by Meg Langford


Last night was the third anniversary of the shooting death of Michael Brown, and, unsurprisingly, this infamous event was mostly forgotten by the populace of social media.  And why should we be surprised?  The human attention span, now officially shorter than that of a goldfish, cannot maintain interest in anything longer than the ever-shrinking 72-hour news cycle.  Michael Brown was shot three years ago.  Michael Brown is indeed exemplary of that morbid reminder, “A person dies twice: once when their breath leaves their body, and the second time, when their name is uttered for the last time.”   Attributed to many, but first put forth by the ancient Egyptians, the expression seems to aptly capture poor Michael Brown’s second, slow, and rather agonizing death.  After all, with the world coming down around us, and all the insanity in the public theatre, who cares about one more poor dead black kid, shot down in the mean streets on a hot August day?

Well, I personally think many people would care, if they but knew this one fact about Michael Brown, which, coincidentally, has a very great deal to do with the breaking news of this week:  You thought Usain Bolt was the record holder for the fastest man in the world?  You, perhaps, have weighed in on the controversy of whether or not a known doper has honestly broken Bolt’s record?

Well, they’re all wrong.  Everybody in the world is wrong, but me.  (Who does that sound like?)   Michael Brown is (was) the Fastest Man in the World.  He still holds that record.  How do I know?  

Because Officer Darren Wilson proved it, with his “testimony”--a fine, upstanding word from the Romans, meaning literally “to swear on one’s testicles.”  That is a pretty serious oath from Wilson.  And after all, police are sworn to always tell the truth.

Here it is, for your consideration:  Michael Brown, the Fastest Man in the World.


                                                      THE PHYSICS OF MURDER

                                   
You can destroy evidence.  You can fail to photograph the body.   You can not bother to take measurements at the crime scene.  You can decide not to record the testimony of the shooter.  You can let the shooter process his gun.   You can discredit witnesses.  You can question their credibility.  You can cherry pick the evidence that you show to the grand jury.  You can put known liars and mentally ill persons in front of the people charged with determining the killer’s fate, and encourage those liars to sway the outcome. You can carelessly, or intentionally, give twelve well-meaning citizens instructions which are absolutely wrong.  You can mislead the public.  And you can manipulate the press.

There is only one thing that you cannot manipulate, mislead, suppress, cherry pick, or destroy.

The Laws of Physics.  Those pesky, irrefutable, immutable Laws of Physics.

Here, we look at “The Physics of Murder”.  As regards the shooting of Michael Brown.  



SIXTEEN SECONDS


The Physics of Murder begins with 16 seconds.   Sixteen seconds, from the time that Darren Wilson communicated through the police radio system, until he began shooting at Michael Brown.  This is a matter of physics, and this cannot be debated by anybody, except for somebody who is in denial of the Laws of Nature.   Somebody who is in denial of reality.

I will, of course, explain how we know all of these things to be a matter of fact.

Let’s begin with the first time stamp:  Officer Darren Wilson’s communication with his dispatcher.  Wilson radios for backup at 12:02 p.m. UTC (Universal Time Clock) time.  August 9th, 2014, just two minutes after noon.  That is according to the Ferguson Police Department’s own records.  If you have doubts and wish to check the accuracy of a UTC timestamp, I assure you the evidence is abundant.   (This is how accurate a UTC timestamp is. The people managing the Universal Time Clock in Colorado even add a leap second periodically, to keep it absolutely accurate.  This, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology at nist.gov:  “A leap second is a second added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep it synchronized with astronomical time.  Leap seconds are added in order to keep the difference between UTC and astronomical time (UT1) to less than 0.9 seconds. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), measures Earth's rotation and publishes the difference between UT1 and UTC. Usually leap seconds are added when UTC is ahead of UT1 by 0.4 seconds or more. At the time the corrections started in 1972, a necessary correction of ten seconds was made to UTC, and there have been leap seconds about every year and a half, on average.”)

So.  To return to the scene of the killing:  Darren Wilson talks to his department at 12:02, just after noon.

A little more than sixteen seconds later, Michael Brown would be dead.  How do we know that?



THOSE PESKY LAWS OF PHYSICS:  UTC VS. GPS


Just as Michael Slager was no doubt horrified to learn that someone had been recording his murder of Walter Scott, and his placing of the Taser near Scott’s dying body, so Officer Darren Wilson was probably alarmed to hear that his shooting had been recorded.  (Sadly, it ended up being a moot point, in regards to the grand jury, but history remembers.)

As most of us know by now, a man in an apartment nearby was chatting with a lady friend—nothing x-rated, just a sultry voice complimenting how she looks.  That recording began at exactly 12:02:14.  Then, in horrific contradistinction, the sound of gunfire cuts into the conversation.  At the heart of this damning evidence—damning for Darren Wilson’s version of the events, that is—is a technology called Glide.  As Glide brags in their description:

Because Glide is the only messaging application using streaming video technology, each message is simultaneously recorded and transmitted, so the exact time can be verified to the second.  

Back to the shooter, Darren Wilson.  Wilson’s shots began two seconds into the Glide tele-chat recording, so that would be 12:02:16.

Now it is only natural that readers would want to confirm the level of accuracy in the time stamps here; i.e., were the two systems—the telechat Glide App, and the emergency dispatch system that Darren Wilson was using—were they “in sync”?  The answer is that emergency dispatch always operates on official State/US clock time, which is, of course, set to UTC standards.  According to a reporter who goes only as “heckphilly.com”, who interviewed everybody from the people at Glide to assorted members of the police and emergency services, “Radio transmissions are usually saved and recorded via a recording device on a computer that saves everything in order … Every agency around here runs 2400 clock just set to the state’s clock so everybody is running at the same exact time … I’ve visited several, and I haven’t noticed any agency that does it differently. It’s only like that so people don’t get confused when it comes to records and such.”

Make no mistake, down-to-the-second accuracy is easy and free to obtain, and it is the gold standard for policing.  

There is, then, only one more concern that needs to be addressed, and that is with regard to the timestamp on the Glide App.  Was the Glide App on UTC time?  Or perhaps on GPS time?  Different devices track time in different ways, most by UTC, and some by GPS.  Some cell phones, for example, give GPS timestamps.  That means, as any rocket scientist knows, that we then have a 16 second difference between UTC time and GPS time, with GPS being 16 seconds ahead of UTC.   (That has actually changed to 17 seconds, given that in summer of 2015, a leap second was added to the UTC, to keep everything completely accurate. But for the year in question, 2014, it would have been 16 seconds.)  If we know that the Glide telechat began at the internal device’s GPS time of 12:02:14, with the shots beginning two seconds in, at 12:02:16 (GPS), then we only need to subtract 16 seconds from the hypothetical GPS time stamp to adjust it to a UTC timestamp.  That would put the bullets beginning at exactly 12:02:00 (UTC), the precise time that Darren Wilson is on the phone and hasn’t even had the physical altercation with Brown.  So we know that the Glide app cannot have been on GPS time, it had to be on the same clock as the police equipment and software:  UTC time.

All of that boils down to some very damning numbers for Darren Wilson.  It means that he was talking with dispatch at exactly 12:02:00 UTC time, and that he began shooting at 12:02:16, just 16 seconds later.  (And that is assuming that it wasn’t 12:02 and “some seconds”; that is assuming that the police department doesn’t round off in their records, which indeed they might.  Which would give Darren Wilson even less time for all the following to happen.)  Sixteen seconds, for a hell of a lot to happen.



A VERY BUSY QUARTER OF A MINUTE

Within the fleeting space of just 16 seconds—a quarter of a minute—a whole slew of events had to transpire, IF we are to believe Darren Wilson’s version of reality.  Let’s just look at everything that had to happen, if Darren Wilson’s story is to be believed.

1. Darren Wilson called in for back-up at exactly 12:02 UTC time, according to official records.  So, he had to finish up that request for back-up, put his cruiser in reverse, then back up, and swerve around so that it stopped right in front of Brown and Johnson.  He then he had to stop the cruiser and turn off the ignition.  Then he called Michael Brown over to his vehicle to have words with him.
2. This verbal exchange set off the first of two scuffles.  Beginning with the now famous door episode, in which Darren Wilson said he attempted to open the door, but Michael Brown slammed it shut on him, while Dorian Johnson (Michael’s friend and proximate witness) told a different story—that the door bounced off of Brown because Officer Wilson had screeched up so close to them.
3. Then began the second scuffle, this one also having two conflicting versions, in which Darren Wilson claims that Michael Brown reached inside the cruiser to get his gun (apparently having been struck with some bizarre desire to commit Death by Cop), a gun that was holstered at Wilson’s right side, a fact which therefore required Brown to duck into the police cruiser, and then stretch his body across that of an armed police officer.  Getting that gun was, according to Darren Wilson, apparently Michael Brown’s plan.  (Dorian Johnson told it differently--he swore that Officer Wilson pulled Brown into the car.)
4. And this one is the corker—since it was later established that Brown had run 170 feet away from the police SUV before Darren Wilson started shooting--that means that this jog of 170 feet also had to take place during the same 16 seconds during which all of the action in points 1,2, and 3 allegedly transpired.  (By the way, the Ferguson Police lied about this matter initially, saying the Brown was about 30 feet from Wilson and the cop’s SUV when the shooting began.  That is not a tiny amount to be “off by”.  There is no plausible explanation for this lie, except that they imagine that we are as stupid as they are deceptive.)

