The New York Times used this photo to accompany an editorial on the indictment of the police officer who killed Walter Scott. There was no editorial on the officer’s mistrial. (photo: Credit Chuck Burton/AP)
Corporate media reported the mistrial in the case of South Carolina police officer Michael Slager, whom video showed shooting unarmed African-American Walter Scott eight times in the back in April 2015, handcuffing him on the ground, and then dropping a taser alongside his body—this after Slager stopped Scott for a broken tail light.
Mostly there were dry headlines like “Mistrial Declared in Black Motorist’s Shooting by Officer.” An AP piece got the headline that many were “at a loss” at the outcome; other headlines had them “stunned.” The story itself included comments that started to get at the depth of folks’ despair: “There’s a jury full of people and they cannot decide if it’s illegal to shoot someone who is running away from you?” asks one source. “What do you say about a country that feels this way about black people?” “Do we really have anything that can seriously be called the administration of criminal justice?” asks another.
Indeed. Corporate media keep referring to how the country has been “rocked” or “staggered” by revelations of police brutality in black communities—evoking the question, if we were really staggered, wouldn’t something like this knock us over?
Instead, we got only media gestures toward documented research on how hard it is to convict police officers and bland references to “racial tensions.” The Daily News (12/5/16) was the only paper I found editorializing on the mistrial: Headlined “Believe Your Eyes,” the paper acknowledged that they don’t generally weigh in on questions of guilt, but that measured against the video evidence, Slager’s testimony—that he was gripped by “total fear” and “fired until the threat was stopped as I was trained to do”—”can only be described as emanating from a parallel universe.”
The New York Times (4/8/16) did run an editorial last April, saying the quick charging of Slager was “encouraging,” along with FBI and Justice Department involvement. Such wrongful deaths “present a clear danger to the civic fabric. The country needs to confront this issue directly and get this problem under control.” The paper’s editorial silence on the mistrial suggests the important gap between the relative ease of calling for change and the difficulty of examining why it doesn’t come.
Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the producer and host of CounterSpin.
I think the danger stopped when Walter Scott turned to run, if there ever was any danger.
This kind of state sanctioned murder is old news in the New South. For those too young to remember, the good people of North Carolina found, after trial, all defendants innocent of having murdered five civil rights protestors notwithstanding the fact that the murders were videotaped, and the killers could be readily identified. The video was shown on all network television.
The defendants were members of the KKK and American Nazi party; four of the five victims were members of the Communist Workers Party. The police were informed of the attack, before it happened–they did nothing.
It’s called the Greensboro massacre. It happened in 1979. You could look it up.
Sometimes, I wish that Lincoln had simply let the South leave the union. A bad marriage sometimes can be remedied only by divorce.
Those of us who understand that there is one race, the human race, which includes all humans, seem to be having difficulty understanding that there are humans who do not realize this. When Slager looked at Scott, he did not see a human being of a dark color; he saw an animal. The one holdout on the jury, and the five undecided, also saw a police officer shooting an animal. And they did not see why it should be against the law for a police officer to shoot an animal.
Do you think I am exaggerating? Consider some comments that have made the news recently describing FLOTUS as “monkey face” or “an ape in heels.” To me it is inconceivable that anyone can look at our FLOTUS and see anything other than a beautiful, smart, gracious lady (who also happens to be an attorney). But obviously, there are those who disagree. This is what we are up against.
BTW, steve, kudos for the allusion to Thurber.
A bullet for a tail light. The enforcement effort police make on the street is extreme and pointless. All police do not need guns, too many times the gun is used because sitting in the car and driving around is all the cop really wants to do.