Guilty by Definition:  The FBI’s Enabling of  Black Genocide

Martha K. Huggins (mhuggins@tulane.edu)

@mdkhuggins (Twitter) 

Bureaucratic Death.  How dis the FBI designate Michael Brown’s death for its annual statistics?  Will Officer Wilson beat the rap for killing Michael Brown (YES); will his killing logged by the FBI as “justifiable”?  Such justifiable law enforcement killings occur, according to the FBI--the US’ premier law enforcement agency whose own killings of civilians are almost never questioned—when a “peace officer [kills] a felon…in the line of duty [and the killing is subsequently] determined through [a] law enforcement investigation to be justifiable….”  Reading this definition I would say to my Tulane University students in 2012 just after Michael Brown’s death, “think, does the Bureau’s definition promote justice or enable injustice?” 

          If national  and international media attention and relentless protests in Ferguson had not derailed police business as usual, Michael Brown’s slaying would have automatically been designated “justifiable” and sent, or not, to the FBI.  Michael Brown, a high school graduate about to enter community college, was killed for walking in the street rather than on the sidewalk--how many of  the rest of us regularly do that, I asked?  Given the proliferation of cracked sidewalks, I do and yes I am angry when I have to do this.  I can still hear one of my students say, ‘But you are not a big angry black kid with pants hanging below his butt. When he walks in the street he does it to be threatening.’  So the Ferguson police would apparently be justified in responding forcefully to such a Black youth’s sartorial faux pas?  

 

Matter out of place.  Michael Brown was killed in 2014 along with countless other Black youth, before and since, not because he had committed a felony but because young Black men are seen as ‘matter out of place,’ as British anthropologist Mary Douglas might put it. Whether outside their usually segregated neighborhoods or when they are on public sidewalks, even those inside their own neighborhoods—as when stopped-and-frisked in Harlem or Bed-Stuy—Black youth are managed by law enforcement and rent-a-cops to keep them from ‘polluting’ others.  Being ‘matter out of place’ US blacks join such other negatively-branded social categories as India’s ‘undesirables,’ Japan’s burakumin, medieval European ‘lepers,’ people in the US with HIV/AIDS, in being defined and treated as dangerous to the ‘unpolluted’ more powerful groups whose domination is fortified by keeping such groups in their “place.”   Through a combination of cultural rituals, administrative  regulation, and the law itself,  those considered ‘matter out of place’ are managed inside and out of te spaces reserved for ‘good’ people.

          For youthful Blacks—since Black is associated with criminality and criminality with being Black[1]--“control” includes circumscribing their movements—from residential segregation to being followed by a department store’s security;  limiting choices—from informally segregating school districts to ‘tracking’ them into non-college preparatory classes; social and physical ‘branding’--from ‘stop-and-frisk’ operations to police militarized assaults on their neighborhoods;  Elimination—from arrest and mass incarceration, to lethal-force killings.  

          US Blacks are victimized by unstated and unrecognized, yet vigorously defended, geographies of exclusion.  Reinforced by corporate real estate ‘redlining’ and other forms of de facto segregation,[2] these geographies provide employment for those who ‘protect’ the rest of us from those who are said to be violating the social and physical boundaries that keep especially poor young Blacks from threatening just about everyone else.  The ready-made label—“dangerous felon”—with its foundation in law and police practice disguises the disproportionate racial exclusion of young Blacks.  Why then does the FBI publish only US law enforcement’s “justifiable” killings of civilians, not the “unjustifiable” ones?  Is it to send the message that our law enforcers only kill when absolutely necessary and justified?  Has the Bureau has chosen not to know whether US law enforcement violates some civilians’ civil rights more than other ones? 

FBI definition enables lethal outcomes.  The most fundamental problem with the Bureau’s research methods is that for over sixty years it has employed a circular definition of a “justifiable” law enforcement killing.  Its self-serving nomenclature helps protect killer cops from serious investigation for murder, in part, because a law enforcer is presumed to have targeted someone who is by definition a “felon.” This outcome is assured by the Bureau’s failing to place the qualifier alleged before the word felon in its description of the victim ‘justifiably’ killed and by not identifying which felony can excusably trigger a “peace officer’s” use of lethal force. In most cases the killer cop claims that a Black youth with a gun, knife, or razor threatened his[3] life.  Worse yet, the Bureau assigns to the blue brotherhood the power to come up with whatever ‘felony’ most excusably prompted the law enforcement-involved killing.[4] Whether the person killed was already a felon or defined post-facto as one, the deceased civilian’s fate is sealed when a cop’s shooting is investigated by a state or local law enforcement organization. 