Let’s go over all that again, in a little more detail--the goal of which is to show Darren Wilson’s version to be impossible, given the Laws of Physics.  And using those same laws, we will show Wilson to be—for lack of a better term—a liar.


Alright, a mere sixteen seconds transpired between the call to the station and Michael Brown being shot.

1. Darren Wilson finishes his call to the station for back up, signs off, and then decides to confront Brown and Johnson.  He puts his vehicle in reverse, screeches back, swerves around, then slams on his breaks and turns off the ignition.  Wilson then calls Michael Brown over, saying he wants to talk to him.  They exchange words.  LET’S SAY THAT ALL OF THIS HAPPENED IN 3 SECONDS.
2. Then the first fight, the fight with the door begins.   More words are exchanged.  Darren Wilson opens his door to get out.  It is shut again, either by Mike’s hand or by bouncing off of Mike.  Then, it opens again; same dueling theories as above.  Then it is shut again.   LET’S CALL THIS THREE SECONDS.   (Darren Wilson would later testify that this fight over the door and the beginning of the fisticuffs took a full 10 seconds, which would put us at a total of 13 seconds so far, but that would leave only 3 seconds remaining for the fight in the car that took so many long minutes for Darren Wilson to describe in his grand jury testimony, and for Michael Brown’s last run for his life.  So let’s give the officer the benefit of a doubt, and just call the door altercation THREE SECONDS.)
3. The prolonged fight in the car.  In order to understand everything that happened in the front seat of that cruiser, let us go right to Darren Wilson’s own words in front of the grand jury, so we can accurately and explicitly glean from the officer himself all the things that happened during that fight in the front seat of his SUV.   Keep in mind that before the second scuffle begins, we have already used up 6 (3+3) seconds of the 16 seconds, leaving just 10 seconds left.—and that Michael Brown also will need to run 170 feet before the shooting starts.  (If, of course, we are to believe Darren Wilson’s version of events.)  The following is the verbatim testimony from Darren Wilson, as he described the events that happened within the car to the grand jury:

             
BEGIN DARREN WILSON’S GRAND JURY EXCERPT:
(grammar uncorrected)


… And they kept walking, as I said, they never once stopped, never got on the sidewalk they stayed in the middle of the road.  So I got on my radio, and Frank 21 is my call sign that day, I said Frank 21 I'm on Canfield with two, send me another car. I then placed my car in reverse and backed up and I backed up just past them and then angled my vehicle, the back of my vehicle to kind of cut them off kind to keep them somewhat contained. As I did that, I go to open the door and I say, hey, come here for a minute to Brown. As I'm opening the door he turns, faces me, looks at me and says, "what the fuck are you going to do about it", and shuts my door, slammed it shut. I haven't even got it open enough to get my leg out, it was only a few inches. I then looked at him and told him to get back and he was just staring at me, almost like to intimidate me or to overpower me. The intense face he had was just not what I expected from any of this.


I then opened my door again and used my door to push him backwards, and while I'm doing that I tell him to, "get the fuck back", and then I use my door to push him. … He then grabs my door again and shuts my door.  At that time is when I saw him coming into my vehicle. His head was higher than the top of my car.  And I see him ducking and as he is ducking, his hands are up and he is coming in my vehicle. I had shielded myself in this type of manner and kind of looked away, so I don't remember seeing him come at me, but I was hit right here in the side of the face with a fist. I don't think it was a full on swing, I think it was a full on swing, but not a full shot. I think my arm deflected some of it, but there was still a significant amount of contact that was made to my face. … I believe it was his right, just judging by how we were situated. But like I said, I had turned away, had my eyes, I was shielding myself. … After he hit me then, it stopped for a second. He kind of like, I remember getting hit and he kind of like grabbed and pulled, and then it stopped. When I looked up, if this is my car door, I'm sitting here facing that way, he's here. He turns like this and now the Cigarillos I see in his left hand. He's going like this and he says, "hey man, hold these." … And he reaches back and he says, "hey man, hold these." I'm assuming to Johnson, but I couldn't see Johnson from my line of sight. … And he said, "hey man, hold these." And at that point I tried to hold his right arm because it was like this at my car. This is my car window. I tried to hold his right arm and use my left hand to get out to have some type of control and not be trapped in my car any more. And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five year old holding onto Hulk Hogan. … Hulk Hogan, that's just how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm. And as I'm trying to open the door is when, and I can't really get it open because he is standing only maybe 6 inches from my door, but as I was trying to pull the handle, I see his hand coming back around like this and he hit me with this part of his right here, just a full swing all the way back around and hit me right here.


After he did that, next thing I remember is how do I get this guy away from me. What do I do not to get beaten inside my car. I remember having my hands up and I thought to myself, you know, what do I do. I considered using my mace, however, I wasn't willing to sacrifice my left hand, which is blocking my face to go for it. I couldn't reach around on my right to get it and if I would have gotten it out, the chances of it being effective were slim to none. His hands were in front of his face, it would have blocked the mace from hitting him in the face and if any of that got on me, I know what it does to me and I would have been out of the game. I wear contacts, if that touches any part of my eyes, then I can't see at all. Like I said, I don't carry a Taser, I considered my asp, but to get that out since I kind of sit on it, I usually have to lean forward and pull myself forward to the steering wheel to get it out. Again, I wasn't willing to let go of the one defense I had against being hit. The whole time, I can't tell you if he was swinging at me or grabbing me or pushing me or what, but there was just stuff going on and I was looking down figuring out what to do. Also, when I was grabbing my asp, I knew if I did even get it out, I'm not going to be able to expand it inside the car or am I going to be able to make a swing that will be effective in any manner. Next I considered my flashlight. I keep that on the passenger side of the car. I wasn't going to, again, reach over like this to grab it and then even if I did grab it, would it even be effective. We are so close and confined. So the only other option I thought I had was my gun. I drew my gun, I turned. It is kind of hard to describe it, I turn and I go like this. He is standing here. I said, "get back or I'm going to shoot you." He immediately grabs my gun and says, "you are too much of a pussy to shoot me." I believe gun was basically pointed this way. I'm in my car, he's here, it is pointed this way, but he grabs it with his right hand, not his left, he grabs with his right one and he twists it and then he digs it down into my hip. I felt that another one of those punches in my face could knock me out or worse. I mean it was, he's obviously bigger than I was and stronger and the, I've already taken two to the face and I didn't think I would, the third one could be fatal if he hit me right. He grabs my gun, says, "you are too much of a pussy to shoot me." The gun goes down into my hip and at that point I thought I was getting shot. I can feel his fingers try to get inside the trigger guard with my finger and I remember envisioning a bullet going into my leg. I thought that was the next step. As I'm looking at it, I'm not paying attention to him, all I can focus on is just this gun in my leg. I was able to kind of shift like this and then push it down, because he is pushing down like to keep it pinned on my leg. So when I slid, I let him use his momentum to push it down and it was kind of pointed to where the seat buckle would attach on the floorboard on the side of my car. Next thing I remember putting my left hand on it like this, putting my elbow into the back of my seat and just pushing with all I could forward. Like I said, I was just so focused on getting the gun out of me. When this point, he is still holding onto it and I pulled the trigger and nothing happens, it just clicked. I pull it again, it just clicked again. At this point I'm like why isn't this working, this guy is going to kill me if he gets ahold of this gun. I pulled it a third time, it goes off. When it went off, it shot through my door panel and my window was down and glass flew out of my door panel. I think that kind of startled him and me at the same time. When I see the glass come up, it comes, a chunk about that big comes across my right hand and then I notice I have blood on the back of my hand. After seeing the blood on my hand, I looked at him and he was, this is my car door, he was here and he kind of stepped back and went like this. And then after he did that, he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up. At that point I just went like this, I tried to pull the trigger again, click, nothing happened. …  Last thing I saw was this coming at me. …  I just saw his hands up, I don't know if they were closed yet, on the way to going closed, I saw this and that face coming at me again, and I just went like this and I shielded my face. …  Went like this and shielded my face  …  So I pulled the trigger, it just clicks that time. Without even looking, I just grab the top of my gun, the slide and I racked it, and I put my, still not looking just holding my hand up, I pulled the trigger again, it goes off. When I look back after that  … It went off twice in the car. Pull, click, click, went off, click, went off. So twice in the car. …  When I look up after that, I see him start cloud of dust behind him. I then get out of my car. As I'm getting out of the car I tell dispatch, "shots fired, send me more cars." We start running, kind of the same direction that Johnson had pointed. Across the street like a diagonal towards this, kind of like where the parking lot came in for Copper Creek Court and Canfield, right at that intersection. And there is a light pole right there, I remember him running towards the light pole. We pass two cars that were behind my police car while we were running. I think the second one was Pontiac Grand Am, a green one. I don't know if it was a two door or four door, I just remember seeing a Pontiac green Grand Am.”


