Look, I did not sit on that grand jury, and I didn’t review all the evidence, and hear testimony. I have no way of knowing if its decision in this case was justified, and I doubt you do either. Seems to me that the way people respond to this decision depends heavily — and perhaps even wholly — on whether they are inclined to trust the police as a general matter. I have long been predisposed to give police the benefit of the doubt, but the outrageous conduct of Chicago police and city officials in the Laquan McDonald case makes it hard to know whom to trust.
A white reader who works for a large city, inside the city government, told me an interesting story the other day, one I forgot to blog about. In his city, the violent crime is almost exclusively in the black part of town. He said that the things police in his city have to deal with in terms of drugs and gun violence beggar belief. (I asked him for examples, and he gave me a few.) He also told me that he has personally witnessed police brutality against black crime suspects on more than one occasion. He said the abusive cops that he’s seen are both white and black, and that he fears his city is prime for a riot.
I was startled to hear this because this reader’s city has not been in the news for police brutality. I did a Google search to see if something had come up that I had missed, but nothing did. I verified that this reader really is an employee of his city’s government, and asked him subsequently about the lack of media coverage, given that his city has both a newspaper and TV stations. Said the reader, “I am constantly amazed by the things that go on here that I know about personally, that never make the news.”
Read the full article HERE.