               Scholarly investigations going back at least 67 years[5] have found that “merely thinking about Blacks can lead people to evaluate their…behavior as aggressive, [and] to miscategorize harmless objects as weapons, or to shoot quickly, and, at times, inappropriately.”  Recent research finds that “thinking of crime can trigger thoughts of Black people.” [6] Putting these findings together suggests the unsettling conclusion that if you are Black you’re criminal and dangerous and if you are criminal you’re Black and threatening. Such an imagined ante-facto social danger easily renders Blacks hazardous ‘matter out of place’ with lethal consequences for many, even though this information cannot be derived from FBI statistics on “justifiable” killings by law enforcement—except by the extraordinarily high proportion of Blacks “justifiably” killed by law enforcement.

FBI protocol shapes research conclusions.  How the most elite US law enforcement organization defines a “justifiable” killing shapes what state, county, and municipal law enforcement agencies send to it quarterly-- or not--for the Bureau’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR).  In fact, most US law enforcement organizations do not  send any data at all to the Bureau on   “justifiable” law enforcement killings in their jurisdiction-- “fewer than five percent of the nation’s 17,000 law enforcement agencies currently send [the Bureau this] information.”[7]  Just the same, what ends up in the Bureau’s Uniform Crime Report statistics on “justifiable” killings by cops has to shape the conclusions available analyzing this information. (FYI US Government:  police and sheriff organizations receiving federal aid of any kind—and most  do--could be required to submit all crime data in their jurisdictions to the DOJ/FBI or lose federal assistance)

          The respected investigative journalism organization ProPublica—full disclosure, I have donated to them--recently interpreted the FBI’s data on “justifiable”  killings by law enforcement to say that between 2010 and 2012,  “young black males…were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts—[in fact] 21 times greater….”  But the FBI’s data only allow a researcher to generalize about what happens to black and white victims respectively when cops investigate another cop’s killing of a civilian.  I propose the alternative more narrow  conclusion that when US cops investigate another cops’ use of lethal force, it is 21 times more likely that a Black youth’s slaying will be deemed “justifiable” than when cops investigate the killing of a White youth.  This is  old-style kangaroo court ‘justice’ for US Blacks.

Black genocide.   Of course, there is in fact every reason to believe that in the United States Black male youth--especially poor ones between their teens and late 20s--are killed at higher rates than comparable White youth.  Yet FBI statistics make it impossible to explore this.  Suffice it to say that Black youth are in serious peril of being killed by law enforcement in their own homes and every time they step outside them.  That their slayings by cops are  disproportionately likely to be deemed “justifiable” by a law enforcement organization merely underlines the danger to their lives from police agencies.

           Public policy researchers Guy Adams and Danny Balfour--drawing on the work of Holocaust scholar Zygmunt Bauman[8]--remind  us that “legal procedures and accounting routines were essential to…removing Jews from German society.”  Once Jews had “ceased to exist as members of a political community,” they could then be killed without repercussion.  These facts are as troublingly true for Blacks in the US today as for Jews in Nazi Germany

 

Police Brutality- Homages to the unknown beaten, raped, or killed by US police

Homages to the unknown beaten, raped, or killed by US police

Linking personal to political: HOMAGES TO THOSE BEATEN, MAIMED, OR KILLED BY POLICE AND FORGOTTEN BY ALL BUT FRIENDS AND FAMILY

homage #1:  To Adolph Grimes III

Letter to the Editor, Times-Picayune after the killing of a Black youth in New Orleans

“Shooting follows a formula”

Martha K. Huggins,  The Times-Picayune NOLA.com January 08, 2009

     As a scholar of police violence for 30 years, I see familiar signs in the Adolph Grimes III shooting by New Orleans police. Hit 14 times by police bullets in what Superintendent Warren Riley labels a "gun battle," Grimes died with two frontal wounds and 12 in his back and legs.

     Grimes' case is not exceptional; it follows a known formula. Police shooting is an execution when, after immobilizing the alleged criminal, police continue to shoot. Police superiors pre-empt public outcry by claiming that a "shoot-out" occurred after an attack on police. In an actual "shoot-out" some police are usually wounded or killed.

     Citizen shootings have civil rights implications when victims are disproportionately minorities and the minority "lethality index" (the ratio of deaths to injuries) is higher than for non-minorities.

Minorities will continue to be victims of police violence unless the racist nature of such killings is addressed.

Martha K. Huggins, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology Tulane University New Orleans

Adolph Grimes III: Killing’s Back-Story: Linking personal to political

           As the US War on Drugs intensified law enforcement killings were increasingly carried out by teams of cops—dubbed special “elite task-forces”—that took down their allegedly dangerous victims gangster-style in  a spray of hit-and-miss bullets.   New Orleans native Adolph Grimes III was killed by just such a police task force early on the  morning of New Year’s day 2009.  Twenty-two years-old at the time,   a high school graduate with no criminal record and regular employment with a cable company, African American Adolph Grimes III died in what New Orleans’ Police Chief  Warren Riley described as a “gun battle.”  Hit mostly in his back and legs as Grimes fled  police fire and died,  not a single cop in the  NOPD’s proactive narcotics task force was injured in the alleged gun battle. 