HERE ENDS DARREN WILSON’S GRAND JURY TESTIMONY.
(Above from Case: State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson, Grand Jury Volume V, September 16, 2014, Section V, 209-216, and pages 223 – 226)


So, of the 16 seconds between the radio call and the shooting, we had assigned 3 seconds to Darren finishing his call to dispatch, and then maneuvering his vehicle back and around, then addressing Michael Brown and turning off the ignition.  And then another 3 seconds, paring it down considerably from Wilson’s own estimate, to the back-and-forth opening and slamming of the door repeatedly.  That’s 6 of the 16 seconds, not counting the time that Michael Brown will need to run 170 feet before “turning” and “looking like a monster”, the apparent provocation for Darren Wilson to start shooting.


So, let’s say that the above several pages of description, dialogue, fighting, attempts at firing, firing, etc. took only 6 seconds.  Personally I find that ridiculous, improbable, impossible, outrageous.  But let’s say it took only 6 seconds.


That is:
3 seconds for Wilson to end precinct call, then car reversing, swerving around, and Wilson then addressing Brown.
3 seconds for the back and forth door altercation.
6 seconds time for all the italics bold action  in Wilson’s above grand jury excerpt to take place.


That means 4 seconds left for Michael Brown to cover 170 feet.  Which basically makes him the fastest man in the world.   In 2009, Usain Bolt set an unbroken record of running the 100 meter dash in 9.58 seconds.  That translates to 10.4384133612 meters per second.   A meter is 3.28084 feet.  That means—and we are rounding off here—that Usain Bolt was running at over 30 feet per second.   But Michael Brown only has 4 seconds left, in our 16 seconds and ticking clock, 4 seconds to run 170 feet.  All of this means that Michael Brown had to run over 40 feet per second, in order for Darren Wilson’s magical mystery math to work.  Michael Brown, overweight and out of shape (sorry, Big Mike), and running barefoot (he lost both shoes as he fled), had to run 25 percent faster than Usain Bolt, in order for Darren Wilson to be telling the truth.   


Assuming of course, that the Laws of Physics are still in place.


I thank you for hanging in there with me, but now we know everything that would have to have happened, from the time of Darren Wilson calling the station, to the time he began firing shots, all within 16 seconds, if Officer Wilson’s version of events is to be believed.


Or wait …


…Maybe it is as 15 witnesses said.  Maybe the reason that so much happened in such a short time is that Michael Brown did not run 170 feet before the bullets started flying; maybe Darren Wilson started firing as soon as he got out of the car.  Maybe Darren Wilson is just another dirtbag “Michael Slager” type cop, firing at a terrified, fleeing kid.

I guess it all depends on how you feel about the laws of physics.




​
​

By Meg Langford                                                             
 
(Dear Reader; As we were writing these closing thoughts and feelings, about the book, it would seem that somewhere in Texas, the assassination of a number of Dallas Police Officers was being carefully planned.  We can only reiterate the sentiments articulated in “Ashley’s Dove’s”, a tribute to a fallen officer written to honor the sacrifice of Officer Ashley Guindon.  It resides on our website, moviesforyourmind.net.  The sheer magnitude of people that this sniper’s act of carnage will impact, and the heartbreak that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives, is simply beyond words.   Beyond imagining.  All that said, the events that took place in Dallas on July 7th, 2016, seem to live in some strange synchronicity with the epilogue to this book.  We mourn with a stunned nation.  Our hearts are broken.)
 
 
It has been a long journey, starting from the century-old lynching deaths of Henry Smith and Jesse Washington and Mary Turner, all carried out in front of a thrill seeking, bloodthirsty mob.  A long journey to the evil and ugly forum comments and social media rants of today, where it feels eerily as though many with a mob mentality would happily watch a modern lynching, if such atrocities were still around—failing that, they will spew their bile onto the world wide web.  It has been a morbid and dreary series of sad stories, as we have gone from one tragic killing to another, starting in “The Little Book of Lynching, Part One” to “The Little Book of Lynching, Part Two.” 

And for what it is worth, I think you can make a valid argument that this second book could be more aptly named, “An Examination of Police Brutality in America” or “Excessive Force:  Deadly Epidemic or Necessary Evil?”—or some other annoyingly academic sounding moniker.

But we are sticking with “The Little Book of Lynching, Part Two”.  Why?  Because there is a common thread here:  that vengeance, masking itself as justice, has been running rampant in this country since we became a country—long before, in fact--and all too often, law enforcement and some perversion of the judicial system is either involved, or hovering on the fringes of tragedy, but choosing to look the other way.  Just as a bunch of thugs associated with local law enforcement orchestrated the killing of three civil rights workers back in the turbulent 1960’s, so now we have police officers who choose to ignore the most important parts of their training, and escalate situations until someone is needlessly shot, or, just as chillingly, Tased to death.   And just as there was precious little effort put towards bringing justice to Emmett Till’s killers, or the mob that lynched Mary Turner, so current law enforcement officers who should know better choose to be unconscionably casual when it comes to investigating the homicide of an innocent human being.  The 2014 death of young Lennon Lacy, of Bladenboro, North Carolina, who was found hanging from a swing in an all-white trailer park in a way that the medical examiner said he could not possibly have engineered himself, was a joke to local cops: they took the coroner’s camera when he tried to document the crime scene, and threatened him with the direst of consequences if he even took one picture for the evidence files.

So, to quote Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”  Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.   Except for the cellphone and its ability to record events.  Old Jean Baptist may have invented the dahlia and been ahead of his time in his campaign to abolish capital punishment, but he didn’t see smart phones in the future.

So, for all of these reasons, this book remains stubbornly titled, “The Little Book of Lynching”, with the most compelling reason of all remaining as sadly true as it was a few hundred pages ago:  There are only a couple of dozen names of the dead here.  There should be thousands.

Until the day I die, I will remember coming across one long list of lynching victims, one of which was only known as “JOHN THE SLAVE.”   Here was a human being who lived, laughed, loved, but more than anything else, he suffered.  He may have been dragged from his home across an ocean to a strange and frightening place.  He probably had a wife and children.   He no doubt had hopes and dreams and prayers, which pushed hopelessly against a wall of greed and cruelty that he just could not overcome.  And that is all that will ever be known of his life.  He was John.  And he had been purchased by another human being.

So yes.  This is “The Little Book of Lynching.”
 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO POLICE OFFICERS EVERYWHERE
 
Stop it.  Just stop it.

Stop saying that YOU “FEARED FOR YOUR LIFE”, when you were clearly in no danger.  And no, I am not vilifying officers for using that defense when they really did have reason to fear for their lives.  That is precisely why examples of officers who employed deadly force when clearly threatened have not been included in this book.

I am talking about cops who use “I feared for my life” as an excuse to engage in the worst kind of brutality:

--Officer Michael Slager claimed he feared for his life when he shot Walter Scott, and will surely testify that there was a small portion of the interaction that we did not see: the fight which took place after the first dash cam footage, and before the covertly documented murder in which Slager shot eight times at a fleeing Walter Scott.  Only one problem with that: virtually everything in Michael Slager’s statement is a lie, so why should we believe his excuse?  He did the unthinkable when he planted a Taser at Scott’s body, and neither he nor his fellow officers attempted CPR, as they claimed they did.  Of course, Officer Slager could not possibly have known when he spewed his pack of lies called an “Officer Statement” that the truth was being covertly taped by a terrified bystander—imagine what might have happened if Slager had looked over and realized that a stranger was recording the entire incident?  Lastly, regarding Slager’s aiming at a fleeing man and firing eight times, nothing that had happened justifies shooting into a crowded neighborhood, especially when three of your bullets have missed their intended target and flown off into suburbia.

