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.

 

 

Several Katrina memories still haunt me:

 A poor older Black man standing in front of the Superdome cries out emotionally to a rolling camera, "I'm way overdue for some luck";

An old Black  woman arrives at a belated rescue bus, only to be told that she must leave her put cat at the side of the road--"animals not allowed on the bus";

A lone man on a backkhoe is slowly scooping displaced mud and trash from the edge of a devastated 9th Ward levy.  His job, to close the close the gaping breach  @mdkhuggins

When the Monroe County Sheriff is Just Plumb Wrong: A Key West Tale of Fibbing

Assistant Public Defender Trish Gibson, a 20-year veteran of Key West’s Public Defender’s office, is running for Public Defender. This makes Sheriff Rick Ramsey’s attempt at discrediting her in The Key West Citizen (4/19/2015)–Political. Gibson had the honesty to state cautiously at the recent ACLU panel, “Policing in Paradise” (4/13/15),  that in her experience ‘selective enforcement can be seen by where we are getting our arrests for drugs–Bahama Village.’ Attorney Gibson went on to say, ‘I have never heard someone say [to a confidential informant] go to Duval Street to buy powder [cocaine].’ Sheriff Ramsay, expressing “outrage” in the Key West Citizen at Gibson’s honestly measured remarks, provides statistics on drug-related apprehensions: of 304 such arrests over a 13 ½ month period by Key West Police, “93 were black and 208, or 68%, were white.” Calling such raw numbers and the one lone percentage, “rates,” demonstrates that Monroe County’s Sheriff does not understand statistics, even though he freely quotes them and then draws a conclusion not validated by his raw numbers and lone percentages.

Investigating whether one race, ethnicity, or gender is under-, equally-, or over-represented among arrests for a particular offense requires simply comparing the percentage of the group arrested with that group’s proportion of a city’s or county’s population. Whites constituted 68% of those arrested for “illegal drugs” over a 13 ½ month period and Blacks constituted 31% of these arrestees. These groups are, respectively, 68 and 10 percent of Key West’s population, leading to the statistical conclusion that in Key West during the period examined, Black’s arrests for “illegal drugs” were three times greater than their share of Key West’s population, while Whites were arrested at about their Key West population share (68%).

Unfortunately, Key West and Monroe County are not unique in this finding. An ACLU study of marijuana arrests in the United States (2001-2010), found that while Black and White people use marijuana at roughly the same rates, the majority of US counties arrested Blacks for Marijuana possession at higher rates than Whites. In the US in 2010, “marijuana arrest rates for black people were 3.73 times greater than those for white people nationally.” Key West law enforcement should take some consolation in the fact that the city’s proportional arrests of Blacks for illegal drug possession is “only” three times (and not almost 4 times) greater than those arrests for whites.

My richest take-away from the ACLU panel was Chief Donnie Lee’s insight about Crack sales and use in Key West (paraphrased): ‘It’s not drug sellers’ customers who get arrested, it’s the sellers. As many Whites smoke Crack as Blacks and about half of the customers going to Bahama Village to get drugs are White. We see more Blacks in drug sales because customers know that Bahama Village is where Blacks live and is [therefore] the place to buy crack.’

This attitude of Key West’s ‘Top Cop’ manifests race-based profiling—the assumption that Crack is the only drug sold illegally in Key West [or the only one that KWPD needs to focus on] protects white drug dealers and their customers, and places the man who is commander and role model for his officers in a position to institutionalize a racist policy that targets poor Blacks greatly out of proportion to their share of Key West’s population.

Whites ‘seek out the crime’ and Blacks ‘do the time,’ as Chief Donnie Lee’s and Trish Gibson’s concurrent observations suggest.

 

Racial Profiling in Paradise:  What Traffic Tickets and “Disorderly Conduct” Reveal

                                                         Martha K. Huggins, Ph.D.

       What would you think if you were stopped by Key West police, on average, three times a year over 5 years—5 times in 2011 alone?  To your credit, you had no stops for DWI. Your traffic infractions were for such things as not wearing your seat belt—a violation discovered after you’d been stopped for loud music;  how about  ‘failure to stop’ and ‘to yield,’ ‘driving at an ‘unlawful speed,’ and  going the wrong way on a one-way street. Then cops got you for failure to update your driver’s license address, not having the car’s registration in your vehicle, and for your vehicle’s being in an ‘unsafe condition.’  You were even stopped, handcuffed, and questioned once while walking your dog!  On top of all this, you were charged with a petty theft that you may not have committed.  All of these things happened to African American KeyWester Everette Fitzgerald Wilson between 2009 and 2013.