          Adolph Grimes III’s killers were a curious combination of police for a unit dubbed ‘elite’-- the majority of the team was relative newbies:  three rookie cops--one  a sharp-shooter  who had recently returned from Afghanistan; two female dog handlers--apparently without their dogs; four veteran police, including the squad’s two NOPD commanders, Lt. Joseph Meisch and Sgt. Daniel Scanlon.  Not to worry that over half of the squad was very likely inexperienced at robbery task-force proactive policing[1]:  most such police get trained on the job and newbies can usually be depended upon to follow their superiors’ lead. 

          Grimes, who was at the right place/wrong time on the day of his killing, had returned to New Orleans from Houston with his fiancé and their 17-month-old son to spend New Year’s day with his family, a long-standing tradition.  Young Adolph, who had lived in Houston since Hurricane Katrina devastated his family’s New Orleans’ neighborhood, was staying for the New Year’s holiday at his grandmother’s house in the Crescent City’s historic Tremé neighborhood.  His father, Adolph Grimes II, was there too.

         On the night of his killing Adolph had celebrated in the French Quarter, returning after midnight to his grandmother’s place on Governor Nicholls Street near the I-10 Interstate to shower and change before meeting a friend to go to an uptown New Orleans after-hours bar. Waiting alone at 3:00 AM in his rental car in a dark residential section of  Tremé,  in  New Orleans’ 6^th Ward--a location law enforcement designated as a ‘high-crime’ area’-- young Adolph must have seen the unmarked Ford SUV Explorer pull up behind him.  He might well have thought that it had civilians inside —the police were in plain-clothes and “dressed like tourists,” as Police Superintendent Riley described their wear.  One can only speculate about what Grimes assumed was about to happen; it is safe to say that he likely felt unsafe. 

           The NOPD task-force targeting robbers, but  killed Adolph Grimes III told  police investigators after the youth’s killing that their unmarked car’s blue emergency light had been lit when they pulled up behind Grime’s car.  In the words of one  task-force cop,  the blue light “virtually identified” the car’s occupants as police.  An officer in the SUV’s back passenger seat told police investigators that  when he shined his flashlight into Grime’s car  he saw Grimes holding a gun.  ‘Fearing for their lives,’ as the police account goes, the task force began shooting with Grimes firing back at them.

          Adolph Grimes III—hit by 14 of the more than 60 bullets fired early New Year’s morning--collapsed near his grandmother’s house just 40 paces from his rental car.  New Orleans’ then Chief Coroner, Frank Minyard’s initial assessment for local media was that Adolph Grimes III had been “shot up pretty good.”   An internal police investigation naturally found that Grimes had fired first, a  finding  allegedly supported by Grimes having  9-mm handgun and a shotgun in his rental car.  Adolph’s parents verified that their son had legally purchased a handgun and shotgun in Houston for protection there.  Both of Grimes’ firearms were registered in Texas, a fact confirmed by the NOPD.  Louisiana—an ‘open carry’ state—permits toting legally registered firearms.  

          Described by his police killers as an “individual [who] continued to fire a handgun at [them],” Grimes—who was running away from police when he was killed--had twelve bullets in his back and legs and two in his front torso.  Not one cop in the proactive narcotics task-force was injured in the alleged gun battle that brought down Adolph Grimes III.   Adolph’s father, who awakened to gunfire outside his mother’s house, walked out the door to find his son’s bloody body-- hands in restraints-- sprawled on the sidewalk.  The story goes that Adolph Grimes III had been handcuffed by police post-mortem.  Patricia Grimes, his mother who apparently was not in her mother-in-law’s house on New Year’s eve, says that she “had to wait for the 5 o’clock news to find out…[her] son was murdered.” [2] 

          I met Patricia Grimes about a year after her son’s slaying  at the federal civil rights trial of five police implicated in the killing and conspiracy to cover-up Henry Glover’s shooting and incineration  by cops during the first days after Katrina in 2005.  Henry Glover was lethally wounded by NOPD rookie David Warren, a voracious gun collector and award-winning sharpshooter.  Warren feared for his life-- as he stood safely on guard on the second floor landing of a provisional police base at an Algiers New Orleans strip mall—claiming that he saw something in Henry Glover’s hand that ‘could have been a gun.’ Firing a single round from his own assault rifle, Warren left Henry Glover severely wounded to the edge of  death. 

          William Tanner, a neighbor of Henry Glover, along with Glover’s brother—both in the area of the strip mall at the time--put Glover into Tanner’s car and sped away seeking medical assistance for Glover.  Ending up at a temporary barracks of an NOPD SWAT team that had been set up at New Orleans’ Habans Elementary School—with Henry Glover barely alive and  bleeding heavily in the car’s back seat—Tanner and Glover’s brother were handcuffed  by police and interrogated.  ‘Arms-up’ and on their knees they became the SWAT teams’ focus of attention as Henry Glover bled to death in Tanner’s car from police-inflicted wounds.  The police clearly knew that they had a problem when Henry Glover died:  what to do with Glover’s body?  His shooting and death in police custody could trigger an investigation. 