​--“I feared for my life?"  I don’t believe that Tamir Rice’s killers feared for their lives, because if you really did fear for your life, driving up to within two feet of a maniac wielding a gun is the last thing a couple of cops would do.  They would instead barricade themselves behind safe cover and start negotiating.  Or shooting.   But never, never if they truly feared for their lives from a maniac wielding a rifle would they speed right up to his line of fire.

--The man who gunned down Bernard Bailey can’t have feared for his life.  Bernard Bailey was a well-known fixture in the teeny tiny town of Eutawville, population 300, where Bernard, fifty years old and patriarch to a large and loving family, served the state as a prison guard for twenty years and attended the local church every Sunday.  He just stopped by the courthouse to pay his daughter’s broken taillight ticket.  Five minutes later, he would be dead.   Because a weasely little man named Chief Richard Combs (who had just been fired from his last policing job, by the way), would later claim that he “feared for his life.”

Oh, and here’s another thing that the citizenry would like to see changed immediately:
Stop being so casual about investigating the deaths of young black men.  As in the case of Keith Warren.  Where officers waited five hours before notifying his parents after they found him hanging from a tree.  And to make matters worse, they sent his body for embalming before the family could say goodbye, choose a funeral home, and most importantly, before an autopsy could be conducted.   Officers, stop being so casual about the death of young black men like Feraris Golden, where you literally drove over the crime scene, then changed the official description of the noose from “a blue work shirt” to “a green sheet.”  Officers, stop being so casual about the death of young black men, like in the case of Kendrick Johnson, where you stupidly and inexcusably waited for a week to take possession of the crucial security footage, and months … months …before you interviewed the witnesses.  And when CIA consultants noted strange evidence of footage missing from all relevant cameras, your response was to claim that the investigation was closed, and then you literally slammed the door.

And Officers, stop this immediately:  stop ignoring the procedures in which you have been so carefully trained, at my expense, at the taxpayer’s expense, just because you have some kind of Rambo fixation.  And stop shooting so quickly, so cavalierly, that under questioning, when seeing the actual video actions of your evidence, you are forced to say “We may have told him to drop the gun while we were firing.”  As was the case with the officers who gunned down Michael Crawford III, for casually carrying a weapon in public, in an open carry state—the definition of which meaning that you can casually carry weapons in public.   But, maybe not if you are black.

Oh, and while this may not seem as earthshaking as the other items on my list, stop killing dogs.  Stop murdering people’s pets.  Like poor Geist, of Utah.  Dozens of police were combing the neighborhood searching for a missing toddler that ended up being right where he belonged, in his own home, sleeping.  But in the process of searching the area, cops entered several city blocks' worth of backyards, calling for the child. When two-year old puppy Geist approach a cop who stepped into Geist’s backyard, the cop just shot him. And in Oklahoma:  When a cop was giving his brother in law a ride-a-long, they got lost and stopped at a family home to ask directions.  When the family dog, Bruiser, came out wagging its tail and barking, they shot it dead.  And in Baltimore:  When Nala, a domesticated sharp Pei with a nametag, was grabbed by Officer Jeffrey Bolger, his best plan was to slit her throat.  It didn’t help that witnesses nearby heard the officer say “I’m going to gut this fucking thing.”  And here’s something else, with the dog killing--this “wrong address” business is getting old.  Your excuse often sounds something like this: you showed up at the wrong address, and then felt threatened by this innocent family’s pet, so you shot it.  FIRSTLY, when a person makes a complaint on a neighbor, such as domestic violence, you should start out with the assumption that you might have the wrong address, since the person calling in the complaint could very well have gotten the address wrong.  So when you show up at a place that you think might be the location, nobody at the house, including the dog, deserves to be treated badly from the get-go.  It is one thing to take care for your own safety as an officer, it is quite another to assume when you knock on the door that whoever is on the other side of the door is guilty of something.  Including the family dog.  Secondly, carry a little seven dollar bottle of mace.  That way, if the family dog does act in an aggressively protective way, the beloved family pet experiences a few moments of pain, instead of eternal death.   Thirdly, if you can’t handle most of these dogs without putting a bullet through their brain, you are pussies.  Some police in Ohio felt so terrified of the family dog that they first Tased poor Jack, then shot him three times.  The family came home, slipped in the dog’s blood on their front porch, and found his lifeless corpse along with a note to call the police.  What you should know about Jack is that he was a five pound Chihuahua.  And yes, I called them pussies.  What other word could possibly apply in examples like these?  There are dozens of such stories on the internet.  It is heartbreaking.

And oh, Officers?   since you are so hung up on obedience to the law, how about respecting people’s First Amendment rights to say what they want, even if it offends you.  So when an all-around great guy like Cleveland Browns Receiver Andrew Hawkins wears a shirt pleading for “JUSTICE FOR TAMIR RICE, JUSTICE FOR JOHN CRAWFORD”, how about if the local Union beefhead not retort with some twaddle about how the entire Browns team owes the local cops an apology, just because Hawkins wants justice?  How can anybody have read the full chapter on Tamir Rice in this book and not see what a gross miscarriage a justice was perpetrated from the moment Loehmann was hired, till the last hurrah, when the prosecutor chose to parade a mentally unstable witness in front of the grand jury.

And here’s another thing about the First Amendment: the people of this country have a right to peaceful protest.  Yes, matters do get out of control, and when they do, arrests should be made.  But they only tend to get out of control when the powers-that-be ignore peaceful protests and reasonable requests, as authorities did in Baltimore for an entire week, after Freddie Grey died of his injuries at the hands of cops who again, ignored procedures.  Dear police:  you don’t get to celebrate the American Revolution, and all the protests and upheaval our Founding Fathers engaged in, and then refer to every gathering of dark skinned people as “uppity thugs”.  Or worse.   And when it comes to how you deal with peaceful protests, how about NOT acting like cop Ray Albers who, for no reason, began pointing his high powered rifle at protestors who, it can clearly be seen in the video, are just milling around.  That didn’t stop this cop from raising his assault rifle and pointing it at people who were doing nothing wrong, just days after Darren Wilson had shot Michael Brown.  Albers, when respectfully asked to identify himself, gave his name and badge numbers as “Officer Go Fuck Yourself.”  And they wonder why we have trouble respecting them? 
 
And here’s something else about which we feel very, very strongly:
 
STOP TAZING CHILDREN.  It can kill them, and you know it.  In fact, stop Tazing anybody unnecessarily--for example, when they are already handcuffed and subdued.   And stop Tazing them many, many times over the prescribed limit.  Because if you do, as “Officer” Scott Nugent Tased Baron “Scooter” Pikes nine times in fourteen minutes (that’s 9 X 50,000 volts, interrupting the heart’s electrical activity), you might kill someone, as Nugent killed Pike.  Pike was acquitted though, of course, even though there is irrefutable evidence that he violated a number of rules and procedures.  

Or, if you are an officer who is “Tase-Crazy”, you might cause brain damage to an innocent young boy, as did Independence, Missouri Officer Timothy Runnel when he made a conscious choice to torture seventeen year old Bryce Masters, not once, but four times, the Tazer pressed cloth against Bryce’s chest, effectively destroying the boy’s mental health, along with his entire future. “Officer” Runnels, you Tased the boy for 23 seconds, then lifted him up several feet and dropped his face and skull hard, on the concrete sidewalk.  You left him medically dead for eight minutes, and caused permanent brain damage.  This is not the action of a policeman.  This is the behavior of a sadistic psychopath.  And no, like millions of other Americans, I don’t  believe that you are sorry.  Why?  Because a person capable of that kind of torture is not capable of remorse.  That is, in essence, the definition of a psychopath. Oh, and to the Independence, Missouri Police Department.  You had a chance to condemn this torture, caught on video for the world to see, but instead, your first words about the incident were flat out lies.  So I guess that makes the officials in charge and the spokesholes at the Inde-Mo police departments a bunch of dirt bags as well.
 
Oh, and Officers, STOP RAPING.  STOP SODOMIZING.  Stop sexually assaulting trusting citizens, and prisoners who are under your watch.  And yes, although we touched on those who use the power of the badge to prey on innocent victims for their sexual gratification in an earlier chapter, it is worth noting a few more, if for no other reason, because these crimes are almost impossible to believe. 
 
A partial list of the damned:
 
Foster “Pete” Bowen, Huntington West Virginia Police Captain, sentenced to between three and six centuries in prison for the known rape of seven boys, although according to evidence that came out in his trial, to quote the judge, “You may have committed more acts of child rape and abuse than any person in the history of West Virginia, sir,” Judge Farrell said. "In fact, you may have committed more crimes against persons than anybody in the history of West Virginia."
 