Would you hire a lawyer to challenge what seemed like police harassment?  Everette Wilson, born in 1964, could not afford an attorney, so he handled his traffic citations and misdemeanor charges himself, usually with great success but not without personal consequences.  Mr. Wilson got six of his nine traffic citations, probably considered frivolous by the court, dismissed.  He paid the fine for two more traffic citations--for unlawful speed and for driving an unsafe vehicle.  The remaining traffic violation--his failure to stop at a sign or traffic signal--was listed as, “adjudicated,” whatever that means.  Everette Wilson took two of his profiling complaints against Key West police to the Civilian Review Board (CRB).  I bet questioning police actions and seeking redress through the CRB for what Mr. Wilson perceived as police violations of his civil rights, got him into trouble with Key West police.  As Attorney John Whitehead has recently argued, “If you don’t want to get probed, poked, pinched, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, arrested, shot, or killed, [then] don’t say, do or even suggest anything that even hints of noncompliance [with police]”[i]

But Everette Wilson’s actions were not in vain:  His case teaches a great deal about racial profiling and the  ways this can be covered up, whether intentionally or not, by normal justice system patterns and practices.  I have used the word “racial profiling” many times over the years, but I must admit that I had never really seen what racial targeting might look like on a person’s official ‘rap sheet.’  I have also discovered that official ‘rap sheets,’ by indicating only a case’s end result—guilty/not guilty, and very briefly, for what—can disguise possibly discriminatory patterns and practices of  law enforcement.  Such practices often get folded into a plea bargain, as happened frequently to Everette Wilson.  In the US, “Ninety-seven percent of federal convictions and ninety-four percent of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas” by a defendant (emphasis in original): “Taking a criminal case to trial is the exception and not the rule [, even though] between two and eight percent of convicted felons [have been found] innocent…after taking plea deals.”[ii]

A ‘Rap Sheet’ Shows Only a Small Portion of the Story

Everette Wilson’s record at Key West’s Monroe County Court House, for February 18, 2012,  indicates “disorderly conduct” as the violation for which he was found guilty.  In fact, Wilson’s exchange with KWPD police officer Brian Leahy that day involved much more than “disorderly conduct.”   

Everette Wilson was noteworthy for being Black:

• Talking into car window while Black:  Officer Leahy said that Wilson had his arms inside and was leaning into the driver’s side window of a Chevrolet that was stopped in the middle of Petronia Street—Conclusion: Wilson must be involved in a drug deal.  
• Being Black with ‘too much’ cash in pocket.” Wilson had $830 on him, further evidence that this “Perp” was a drug dealer.  Conclusion: since this amount of money is “consistent with street-level drug sales,” Wilson must have been selling drugs.
• Living where Black drug dealing is done.  Officer Leahy was on high alert because the alleged drug deal was in an area where he had investigated "numerous narcotic-related incidents." Conclusion: A city’s real or imagined geography—“poor”/ “rich” areas, usually distinguished from one another by their racial concentrations—suggests the kinds of people who “ought” and “ought not” be in each area.  If you’re Black and in the “wrong” place then you’re obviously up to no good.  Apparently drug customers are not out of place in either white or Black city geographies.

But Everette Wilson was actually arrested on February 18, 2012, on an outstanding warrant for a prior failure to appear in court on a charge of stealing two TVs on April 26, 2011,  from the Truman Avenue CVS.  (Timothy Jacobsen, a White man, wouold later steal a TV and a Stereo (on December 4, 2011) from a Roosevelt Boulevard “department store.”[iii]  Jacobsen’s loot valued at $837—was very close to the cash ($830) confiscated from Everette Wilson during his February 18, 2012, arrest).  One might suspect that Wilson may be innocent of stealing the TVs and was mistakenly arrested on Jacobsen’s warrant. Someone may be able to prove this speculation right or wrong.

In any case, Everette Wilson sent his charges against Officer Leahy to the Key West Citizens’ Review Board alleging that Officer Leahy had violated his civil rights during the February 18, 2012, arrest.   

Everette Fitzgerald Wilson, 48, claims Officer Brian Leahy abused his authority by firing a Taser at Wilson's back while chasing him on Petronia Street on Feb. 18, [2012]. Wilson alleged that Officer Leahy had demonstrated racial profiling, abuse of authority, and improper use of a Taser that day.   

Because Leahy exited his patrol car with Taser in hand,  when Wilson alleges he was not acting in a threatening manner, the officer intended to tase Wilson.  Officer Leahy concurred that he had exited his patrol vehicle with Taser drawn and approached Wilson from behind.  When Wilson turned and saw Leahy, Wilson ran toward the stairs of a nearby apartment at 733 Whitehead Street.  Leahy shot the Taser as Wilson  ran--one prong hitting Wilson, the other hitting a wall.

According to the KW Citizen,[iv] Wilson barricaded himself inside the second-floor apartment for a while before exiting the apartment and being arrested.  Leahy found the $830 in Wilson’s hand; Wilson claimed the cash was for paying a long over-due sewer bill. As I remember, the CRB was never able to verify with the proper utility authority that this money was due.

I discovered that sometime in 2014, that  less than half of the $830 confiscated by police from Everette Wilson had been returned to Wilson’s wife.  She had apparently successfully convinced officials that it was hers and not the product of a drug deal.  But the larger portion of the Wilson family’s money was kept by the KWPD—a civil forfeiture against a prior “judgment lien.”  Since 2001, more than $2.5 billion has been taken just from motorists who were never charged with a crime.[v] “Police stop a motorist for a minor traffic violation, then they ask to search the vehicle.  If there is cash or valuable property in the car, police then ask the driver to prove that it was not obtained during the commission of a crime.  If the driver is not able to prove where the money or property came from, it’s seized by police,” which is what happened in the case of Everette Wilson’s $830, even though not related to a moving violation. 