          Hearing in court the slow repetitive accounts and the counter interpretations of David Warren’s shooting of Henry Glover and his ultimate death was difficult for many listeners in the court room divided  neatly between those supporting the defendant cops and those lending support to Henry Glover’s family.  Even more problematic was learning about the police complicity in letting Glover to ‘bleed-out’ in the near-by car.  The lynchpin that held these infamous deeds together was a police conspiracy to hide evidence of police burning of the car that held Henry Glover’s by-then -headless body.   I wondered why  Patricia Grimes would subject herself to hearing all of this so soon after she had  lost her son to lethal and possibly conspiratorial police action and inaction?  I assumed that Ms. Grimes was attending the trial to support the Glover family.

           Much later I discovered that Henry Glover’s and her son’s killing were linked, Ms. Glover obviously knew this.  A key informant for federal government prosecutors at the Henry Glover federal civil rights trial was NOPD Lt. Joseph Meisch, one of the two police commanders of the plainclothes police squad that in 2009 had gunned down Patricia Glover’s son, Adolph Grimes III.  Lt. Meisch--who had worked out a plea deal with the Feds before testifying at the Henry Glover federal trial—had  carefully elaborated his role in the conspiracy to cover up Henry Glover’s incineration.  But Lt. Meisch had failed to report seeing NOPD policeman Gregory McRae throw lighted flares into the Chevrolet Malibu that contained Henry Glover’s bloody,  headless body, although Meisch had seen an NOPD cop shoot  the car’s  closed windows to accelerate the fire’s power to burn away Glover’s remains. 

          Sitting in the federal court room one row in front of Patricia Grimes, I heard her draw a deep breath as Meisch  gave graphic testimony about the all-consuming fire that reduced Mr. Glover’s lifeless body to bones and ashes—his head was never located.   Meisch, who had suppressed for five years important evidence about  a possible police crime, was not let go by the NOPD until 2012--seven years after Henry Glover’s killing and three after Meisch’s involvement in Adolph Grimes III’s killing by the elite squad that Meisch co-commanded.  In its 2012 dismissal of Lt. Joseph Meisch, New Orleans’ Civil Service Commission ruled that Meisch had neglected his duty in the Henry Glover matter “by failing to report what he observed in a timely fashion.”[3] 

        Meisch’s police record reflects a pattern and practice of civil rights violations much more formidable than the relatively innocuous issue for which he was finally fired from the NOPD.  At the time of young Adolph Grimes’s killing by the narcotics task force under his co-command, Lt. Joseph Meisch, a Marine Corps veteran, had “a handful of disciplinary complaints” against him, including two for “unauthorized force,” according to the Times- Picayune’s tireless investigative reporter, Brendan McCarthy.[4]  One can easily calculate that Meisch’s police squad killed Adolph Grimes while Meisch was already under federal investigation for conspiracy to hide evidence about Henry Glover’s September 2, 2005, slaying and incineration. 

          Likewise, the robbery task force’s other co-commander, Sgt. Daniel Scanlon, was no stranger to civil rights complaints.   In fact, Scanlon had an even more questionable police record than his task-force superior, Lt. Meisch.  Scanlon, a twenty-two- year NOPD veteran known as “Blue Eyes” to New Orleans’ poor in predominantly Black neighborhoods where he was assigned,  had been sued in federal court “for allegedly hitting a handcuffed man with a flashlight, breaking the man’s jaw.”  Settled out of court, that case went away, but Scanlon  continued to “amass… a dossier of citizen complaints ranging from brutality to false imprisonment and theft.”  Just the same, or perhaps precisely because of his record, Sgt. Scanlon received dozens of police metals and letters of commendation, including  in 1995 the Henry Morris Award for “police officer of the year.”

          Another six members of  the nine-cop plainclothes squad--three white women and three men, the latter white, Hispanic, and African American--that killed Adolph Grimes III “had modest disciplinary histories.” The  other squad member, rookie Gregory Lapin, was a white male and the squad’s sharpshooter.  The newest member of the task-force, Lapin had no civilian complaints against him for NOPD police work. 