Christopher Bowersox, a Bakersfield police officer sentenced for possessing child pornography, according to federal prosecutors. The FBI case against him alleged he had child pornography images on his home computer and took part in online chats in which he discussed raping, mutilating and killing, and eating young boys and infants.  He got just 48 months.
 
Columbia County Oregon Sheriff’s Deputy John Lawrence Hinckle.  Initially indicted on more than thirty counts, he was eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree rape, two counts of first-degree sodomy, one count of first-degree sex abuse and one count of incest.  75 months.  The victim was his daughter.  He molested her from the time she was ten, to the time she was seventeen. Perhaps he was losing interest as she got older.
 
Once head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in South Florida, Special Agent Anthony Mangione led a double life, fighting child pornographers even as he was building his own special collection of brutal child porn, some of the victims as young as three.  He was busted when he stupidly emailed some to a school bus driver (chilling thought, that), and feds linked the emails back to Mangione.  Who only got six years for his evil.
 
 “Officer” Gary Dale Baker, who raped a seventy five year old woman who had trouble communicating to her family what had happened because of a stroke which had severely debilitated her speech.  And he didn’t just do it once.  He did it four times, the first time while she was actually having the stroke—and the fourth time under the watchful eye of a hidden camera her family had installed.  His charged included not only rape but also sexual battery, forced oral copulation, and robbery.
 
Wichita Kansas Police Officer Greg T. Nicks was given four life sentences for sexually abusing a fifteen month old, and sending the pictures to his girlfriend, who, horrifically enough, did not turn him in.  She is in jail on similar charges.
 
Chief Deputy of the Pike County Sheriff’s Office Clyde Franklin Sanders Jr., pleaded no contest to raping a three year old.  Twice.  She was his daughter.
 
Boyce Officer Stephen Young purposely engineered positions that would put him in close proximity with children, where he spent years and years sexually abusing them. Officials investigating the case believe that he raped about twenty toddlers, five of them being mere infants.
 
Benton County, Washington Deputy Sheriff Kenneth John Freeman enjoyed the dubious distinction of  being the most wanted man on the U.S. Marshall’s list. He was finally found in China, and brought home to face trial for raping his daughter from the age of ten to the age of fifteen. Deputy Sheriff Freeman (ironic name) got fifty years, and also has a second dubious distinction:  the film he uploaded to the internet, of him raping his own daughter, is the most downloaded and viewed piece of child pornography every tracked.
 
This is just a partial list of the long, long scroll of the damned.

And let me make this crystal clear:  I do not list this long litany of crimes and horrors so that we can somehow learn to hate and distrust the police even more.  I said that I believe the vast majority of officers to be good, brave, and honest, and I believe that those officers are smart, ethical, and noble enough to finally admit that there are cops worthy of condemnation.
 
                                                            ********* 
 
And most importantly, officers, if the above manifesto does not apply to you, then don’t get angry at an increasingly outraged populus; don’t claim you have the Blue Flu and fail to show up, to do your duty.  That isn’t showing fellow officers loyalty.  That is aligning yourselves with cops who have turned criminal.  And to stand by them would betray everything you claim to believe.  Everything you have sworn to uphold. 

It’s very simple, officers:  if none of these grim and ghastly charges apply to you, then don’t take it personally.  What you should take personally is how seriously officers who violate procedures, engage in police brutality, and commit heinous crimes threaten to put you in a bad light, and make your job infinitely more dangerous.  Direct your rage and righteous indignation where it belongs—at them, not at the concerned citizen.

And finally, officers, for God’s sake, in the name of all that is sacred, stand up loud and proud, and repudiate these actions on the part of rogue officers.  Distance yourself; call out and criticize and condemn these men:  officers who use excessive force are breaking the law just as much as the criminals you arrest, and officers who body slam, who punch and pummel the handcuffed suspect, officers who torture through Tazing, and who rape, are sadists who are not worthy of wearing the uniform.

Think about it.

We expect conservatives and right-to-lifers to clearly repudiate people who bomb abortion clinics.

We expect people who believe in free speech to draw the line at the likes of Fred Phelps, especially if his ilk shows up at a soldier’s funeral.

We expect the Muslim community to stand up and loudly repudiate people who commit violence in the name of Islam.

So here’s the thing, officers--you don’t get a pass. 

The thin Blue line needs to be erased now, and the tall Blue wall needs to come down today, with all the same drama and outrageous indignation that brought down the Berlin Wall.

Because to all of the hundreds of thousands of good, brave, honest cops out there—if you don’t name these vile violations of proper procedure and egregious engagements in police brutality for what they are …acts of war, committed by a mercenary band of Storm Troopers--then mark my words:

It sure as hell feels like you have declared war on us, the citizens of these United States..

And boys in blue—you just know that is not going to end happily.

Declaring war on the citizens of these United States?   That has never gone well for anybody. 
 
 
(During the time that we were putting together this final epilogue to the book, two more black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, were killed at the hands of white police officers.  Whether or not those two men needed to be shot will no doubt be at the center of heated debate and intense investigation for months, perhaps years.  We had to end the book at some point, and commit these stories to history, since clearly there is no natural end point to the project.   It seems as though the killings will never end.)

By Meg Langford

​(caution; links in the article contain graphic images and may be upsetting to viewers)
      
​        
Can you really blame them?

All they want is to be treated equally, and to have the same rights as white men.  They have waited for decades.  For decades they have petitioned and protested peacefully.  No change.

Let’s look at some of the more memorable and controversial actions.

There were the declarations that they would create their own mini-government, an alter-nation if you will, to deal with the fact that they had been denied a true voice in government.  On that famous Black Friday, when they showed up three hundred strong, they were naturally met by an army of cops, and for hours—hours—they were “batoned, beaten, punched, thrown to the ground, kicked on the floor, and had their faces rubbed against the railings”.  One martyr in the making, determined to bring publicity to the cause, purposely stepped in front of charging horses and died of injuries after being rushed to the hospital.  There were also “widespread reports of police sexually abusing the demonstrators.  They repeatedly pinched and twisted their breasts, lifted their skirts, groping and assaulting the women for hours.”   

Some of the protesters died after these attacks.  

It all culminated in a conscious decision on the part of the protesters to break hundreds of windows throughout the city.   Beyond civil disobedience, yes.    But they had a “method to their madness”, to quote “Hamlet”.   By committing the crime of vandalism, they would get arrested and taken to jail sooner, thereby avoiding the extreme physical abuse and torture heaped upon them, for the mere legal act of engaging in public protest.  And they would bring much needed national and international publicity to their cause. 

And it worked.  On this day in history, February 27th, 1922, women in all 50 states got the vote. 
(Niggling detail: these Black Friday riots took place in England, while the Nineteenth Amendment, passed on this day, took place in the United States—but the momentum was there.  It was international, it was unstoppable, it was a tsunami of petticoats and estrogen and adrenalin and big rocks being pelted through the windows of stodgy white businessmen.)

Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, the Suffragettes seem noble, endearing, even cute when Disney portrays them in “Mary Poppins”.   But make no mistake: they were the terrorists of their times, according to some.  Viewed with the same suspicion and vitriol that “Black Lives Matter” activists are so often viewed with today.

Yes, there are those who may say that the analogy does not hold, because Black Friday was about women fighting for the right to vote, and blacks have the right to vote.  But for that, I have three words:  “argumenta ex analogia”.  And all that those words imply.  But what binds these two movements together, what is fundamentally important here, is that both groups were simply demanding that they be treated equally, as promised by the Constitution.   

The legacy of women’s rights and the struggle for civil rights are, upon closer examination, eerily similar:  when someone who is not a “white male in power” gets uppity, and starts making demands, they WILL be put in their place.  And if not, punishment will ensue.  The severest of measures will be taken. (Look how well that exact same set of sexist strictures is working out when extremist imams condone the rape of infidel women, for going out sans hijab.  For the sin against Allah of wearing perfume.  The Cologne Rapes is not a bad pun.  It is now terrifying history.)

It is time to finally begin marshaling arguments and engaging in debates that are based on sound, calm logic, not name calling, Sophistry, and the ridiculously vincible voices of the playground set and pointy-hood hat society.  Is black-on-black crime more prevalent than white-on-black crime?  Sure it is.  More whites are killed by other whites than by black people.  It is largely a matter of socio-cultural proxemics.  But what does that have to do with the fact that in far too many cases, white police officers trample the civil rights of black men, show absolutely no regard for the policing procedures in which they are trained, and demonstrate a proven statistical propensity for treating blacks differently—and worse—than whites.   Because, flawed though the movement may be, that is what “Black Lives Matter” is about.  And that is unquestionably what the philosophy, without the capitalization, that “black lives matter”, is about.

