART POLICE CAN’T SPIN WAY OUT OF A FATAL SHOOTING IN A WEB 2.0 ERA
From the eye of a cell phone, an outraged and shocked public witnessed the shooting death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant at a BART station in Oakland, by a police officer in the early morning hours of the first day of 2009. And now, as a result, a tragically common starting point of an American story — young black male killed by law enforcement — may be headed toward an uncommon ending point: justice being served…
Every city knows the story of an Oscar Grant, and the almost automatic anti-climactic ending when the case hits the courts. The officers are found innocent, they go back to work, and the family of the victim is left without a son, father or brother. A community suffers the indignity of knowing a grave injustice has been done without any reprisal.
Such was the case of Jerrold Hall, a 19-year-old who was killed by Bay Area Rapid Transit police in 2001. Hall was shot in the back of the head.
But while the basic fact pattern of these two case is similar — unarmed young black men with their backs turned, posing no threat to the officer — Oscar Grant has something Hall did not: thousands of witnesses worldwide…
Excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle…
BART SHOOTING CAPTURED ON VIDEO
…”The four officers have to be operating under a high level of stress given the relatively confined setting and the people on the BART train who are expressing, in a very loud vocal fashion, their displeasure with the officers’ actions,” said Frank Borelli, a use-of-force expert in Maryland. “Those officers, should things go bad for them, are vastly outnumbered by a group of people who have already voiced their unhappiness with the police.”
But other experts saw the moment differently.
“It’s clear it was not a use-of-deadly-force situation,” said Gregory D. Lee, a retired supervisory special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration who has testified in federal use-of-force cases. “You’ve got more than enough manpower there to handle these guys.”…
…Several use-of-force trainers said it appeared that the struggle led the officer to change tactics.
“In my mind, what happened here was this guy was resisting,” Siddle said. “And at some point there was a decision made … we can’t control him, so we’re going to use the Taser.”
BART officials say some officers carry a Taser X26, a top-of-the-line model used by several other Bay Area police agencies. A BART spokesman said the Police Department started training to use the devices three or four months ago, but a source within BART said officers had only been using them on regular patrols since mid-December.
Agency police have not said whether Mehserle had a Taser the night of the shooting, although several of the experts said the videos appeared to show that he had the device on his belt.
The experts were split on whether Mehserle should have been drawing a weapon of any kind, lethal or otherwise…
…BART officials have said Grant was unarmed.
Another expert, Roy Bedard, who has trained police officers around the world, advanced a different theory after his first viewing of the video: that the shooting was a pure accident, a trigger pulled because of a loss of balance or a loud noise.
But in an indication of how the videos might move the investigation, Bedard reached a different conclusion after viewing the shooting from a different angle.
“Looking at it, I hate to say this, it looks like an execution to me,” he said. “It really looks bad for the officer. … We have to get inside his head and figure out what he was thinking when he fired the shot.”
Here is a link to Huffington Post about the protests…
BART COP NEEDS TO BE HELD WITHOUT BAIL (excerpt below)
An officer identified as Johannes Mehserle shot the 22-year-old on a BART station platform after responding to reports of men fighting on a train. Officers had pulled Grant and a few other men out of the train. The victim was lying face down on the platform when he was shot.
POLICE SWARM SUBWAY AFTER PROTESTS OVER SHOOTING TURN VIOLENT
Could the shooting be justifiable in any way?
Will justice be served this time?
How do you feel about the resulting protests?