          Apparently in  2010 or 2011 Lapin became part of the VATA Group (Visibility  Assessment and Threat Analysis Group), with its training center in Slidell, Louisiana.  According to VATA’s website this organization was established in 2009  “by two guys sitting off the coast of Somalia in 30-foot seas saying, ‘There has got to be a better way.’”   One of  Lapin’s  responsibilities for VATA has been serving as a “Detail member [for the] Department of State's Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) in several high-threat arenas.”   By 2011, Lapin has become a relatively regular UTube video trainer on “Trigger Time TV,” where in one of the show’s segments he taught ‘how to take out a vehicle and get inside it by using a fire arm to break stuff on the vehicle.’ It triggered my memory of the Adolph Grimes III shooting that VATA invites its Facebook Friends who need “stocking stuffers” to purchase their “ Concealed Carry 2 DVD” from Visit shopguntalk.com/.  Might it have saved young Adolph’s life to have studied  VATA’s “Concealed Carry” videos 1 and 2 before traveling to New Orleans on the day he was Killed?

          The local criminal case is now closed—“slabbed”--involving  the NOPD  task force police implicated in Adolph Grimes III’s killing—apparently there is insufficient evidence for a criminal trial.  The FBI investigation into Adolph Grimes III’s killing is still ‘on-going’ in 2014.  A civil rights case filed in 2009 in New Orleans’ civil court has not yet come to trial and I suspect it never will.  At this point all that I can do is write about Adolph Grimes III’s killing in the hope that this injustice will be known.  Along these lines, I will be looking into the relationship of  the New Orleans Police Department—now under DOJ pressure to get training—to VATA as well as VATA’s relationship  to the US State Department. 

Police Brutality- Homages to the unknown beaten, raped, or killed by US police

Homages to the unknown beaten, raped, or killed by US police

Linking personal to political: HOMAGES TO THOSE BEATEN, MAIMED, OR KILLED BY POLICE AND FORGOTTEN BY ALL BUT FRIENDS AND FAMILY

homage #1:  To Adolph Grimes III

 

Letter to the Editor, Times-Picayune after the killing of a Black youth in New Orleans

“Shooting follows a formula”

Martha K. Huggins,  The Times-Picayune NOLA.com January 08, 2009

     As a scholar of police violence for 30 years, I see familiar signs in the Adolph Grimes III shooting by New Orleans police. Hit 14 times by police bullets in what Superintendent Warren Riley labels a "gun battle," Grimes died with two frontal wounds and 12 in his back and legs.

     Grimes' case is not exceptional; it follows a known formula. Police shooting is an execution when, after immobilizing the alleged criminal, police continue to shoot. Police superiors pre-empt public outcry by claiming that a "shoot-out" occurred after an attack on police. In an actual "shoot-out" some police are usually wounded or killed.

     Citizen shootings have civil rights implications when victims are disproportionately minorities and the minority "lethality index" (the ratio of deaths to injuries) is higher than for non-minorities.

Minorities will continue to be victims of police violence unless the racist nature of such killings is addressed.

Martha K. Huggins, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology Tulane University New Orleans

Adolph Grimes III: Killing’s Back-Story: Linking personal to political

           As the US War on Drugs intensified law enforcement killings were increasingly carried out by teams of cops—dubbed special “elite task-forces”—that took down their allegedly dangerous victims gangster-style in  a spray of hit-and-miss bullets.   New Orleans native Adolph Grimes III was killed by just such a police task force early on the  morning of New Year’s day 2009.  Twenty-two years-old at the time,   a high school graduate with no criminal record and regular employment with a cable company, African American Adolph Grimes III died in what New Orleans’ Police Chief  Warren Riley described as a “gun battle.”  Hit mostly in his back and legs as Grimes fled  police fire and died,  not a single cop in the  NOPD’s proactive narcotics task force was injured in the alleged gun battle. 

 

          Adolph Grimes III’s killers were a curious combination of police for a unit dubbed ‘elite’-- the majority of the team was relative newbies:  three rookie cops--one  a sharp-shooter  who had recently returned from Afghanistan; two female dog handlers--apparently without their dogs; four veteran police, including the squad’s two NOPD commanders, Lt. Joseph Meisch and Sgt. Daniel Scanlon.  Not to worry that over half of the squad was very likely inexperienced at robbery task-force proactive policing[1]:  most such police get trained on the job and newbies can usually be depended upon to follow their superiors’ lead. 

          Grimes, who was at the right place/wrong time on the day of his killing, had returned to New Orleans from Houston with his fiancé and their 17-month-old son to spend New Year’s day with his family, a long-standing tradition.  Young Adolph, who had lived in Houston since Hurricane Katrina devastated his family’s New Orleans’ neighborhood, was staying for the New Year’s holiday at his grandmother’s house in the Crescent City’s historic Tremé neighborhood.  His father, Adolph Grimes II, was there too.

         On the night of his killing Adolph had celebrated in the French Quarter, returning after midnight to his grandmother’s place on Governor Nicholls Street near the I-10 Interstate to shower and change before meeting a friend to go to an uptown New Orleans after-hours bar. Waiting alone at 3:00 AM in his rental car in a dark residential section of  Tremé,  in  New Orleans’ 6^th Ward--a location law enforcement designated as a ‘high-crime’ area’-- young Adolph must have seen the unmarked Ford SUV Explorer pull up behind him.  He might well have thought that it had civilians inside —the police were in plain-clothes and “dressed like tourists,” as Police Superintendent Riley described their wear.  One can only speculate about what Grimes assumed was about to happen; it is safe to say that he likely felt unsafe. 