And for those who would snark or screech, in response to “Black Lives Matter”, that “All Lives Matter”, I would simply ask you this:  would you run into a Breast Cancer Awareness Fundraiser full of survivors and people fighting the disease, and yell that “All Cancers Matter!”   Anyone who is not a total racist or clodpate knows that the meaning of the phrase “black lives matter” is not to minimize the significance of other lives, groups, cultures, or nations, but merely to point out that which is an undeniable fact:  in far too many situations involving the police, Afro-Americans are treated as though their lives simply do not matter.

The facts lie in the NYPD “Stop and Frisk” statistics.  The facts lie in the D.O.J. Reports on Ferguson and Cleveland.  And these are just the first three that come to mind.

And then there are the personal stories.  Human stories, where the dead body has a face and a name and a family and friends.  More importantly, regardless of what you think of these human stories, your opinion of the dead is quite possibly irrelevant.  What is painfully relevant are the actions of the police.  Police are violating procedures, breaking the law, and basically creating their own police state, and that is what has so many blacks, and Americans of good conscience, so incensed.  In a word, they are acting like Nazi Storm Troopers.  Ordnungspolizei.   Kriminalpolizei.  Sicherheitpolizei.
 
Eric Garner had a previous record for the non-violent crime of selling loosies; how does that give Officer Daniel Pantaleo authorization to engage in illegal behavior?  He is a police officer.  And Garner was certainly posing no threat to him.

When 17 year old Lennon Lacy, a young black man, was found hanging in an all-white trailer park, in a position that the medical examiner said would not have been possible to achieve by suicide, the police threatened the county coroner when he tried to take pictures, saying they would confiscate his camera if he documented the crime scene.  Would those police have said that, if it was a white person hanging there?

When Afro-American Bernard Bailey, a guard for twenty years in the state prison system, with a flawless record, was called by his daughter because she was stopped by a policeman in the middle of the night for a faulty tail light, he went to the scene to shepherd her through it.  Multiple police witnesses (also called to the scene by parties in both sides) testified that absolutely nothing significant had happened.  Bernard Bailey had not raised his voice, made threats, nor had he become in any way, shape, or form physically aggressive.  Weeks later, when Bailey went down to the courthouse to pay the ticket for his daughter who was in college, he was served with a felony warrant, and the cop from the traffic stop tried to put him in cuffs, telling Bailey he was on his way to jail.  When Bailey waved him off and walked out to the parking lot, he was shot dead as he tried to leave in his vehicle.  Is that how Officer Richard Combs (who had been fired from a previous policing job) would have treated the white mayor’s wife?  Or any white woman or man, for that matter?

What about the “lie” of “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”  What about the obvious compromise—that after being shot, losing blood, and being generally terrified, Michael Brown turned in a flailing position, hands sort of up, hands neither straight up in the air, nor balled up in a threatening fist.  (It’s kind of hard to put your head down and charge, Darren, when you are also at the same instant going for your gun in your waistband, and, as Darren Wilson testified, you are also bent over at a 90 degree angle, which Michael was when Wilson let loose the last kill shot.  I just can’t see how someone stares at the ground and gropes for a gun while charging at a cop.  I kind of sort of think that is physically impossible.  In fact, why don’t we all go outside and try it.  Now.

I, for one, am interested in the many lies of Darren Wilson, all of which can be verified by reading the grand jury transcripts:  he repeatedly told his supervisor, when asked just minutes after the shooting, that he didn’t know about the robbery.  Then, he drove himself back to the station (a complete violation of protocol), spoke with his lawyer, and then announced that Oh! He did know about the robbery, after all.  You see, Darren Wilson had to change his story and pretend that he knew about the robbery, because the truth was far too damning:  Because if Wilson behaved, as he testified he did in front the grand jury, screeching up to a couple of mere jaywalkers and confronting them, and letting it escalate, then that would make Darren Wilson a big bully.  Kind of like the footage of Darren from a year before that, where he threatens a guy for filming him, announces “I’m going to lock your ass up!” and then grabs for the guy’s camera. 

But the lie that is even more disturbing is Wilson’s big lie that he shot two bullets from inside his police vehicle.   Oh, make no mistake: from the very beginning, he was very clear about the fact that he shot his weapon only once in the car; he only got off one bullet that shattered the window.  He told that to his supervisor, moments after the incident.  Shortly after that, he spoke to detectives, and told them the same thing:  he had fired just one bullet.  Then, the Chief of Police of the St. Louis Count y Police Department announced it was one bullet.  Then, for days and weeks after that fact, major newspapers quoted authoritative sources, claiming that Wilson had fired “one bullet inside the car”.   (“Pay no attention to the fact that man behind the curtain.”  “Pay no attention to the two bullet casings right next to Officer Wilson’s car.”

Then, one day, as if magic, it became two bullets!  It had to become two bullets that were shot by Wilson while inside the car, because of that bullet lodged in an apartment building called 2960 Canfield Drive, which is nowhere near where the final round of ten shots were fired.  The only way a bullet could be lodged in 2960 Canfield Drive is if Wilson jumped from his vehicle and shot it at a fleeing Michael Brown.  It had to be two bullets shot inside the car, or Darren Wilson, like Officer Michael Slager, would be shooting at a fleeing man.  So the one bullet story became two bullets, after a team of lawyers got involved.

And that leaves us with the last controversy:  did Michael initiate the fight, slamming the door and reaching in, and committing Suicide By Cop?  Or did Darren Wilson screech up so close that the opening door bounced off of Michael, as many witnesses attested.  And did Darren Wilson then grab Michael, as many witnesses attested, and pull Michael into the car, restraining him, in a move similar to the one that had just gotten him a fancy police award a few months earlier.  We have two competing narratives:  the dead man’s side of the tail.  And the version told by a man who, according to all the evidence and grand jury testimony, has already told two big lies?

Would Michael Slager have shot a white man or woman five times in the back as they fled?

Would Timothy Loehmann have shot a white 12 year old? 

Would Brian Encinia have Tazed a cute white cheerleader?  Would he have dragged her from the car, as he did Sandra Bland, and beat her down on the ground?

Heather MacDonald, a well-known conservative pundit, says in pseudo-mocking terms that the “Black Lives Matter” folks think there is some kind of “epidemic” of white cops killing black men.  Well, Heather, even the august Centers for Disease Control doesn’t have a numerical or quantitative definition of “epidemic,” so let me turn the tables on you, and ask you the following poser:  Just how many black men killed by the excessive force of white cops is an acceptable number.   One hundred per year?  Too many?  How about 20?  12?   How about one black man?  If one black man died because white officers like Darren Wilson and Timothy Loehmann and Brian Encinia and Danny Pantaleo and Sean Williams and David  Darkow and Michael Slager—hell, I have to end this sentence at some point—if these officers KNOWINGLY violated procedure and ignored protocol—are you OK with that one black man lying dead?  What if it was your own son?  Or are you incapable of empathizing with blacks? 

Read the Department of Justice D.O.J. report.  In fact, read page 31 of that report:  In Ferguson, officers ordered a 150 pound police canine to attack a fourteen year old boy because he had trespassed into an abandoned house and was crouching, terrified, in a closet when they found him.   Here is the question that speaks volumes about all the unrest that has transpired over the last two years:  would the cops have sicced an attack dog, trained to kill, on a fourteen year old white girl cowering in a closet?

Because unless the answer is “Hell, yes!”, then this is not the America that is described in the founding documents.  

This is not the America I love.  

This is not the America that America must become. 

Meg Langford

You are a decorated soldier.  You served your country proudly in the war.   And now, you are on your way home.   You buy a ticket for a Greyhound bus in Atlanta, Georgia, and after you’ve been on the road for a while, the bus pulls up to a small drug store.  You ask the driver if there is time for you to use the restroom.  He says yes, but he’s not too happy about it.  When you get to Batesburg, several police forcibly remove you from the bus, drag you into an alley, and beat you with billy clubs.  Then you are arrested for disorderly conduct and taken to jail where, in the night, they come into your cell and again attack you with billy clubs, gouging out your eyes.   It will be three weeks before your family can find you, languishing in a hospital.  You cannot see, and you cannot remember.  Eventually, the memories come flooding back.  And even though Police Chief Shull will admit under oath to repeatedly gouging your eyes, he will suffer no repercussions.  He walks away, a free man.  You will both live to be old men--Shull with his 20/20 vision, and you blind for life.  
 
