St. Louis CofCC Blog

AP:

Already tarnished by brutality and misconduct allegations, Chicago’s police department is facing more tough questions in the wake of two officer-involved deaths in less than a week.

Leading the latest chorus of critics are the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who opened a local branch of his National Action Network after two alleged police assaults on civilians were caught on videotape.

Just as Al Sharpton sets up shop in Chicago, he gets a chance to show off. The fighting between Jesse and Al will be more entertaining than any of their anti-police crusades.

On Tuesday, about 14 hours before Jackson made an appearance at a rally protesting the Taser death of a 42-year-old man, police shot and killed an 18-year-old man who they say flashed a gun at them and ran away.

The latest shooting prompted an angry crowd of more than 100 people to gather near the scene where the Cook County medical examiner’s office said Aaron Harrison was killed by a gunshot wound to the back.

If that “angry crowd of more than 100 people” would each spend 10 minutes in a firearms simulator and play the role of a cop, they would understand why a cop would get scared when someone flashes a gun at them.

Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center, was furious that police suggested the officers acted properly so early in the investigation.

“I just don’t understand the tendency of this department to immediately circle the wagons, engage in blaming the victim and justifying the police actions before the facts are thoroughly investigated,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

If there’s any circling of the wagons, it’s in the black community. People talk about the “blue wall of silence,” that is, the tendency of cops not to rat each other out. However, I worry more about the “black wall of silence,” that is, the tendency of blacks not to tell the cops what they know about crimes or what crimes they witnessed (i.e. 50 people standing around, and nobody saw anything), and also the tendency for blacks on juries not to convict black criminal defendants in spite of overwhelming evidence (black jury nullification).

To me, if we can tolerate a black wall of silence, then the cops can have their blue wall of silence.