           The NOPD task-force targeting robbers, but  killed Adolph Grimes III told  police investigators after the youth’s killing that their unmarked car’s blue emergency light had been lit when they pulled up behind Grime’s car.  In the words of one  task-force cop,  the blue light “virtually identified” the car’s occupants as police.  An officer in the SUV’s back passenger seat told police investigators that  when he shined his flashlight into Grime’s car  he saw Grimes holding a gun.  ‘Fearing for their lives,’ as the police account goes, the task force began shooting with Grimes firing back at them.

 

          Adolph Grimes III—hit by 14 of the more than 60 bullets fired early New Year’s morning--collapsed near his grandmother’s house just 40 paces from his rental car.  New Orleans’ then Chief Coroner, Frank Minyard’s initial assessment for local media was that Adolph Grimes III had been “shot up pretty good.”   An internal police investigation naturally found that Grimes had fired first, a  finding  allegedly supported by Grimes having  9-mm handgun and a shotgun in his rental car.  Adolph’s parents verified that their son had legally purchased a handgun and shotgun in Houston for protection there.  Both of Grimes’ firearms were registered in Texas, a fact confirmed by the NOPD.  Louisiana—an ‘open carry’ state—permits toting legally registered firearms.  

          Described by his police killers as an “individual [who] continued to fire a handgun at [them],” Grimes—who was running away from police when he was killed--had twelve bullets in his back and legs and two in his front torso.  Not one cop in the proactive narcotics task-force was injured in the alleged gun battle that brought down Adolph Grimes III.   Adolph’s father, who awakened to gunfire outside his mother’s house, walked out the door to find his son’s bloody body-- hands in restraints-- sprawled on the sidewalk.  The story goes that Adolph Grimes III had been handcuffed by police post-mortem.  Patricia Grimes, his mother who apparently was not in her mother-in-law’s house on New Year’s eve, says that she “had to wait for the 5 o’clock news to find out…[her] son was murdered.” [2] 

          I met Patricia Grimes about a year after her son’s slaying  at the federal civil rights trial of five police implicated in the killing and conspiracy to cover-up Henry Glover’s shooting and incineration  by cops during the first days after Katrina in 2005.  Henry Glover was lethally wounded by NOPD rookie David Warren, a voracious gun collector and award-winning sharpshooter.  Warren feared for his life-- as he stood safely on guard on the second floor landing of a provisional police base at an Algiers New Orleans strip mall—claiming that he saw something in Henry Glover’s hand that ‘could have been a gun.’ Firing a single round from his own assault rifle, Warren left Henry Glover severely wounded to the edge of  death. 

          William Tanner, a neighbor of Henry Glover, along with Glover’s brother—both in the area of the strip mall at the time--put Glover into Tanner’s car and sped away seeking medical assistance for Glover.  Ending up at a temporary barracks of an NOPD SWAT team that had been set up at New Orleans’ Habans Elementary School—with Henry Glover barely alive and  bleeding heavily in the car’s back seat—Tanner and Glover’s brother were handcuffed  by police and interrogated.  ‘Arms-up’ and on their knees they became the SWAT teams’ focus of attention as Henry Glover bled to death in Tanner’s car from police-inflicted wounds.  The police clearly knew that they had a problem when Henry Glover died:  what to do with Glover’s body?  His shooting and death in police custody could trigger an investigation. 

          Hearing in court the slow repetitive accounts and the counter interpretations of David Warren’s shooting of Henry Glover and his ultimate death was difficult for many listeners in the court room divided  neatly between those supporting the defendant cops and those lending support to Henry Glover’s family.  Even more problematic was learning about the police complicity in letting Glover to ‘bleed-out’ in the near-by car.  The lynchpin that held these infamous deeds together was a police conspiracy to hide evidence of police burning of the car that held Henry Glover’s by-then -headless body.   I wondered why  Patricia Grimes would subject herself to hearing all of this so soon after she had  lost her son to lethal and possibly conspiratorial police action and inaction?  I assumed that Ms. Grimes was attending the trial to support the Glover family.

           Much later I discovered that Henry Glover’s and her son’s killing were linked, Ms. Glover obviously knew this.  A key informant for federal government prosecutors at the Henry Glover federal civil rights trial was NOPD Lt. Joseph Meisch, one of the two police commanders of the plainclothes police squad that in 2009 had gunned down Patricia Glover’s son, Adolph Grimes III.  Lt. Meisch--who had worked out a plea deal with the Feds before testifying at the Henry Glover federal trial—had  carefully elaborated his role in the conspiracy to cover up Henry Glover’s incineration.  But Lt. Meisch had failed to report seeing NOPD policeman Gregory McRae throw lighted flares into the Chevrolet Malibu that contained Henry Glover’s bloody,  headless body, although Meisch had seen an NOPD cop shoot  the car’s  closed windows to accelerate the fire’s power to burn away Glover’s remains. 