                                                THE STORY, WRIT LARGE
 
As a young boy in North Carolina, Isaac managed to stay alive and thrive, even under the harsh glare of Jim Crow laws.  Born in Fairfield County and growing up in Goldsboro, he attended segregated schools, known for their poor conditions due to chronic underfunding.

Woodard was 23 when he was inspired to join the Army, memories of Pearl Harbor burned into his brain.  He arrived at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina on October 14th, 1942.  Woodard served proudly in a labor battalion as a longshoreman, stationed in the Pacific Theatre, and was quickly promoted to sergeant. . Isaac Woodard was a brave man, earning a battle star for his Asiatic-Pacific Theater Campaign Medal by unloading ships under enemy fire in New Guinea.  He also received the Good Conduct Medal, the Service Medal, and a World War II Victory Medal.   And when the endless war finally ended, Woodard received an honorable discharge.

February 12, 1946 was a day that would change Woodard’s life forever.  He boarded a Greyhound bus in Atlanta, Georgia, with plans to meet his wife further up the road in North Carolina, then on to meet his parents in New York.  After they had been on the road for a while, the bus pulled up to a small drug store.  Woodard asked the bus driver if there was time for him to use the restroom. The driver insulted Woodard, but let him off the bus for a few minutes.  Woodard returned to his seat, and no more words were exchanged.  But Woodard could not imagine the horrors that lay ahead for him up the road. 

Next stop:  Batesburg, South Carolina.  The driver, who had apparently been stewing about the restroom incident for many miles, immediately contacted the local police. Within minutes, Chief of Police Linwood Shull ordered Isaac off the bus.  Isaac obeyed.  “Where are your discharge papers?” he barked.  Woodard showed the officer.  Shull then twisted Woodard’s arm behind his back and started walking him down the street to a nearby alley as he beat Woodard with a nightstick.  When Woodard screamed in pain and grabbed the nightstick, suddenly another cop appeared, and was aiming a gun at Isaac as they continued walking.  Once they turned the corner into the alley, the cops beat him mercilessly with their nightsticks.   Woodard was then arrested for disorderly conduct, and thrown in a jail cell.

As Woodard was trying was trying to sleep through the long, hellish night, trying to fend off his terror,  Shull and a gang of other cops came into Woodard’s cell and continued the beatings, giving particular attention to Woodard’s eyes, which were effectively gouged out.  When Isaac awoke the next morning, he was blind.  Police Chief Shull came to his cell, and Woodard was dragged to the courtroom as he groped and stumbled his way along.  The judge threatened him with 30 days hard labor, unless he could come up with the fifty dollar fine.   And lest you think that doesn’t sound like much, adjusted for inflation, that was a demand for 649.79.

Woodard was then hauled back to jail, then to a hospital.  Nobody made any effort to help him find his relatives.   Three weeks after his family reported him missing, Woodard was finally found, languishing in a hospital bed.  His family immediately moved him to the US Army Hospital in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  Although he was starting to recover from his amnesia, doctors said that his eyes had been damaged beyond repair.   

A NATION RESPONDS:  The story initially received very little coverage, but the NAAC P pushed for days, weeks, months to shine a light on it.  When long time Civil Rights champion  Orson Welles heard about the Woodard tragedy, he did an entire show dedicated to it, sparing no purple prose, and seemingly overnight, much of America was enraged:

What does it cost to be a Negro? In Aiken, South Carolina it cost a man his eyes. What does it cost to wear over your skeleton the pinkish tint officially described as white? In Aiken, South Carolina it cost a man his soul... Your eyes, Officer X, your eyes, remember, were not gouged away, only the lids are closed. You might raise the lids, you might just try the wild adventure of looking, you might see something. It might be a simple truth, one of those truths held to be self-evident by our founding fathers and by most of us. If we should ever find you bravely blinking at the sun, we will know then that the world is young after all, that chaos is behind us and not ahead. Then there will be shouting of trumpets to rouse the dead at Gettysburg, a thunder of cannon will declare the tidings of peace, and all the bells of liberty will laugh out loud in the streets to celebrate goodwill towards all men.                                   
                                                            --Orson Welles
​
Note:  Orson Welles named the town of Aiken because that is the small town Woodard thought that was where the bus had stopped, and so named Aiken in his deposition.  It was really Batesburg. Aiken was furious, and refused to show any Orson Welles movies thereafter.
 
Much of America was enraged after the famous Orson Welles broadcast, yes, but who was not enraged was the population of Batesburg. Nobody was arrested, and for Chief of Police Shull and his henchmen, it was business as usual.  “To Protect and Serve.”  Unless you happen to be black.
 
A GOVERNMENT RESPONDS:  The NAACP kept pushing the story, and on September 19th, 1946, the NAACP’s Executive Secretary Walter Francis White found himself meeting with President Harry S. Truman in the Oval Office to discuss the Woodard case.  A full seven months had passed since the incident, and nobody had done anything—no trial, no justice.  Michael R. Gardner, in his book “Harry Truman and Civil Rights: Moral Courage and Political Risks” writes of Truman’s fury, stating that when Truman "heard this story in the context of the state authorities of South Carolina doing nothing for seven months, he exploded."   Truman then fired off a letter to his Attorney General demanding action, and within a week, Truman directed the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the Isaac Woodard case.
 
Suddenly, action was being taken.  But all the signs did not look good.  There was a shoddy investigation, as pressured and resentful locals barely “cooperated” with agents of the federal government.   Because the beating had occurred at a bus stop that was on federal property, and because Woodard had been a soldier in uniform (the locals’ objection that he had been discharged for five hours at the time of the incident did not go over well), the trial fell within federal jurisdiction.
 
From the first filing of the charges, proud South Carolinians closed ranks.  A defense fund was started for Police Officer Shull, and Batesburg’s most respected citizens, led by the Mayor, made it their business to post Shull’s bond.  And unbelievably (why did I just write that), the state law enforcement association adopted a resolution protesting the “high-handed” interference of federal authorities in a “purely local matter.”
 
Judge Julius Waties Waring presided over the case.  Judge Waring had experienced an interesting journey of his own—well worth reading about—from typical southern judge exhibiting racial bias, to an amazingly progressive man, given the times.  An eighth-generation Charlestonian, Waring had become more sympathetic on racial issues since marrying a social progressive from New York City.  He was clearly sympathetic to Woodard’s side during the proceedings, although maintained an aura of professional impartiality throughout the trial.
 
Sadly, by all accounts, the trial was a joke to most of the locals involved, and yet a further series of insults and attacks to victim Isaac Woodard.  
 
Once the trial proper started, it was, of course, populated by an all-white jury, “Negroes” being excluded from the process in South Carbolina in the 1940’s.  The local U.S. Attorney charged with handling the case had failed to interview anyone except the bus driver, a decision that Judge Waring, a civil rights proponent, believed was a gross dereliction of duty. Waring later wrote of being disgusted at the way the case was handled at the local level, commenting, "I was shocked by the hypocrisy of my government...in submitting that disgraceful case...."

Shull denied the version of events as told by poor Isaac Woodard.  Not surprisingly, local police backed up Shull’s version: the officer claimed that he merely “brushed” Woodard with his nightstick (I don’t even know what that means), and the, police testified, Woodard then tried to grab the nightstick and beat the policeman.  Shull also claimed that Woodard had a gun, and was threatening everybody with it.  (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)  But a university student and a white soldier, both of whom were on the bus, both corroborated Woodard’s story—the part they could see, that is. 

The defense attorney for Chief of Police Shull was a piece of work.  His rhetoric for the duration of the trial was liberally peppered with “nigger” and other abhorrent epithets, in spite of the Judge’s frequent admonitions.  And Shull’s defense attornies continued the racist rhetoric right through their fiery summation:  Woodard belongs to “an inferior race”, one proclaimed, then went on to say that his “vulgar” talk was “not the talk of a sober South Carolina Negro”…This was apparently a reference to Woodard’s telling the bus driver that “He needed to take a piss.”  

Defense’s closing speech ended with a flourish. “If Lynwood Shull is convicted today,” Shull’s attorney warned, “You will be saying to the public officers of South Carolina that you no longer want your home, your wife, and your children protected.” Another of Shull’s counsel alluded heavily to the Confederacy and the Civil War. If delivering a verdict against the federal government “means that South Carolina’ll have to secede again,” he told the jurors, “then let’s secede!”