Bad Grades for Police Chief Lee and the CRB

Raw numbers hide Racism: Statistics 101.  To determine the relative impact of particular policies or practices on different racial and ethnic groups’ getting traffic citations, being tasered, or arrested, one must convert raw numbers into proportions or rates.

• Traffic citations.  In an Everette Wilson case heard by the CRB, Mr. Wilson charged Key West Officer Curtis Richardson with profiling Blacks in his traffic ticketing. Chief Lee’s statistics showed that Curtis Richardson had issued 31 tickets to Whites and only 14 to Blacks during his time on the force. This, Chief Lee assured the CRB, demonstrated that Officer Richardson had not profiled Blacks. Incorrect conclusion from these statistics: Officer Richardson issued traffic tickets to Blacks at a proportion three-times this group’s share of Key West’s population; Whites were ticketed at exactly their proportion of the city’s population.  But the CRB deemed Everette Wilson’s charges against policeman Curtis Richardson, “unfounded.”

• Milwaukee, Wisconsin, traffic stops:  “A Black Milwaukee driver is 7 times as likely to be stopped by city police as a white resident driver.”[vi]
• Cincinatti, Ohio, traffic stops:  Blacks “had longer stops and higher search rates than white drivers.”[vii]
   

• Tasering:  In Everette Wilson’s request for CRB review of his case charging KWPD officer Leahy with racial profiling in use of his taser, Chief Lee offered the CRB no data on Officer Leahy’s taser use, even though such data were easily available to the police chief. Key West’s police department taser records (including both threats of taser use and its actual use—including few cases where chemical spray was instead employed)--obtained by The Blue Paper through a public records request, demonstrate that:
   

• In 2011, KWPD police threatened or used a taser against Blacks,     2 ½ times their proportion of Key West’s population.
• In 2012 (the year that Everette Wilson was tased by Officer Leahy), Blacks were again threatened with a taser,  or tased, 2 ½  times their share of Key West’s population--not four times their share, as I stated previously.
• In 2013, taser use or its threatened deployment against Blacks declined slightly to 2 times Black’s share of Key West’s population—not to 1 ½ times as stated previously.
• As for whites being threatened with a taser, or tased, this occurred in proportions under white’s share of Key West’s population in 2011 and 2012, while in 2013,  whites were threatened with tasing or tased at slightly over their share of Key West’s population.

• Houston, Texas, Tasering:--a city that may be inching toward a DOJ investigation of  police force patterns and practices—tases whites at a proportion three times less than their share of Houston’s population, while Blacks are tased at around 2 ¾ times greater than their proportion of Houston’s population. [viii]
   

• Arrests. In response to Everette Wilson’s complaint to the CRB that Officer Brian Leahy had practiced racial profiling in arresting him, KWPD Chief Donnie Lee provided the CRB with the raw numbers of Leahy’s arrests by race:  Leahy had made 39 arrests of whites and only of 11 of blacks since Leahy was hired.  The data clearly do not support such  the Chief’s conclusion that Officer Leahy did not profile Blacks for arrest:  out of the 50 arrests since Officer Leahy joined the KWPD, 22% were of Blacks—more than two times their share of Key West’s population; whites’ arrests were 78%—a proportion only slightly above their share of the city’s population.  Nevertheless, the CRB deemed Everette Wilson’s case against officer Leahy, to be “unfounded.”
   

• Black arrests, US.  Even though the same percentage of whites, Blacks, and Hispanics were stopped in the US by law enforcement (9% for each group), Blacks were 3 times more likely than whites to be searched and handcuffed, and almost three times more likely to be arrested. 

Some policing in Key West’s Paradise is clearly worse than other cities’; most is roughly equal to other US cities, although that is hardly anything to be proud of.   Several forms of racial profiling are alive and well in Paradise a fact to be accepted and corrected before Key West is faced with the Department of Justice using its subpoena powers to dig through police and other Key West government records and require interviews from Key West police officers, city officials, CRB members, and administrative rank-and-file.  We can make the necessary changes in policing ourselves if we admit that, right now, justice in our Paradise is not blind.

 

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[i]https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/resistance_is_futile_the_violent_cost_of_challenging_the_american_police_st

[ii] http://theantimedia.org/innocent-people-take-plea-bargains/

[iii] See Key West Citizen Archives, “Stereo, TV not easily concealed,”  12/05/2011

[iv] See Key West Citizen Archives, “Oversight board clears two police officers of charges,”  12/11/2012

 

[v] http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/09/15/cops-take-2-5-billion-from-innocent-motorists/

[vi] http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/racial-gap-found-in-traffic-stops-in-milwaukee-ke1hsip-134977408.html?ipad=y

[vii]  http://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/legitimacy/Pages/traffic-stops.aspx

[viii] http://www.uh.edu/class/hcpp/_docs/ced-analysis.pdf