          Sitting in the federal court room one row in front of Patricia Grimes, I heard her draw a deep breath as Meisch  gave graphic testimony about the all-consuming fire that reduced Mr. Glover’s lifeless body to bones and ashes—his head was never located.   Meisch, who had suppressed for five years important evidence about  a possible police crime, was not let go by the NOPD until 2012--seven years after Henry Glover’s killing and three after Meisch’s involvement in Adolph Grimes III’s killing by the elite squad that Meisch co-commanded.  In its 2012 dismissal of Lt. Joseph Meisch, New Orleans’ Civil Service Commission ruled that Meisch had neglected his duty in the Henry Glover matter “by failing to report what he observed in a timely fashion.”[3] 

        Meisch’s police record reflects a pattern and practice of civil rights violations much more formidable than the relatively innocuous issue for which he was finally fired from the NOPD.  At the time of young Adolph Grimes’s killing by the narcotics task force under his co-command, Lt. Joseph Meisch, a Marine Corps veteran, had “a handful of disciplinary complaints” against him, including two for “unauthorized force,” according to the Times- Picayune’s tireless investigative reporter, Brendan McCarthy.[4]  One can easily calculate that Meisch’s police squad killed Adolph Grimes while Meisch was already under federal investigation for conspiracy to hide evidence about Henry Glover’s September 2, 2005, slaying and incineration. 

          Likewise, the robbery task force’s other co-commander, Sgt. Daniel Scanlon, was no stranger to civil rights complaints.   In fact, Scanlon had an even more questionable police record than his task-force superior, Lt. Meisch.  Scanlon, a twenty-two- year NOPD veteran known as “Blue Eyes” to New Orleans’ poor in predominantly Black neighborhoods where he was assigned,  had been sued in federal court “for allegedly hitting a handcuffed man with a flashlight, breaking the man’s jaw.”  Settled out of court, that case went away, but Scanlon  continued to “amass… a dossier of citizen complaints ranging from brutality to false imprisonment and theft.”  Just the same, or perhaps precisely because of his record, Sgt. Scanlon received dozens of police metals and letters of commendation, including  in 1995 the Henry Morris Award for “police officer of the year.”

          Another six members of  the nine-cop plainclothes squad--three white women and three men, the latter white, Hispanic, and African American--that killed Adolph Grimes III “had modest disciplinary histories.” The  other squad member, rookie Gregory Lapin, was a white male and the squad’s sharpshooter.  The newest member of the task-force, Lapin had no civilian complaints against him for NOPD police work. 

          Apparently in  2010 or 2011 Lapin became part of the VATA Group (Visibility  Assessment and Threat Analysis Group), with its training center in Slidell, Louisiana.  According to VATA’s website this organization was established in 2009  “by two guys sitting off the coast of Somalia in 30-foot seas saying, ‘There has got to be a better way.’”   One of  Lapin’s  responsibilities for VATA has been serving as a “Detail member [for the] Department of State's Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) in several high-threat arenas.”   By 2011, Lapin has become a relatively regular UTube video trainer on “Trigger Time TV,” where in one of the show’s segments he taught ‘how to take out a vehicle and get inside it by using a fire arm to break stuff on the vehicle.’ It triggered my memory of the Adolph Grimes III shooting that VATA invites its Facebook Friends who need “stocking stuffers” to purchase their “ Concealed Carry 2 DVD” from Visit shopguntalk.com/.  Might it have saved young Adolph’s life to have studied  VATA’s “Concealed Carry” videos 1 and 2 before traveling to New Orleans on the day he was Killed?

          The local criminal case is now closed—“slabbed”--involving  the NOPD  task force police implicated in Adolph Grimes III’s killing—apparently there is insufficient evidence for a criminal trial.  The FBI investigation into Adolph Grimes III’s killing is still ‘on-going’ in 2014.  A civil rights case filed in 2009 in New Orleans’ civil court has not yet come to trial and I suspect it never will.  At this point all that I can do is write about Adolph Grimes III’s killing in the hope that this injustice will be known.  Along these lines, I will be looking into the relationship of  the New Orleans Police Department—now under DOJ pressure to get training—to VATA as well as VATA’s relationship  to the US State Department. 

French Government Retaliaion 101: Enabling Gross HR violations

1. Defiant posture of retaliation
2. Internal state of siege, declared as "state of emergency"=discursive invisibility
3. Externalized war
4. Election year with candidates competing to be the toughest
5. Secrecy and fear enhancement
6. History of ethnic persecution
7. Teaming with the US
8. Impunity for gross human rights violations and absence of critique
9. War actions validated by national and world public opinion
10. International ranking of some countries' losses, "more important" ('grievable') than others

The Sexual  Exploitation of Children:  Sociology  101

                                                                   Martha K. Huggins

 

1.       The words rape, sodomy, and slavery are seldom used.  When the uninformed public, the media, and the perpetrators and facilitators who perpetrate or facilitate  criminal violence against infants and children, the specific nature of these criminal acts is seldom stated. Forced staged sex between minor infants and children or carried out by adults against infants and underage youth, is rarely discussed.  Brutal violence against infants and youth without the ability or power to resist is subsumed under the contested concept of ‘pornography,’ a leisure activity thought to be the legitimate right of consenting adults to enjoy in the privacy of their homes;

 

2.      The secrecy of  taboo.  One of the few remaining taboos in most industrialized countries seems to be that speaking about infant and child rape is bad form. The main way of acceptably transgressing the ‘do not discuss child rape taboo,’  is to neutralize its broader social implications by rendering the perpetrator a ‘unique’ kind of deviant;

3.      The perpetrator myth.  A well-educated, liberal colleague recently asserted that university administrators and faculty are not the ‘worst pervs’ who violate children sexually,’ adding that the ‘real  pervs’ are the ones to go after.  This faculty colleague’s observation shines light on her myths about those who violate children sexually:  that sexual exploiters of infants and youth, who by definition are uniquely deviant,  have social class characteristics (‘stigmata) that signal  their generalized deviance: e.g.,  poor, males with little education, and/or aggressively masculine male ‘groupies’,  and/or meek isolated loners who live with their mothers.

4.      Criminal Profiles defy the myth. Criminal perpetrators of infant and child rape and torture have been Catholic prelates and are increasingly discovered to be  male university administrators and professors and  (see, L. Handrahan, XXXX). Both sets of actors, due to their socially respected occupational and social status,  do not fit the public image of a child rapist.

 

5.      ‘Protective Denial’: My university colleague's assertion, after I  had posted Hanrahan’s data on the direct involvement of university administrators and faculty in child rape and  pornography---that academics are not ‘the worst pervs,’ there are people much worse than them--suggested her imagined continuum that placed academics at  the continuum's most ‘acceptable’ end, while at the continuum’s ‘most heinous’ end, were the “real pervs” who sexually abused children.  Apparently, in my colleague’s mind, “good” people are not regular perpetrators of child rape, while the deviant “real pervs” do it all the time.  Most important to her argument was that university people have been unfairly charged with victimizing children or with having child sexual pornography,  In any  case, she argued, children don't make good witnesses:  ‘Remember the McMaster Day Care false charges,’  she said.

6.      Organizational protection and complicity. When ‘respectable’ people are singled out by a parishioner, parent, or student,  a faculty member, the socially esteemed organization that houses the perpetrator—the local, national, and international Catholic Church  or a public or private US university and its Trustees--has a vested interest in keeping their member’s  deviance secret.  At most, the perpetrator will be classified as ‘atypical’--as happened with the Catholic Church--until mounting evidence showed the allegedly ‘atypical’ priestly perpetrators to  be acting within the organizations working norms

7.      Beyond Perpetrators:  the multiple actors in child sexual abuse.  The  rape and torture of underage youth involves multiple actors:  its direct perpetrators, their facilitators--including the organizational bureaucracy of which the perpetrator is a member--and  those facilitators who make, distribute, and purchase the visual products of perpetrators’ actions.  Just as complicitious in child rape and in the continuance of its marketed and purchased pornographic images,  are the seemingly outsider bystanders who know about child rape and torture and may even be aware of the lucrative industry that has emerged out of it.  Such bystanders, who are actually facilitators,  neither denounce child rape nor the pornography industry’s producers, videographers, distributers, sellers, and buyers;

 

8.      Impunity breeds Impunity; Impunity becomes ethos and legacy. 

ü  If  the perpetrators and facilitators who directly and indirectly  sexually victimize infants and youth keep getting away with  their criminal actions;

ü  And  if allegedly innocent bystanders are allowed inaction when knowing of  sexual and pornographic violence against  vulnerable infants and youth;

ü  And  if myths continue un-exposed about child sexual exploitation’s expansive system of actors; 

ü  And if local, state, and federal governments continue to back-stage the pursuit of  those who abuse and make money off of the torture of  infants and youth,

v  Then, in the US, sexual exploitation and physical torture of vulnerable  youth will continue to be our country’s operational cultural and institutional ethos and legacy. 

 

 

Martha K. Huggins, Professor Emerita:  Union College (Schenectady, NY) and Tulane University (New Orleans), has conducted research in Brazil for 40 years, producing 7 books from that research.  Now an investigative journalist for The Blue Paper (Key West), Huggins continues her research on police violence in Brazil, now with a comparative focus on the US as well.