On November 5, the jury found Shull not guilty on all charges, despite his admission that he had blinded Woodard. The jury deliberated for a whole 25 minutes.  Judge Waring later speculated that he felt the jury would have taken even less time, but the Judge used this time to take a long walk, deep in thought—this trial was to transform the judge profoundly.  Then, after the jury walked back into the courtroom, Shull was acquitted “to the cheers of a crowded courtroom”.  (Walter White, “A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White.  1948.  Page 327.)  The man who blinded Isaac Woodard went on to live a full and rich life.  He died in in Batesburg, South Carolina on December 27, 1997 at age 95.

Isaac Woodard moved North after the trial and lived in the New York City area for the rest of his life. He died at age 73 in the Veterans Administration Hospital in the Bronx on September 23, 1992. He was buried with military honors at the Calverton National Cemetery 
 
PARTING NOTES:  One of the people who was very deeply moved by Isaac Woodard’s story was folk artist Woody Guthrie.  He wrote and recorded "The Blinding of Isaac Woodard," which then came out as a part of his album The Great Dust Storm. He said that he wrote the song "...so's you wouldn't be forgetting what happened to this famous Negro soldier less than three hours after he got his Honorable Discharge down in Atlanta...."  Woody Guthrie later recalled, "I sung 'The Blinding of Isaac Woodard' in the Lewisohn Stadium (in New York City) one night for more than 36,000 people, and I got the loudest applause I've ever got in my whole life."
 
FINAL THOUGHTS:  a cynic might say that Isaac Woodard got off lucky.  That same year, another black servicemen, John C. Jones, was found murdered in a swamp outside of Minden, Louisiana.   His friend, 17 year old Albert Harris had been thrown into the swamp next to him, and only because he was not quite dead, and able to escape, do we know the story:  a bunch of white men in the area circulated the story that two black men were coming after their white women.  John C. Jones had his hands chopped off with a meat cleaver and a blowtorch applied to his face before being executed, his remains being tossed in a swamp outside of Minden, Louisiana.   And, like thousands of lynched Negroes, nobody wrote a song about him.
 
 
EXTRA MATERIAL:   Below, read the story in Isaac Woodard own words, as transcribed directly from his deposition.  The lines in italics are taken from the actual trial transcripts themselves, as I believe they add even more poignancy and outrage. I, ISAAC WOODARD, JR., being duly sworn, do depose and state as follows:

THAT, I reside at 1100 Franklin Avenue, Bronx, New York, Apartment 2. I am 27 years old, and a veteran of the United States Army, having served from the 12th of October, 1952, to the 12th of February, 1946, when I received an honorable discharge from Camp Gordon, Georgia. I served for 15 months in the South Pacific with the 429th Port Battalion. I served in the Philippines and in New Guinea and earned one battle star.

I was discharged about 5:30 P.M. on February 12, 1946, from Camp Gordon, Georgia. At 8:30 P.M. at the Greyhound Terminal in Atlanta, Georgia, while I was in uniform, I purchased a ticket to Winnsboro, South Carolina and took the bus headed there to pick up my wife to come to New York to see my father and mother. About one hour out of Atlanta the bus driver stopped at a small drug store. As he stopped, I asked him if he had time to wait for me until I had a chance to go to the rest room. He cursed and said, “No.” When he cursed me, I cursed him back. After I cursed him, he said, “Go ahead and get off and hurry back,” so I got off, hurrying back as he said.

About half an hour later, when the bus got to Aiken, he stopped again and got off and went and got the police. I did not know what he was doing and thought it was just a regular stop. He came back and came in the bus and came to me and said, “Come outside for a minute,” and I got off the bus. When I walked out, the police were there. As I walked out, the bus driver started telling the police that I was the one that was disturbing the bus. When he said that, I started explaining to the police that I was not raising a disturbance on the bus, but they didn’t give me a chance to explain. The policeman struck me with a billy across my head and told me to “shut up.” After he finished talking he said to me, “You won’t catch this bus out of here, you catch the next bus.”

After that, he grabbed me by my left arm and twisted it behind my back, and walked me down the street, continually twisting my wrist. I figured he was trying to make resist. I did not resist against him. He asked me was I discharged, and I told him, “Yes.” When I said, “Yes,” that is when he started beating me with the billy; hitting me across the top of my head. After that, I grabbed his billy and wrung it out of his hand. He ran behind my back and grabbed my arm again. I had him by his right shoulder. After that another policeman came up and throw [sic] his gun on me and told me to drop the billy or he would drop me, so I dropped the billy.

After I dropped the billy, the second policeman hold his gun on me while the other one was beating me as we were walking down the street. I did not see anyone on the street. When we got to the door of the police station, he struck me again and knocked me unconscious. After I commenced to come to myself, he hollered, “Get up.” When I started to get up, he started punching me in my eyes with the end of his billy. I finally got up, and when I got up, he pushed me inside the jail house and locked me up. I could still see for a few minutes as I can remember, because I was hardly conscious.
A few minutes after he locked me up, he came in and threw me my purse. He went back out and locked the door. I picked out a cot and lied down.

I woke up the next morning and could not see. Someone brought me my breakfast to the bed. After that, a policeman came to the door and opened the door and told me to come out. He said, “Let’s go up here and see what the judge wants.” I told him that I could not see how to come out, I was blind. He said, “Feel your way out.” I did not make any move to come out, so he walked in and led me to a sink and told me to wash my face, and said that I would be all right after I washed my face. He then led me up to the judge, and the judge said to me, “You were raising sand on the last night – – – stubborn.” So I said to him, “No, sir,” and I told him what happened. After I told him what happened, he said, “We don’t have that kind of stuff down here.” After he said that, the policeman spoke and said, “He wrung my billy out of my hand, and I told him that if he did not drop it, I would drop him.” That is how I knew it was the same policeman as had beat my eyes out.

After that, the judge spoke and said, “I fine you $50.00 or 30 hard days on the road.” I said I would pay the $50.00 but I did not have the $50.00 at the time. So the policeman said “You have some money there in your wallet.” He took my wallet and took all I had out of it, and he said “Is that all the money you have?”  I said “No I have some more in my watch pocket.”   I had four one dollar bills in my watch pocket and I pulled it out and they took that. which was a total of $40.00 and took $4.00 from my watch pocket and they took that. I had a check for $694.73, which was my mustering out pay and soldiers deposit. He said to me, “Can you see how to sign this check — you have a government check.” I told him, “No, sir”. “I said I could not sign my name myself, because I never had tried to sign my name without seeing.”  So he gave me the check back, so the judge told the police to carry me back and lock me up them.

Q:  When you were taken for trial there, did you have an attorney in the court that morning, a lawyer to represent you.
A:  No sir.
Q:  Did you have any friends there?
A: No sir.
Mr. Morris:  I do not believe that is material, Your Honor.

He took me back and locked me up in jail. I stayed in there for a while and after a few minutes he came in and asked me if I wanted a drink of whiskey — if I took a drink of whiskey I would probably feel better. I told him, “No, sir,” I did not care for any. He went and got some kind of eye medicine and came back and poured it in both my eyes. He went and got a hot towel and spread it across my head. I stayed there for the rest of the day until about 5:30 that evening. I could tell about what time it was because I asked a policeman and he told me it was late. I do not know if that was the same policeman. At that time he came in and get me and told me that “We’re going to take you to the hospital.” I did not hear anyone else in the room.

He took me to the Veterans’ Hospital in Columbia, S.C. When I got there, the doctor was not in at the time, so he laid me on a bench. A nurse took my name and asked me where I was from and everything, so I told her I was from Winnsboro, N.C. The doctor came in and he questioned the policeman and asked him what was the matter. The policeman told him that I was raising a disturbance on the bus and drunk. The doctor asked the policeman was I drunk then, and he said “No.”  … I believe that the doctor who cared for me was named Dr. Clarence. I told him what had happened to me. He made no comment, but told me I should join a blind school.  I stayed in the hospital for two months — I went in on the 13th of February and came out on the 13th of April. My sisters came down to see me, and since they discharged me while they were down there, they brought me back up to New York to my father’s home in the Bronx, where I am still staying.

Sworn to before me
this 23rd day of
April, 1946. 

​
By Meg Langford

CLEVELAND FORGIVES TAMIR RICE “BULLET BILL”, AND MAYOR APOLOGIZES.
“We want to start off, again, apologizing to the Rice family, if in fact this has added to any grief or pain that they may have, uh, but we want to explain what happened so that both they, you, and the community at large understands what happened, in regards to this”.         (???)
                                                                                   --Mayor Frank Jackson
 
Equivocate much?
 
Don’t buy it.  Don’t believe it.  I am not fooled, and neither should you be.  Yes, it is a point of fact that the debt is forgiven, but what these city leaders don’t understand is that this was never about the money.   $500?  Are you kidding me?   It’s that you were willing to cause such angst over such a measly sum, Mayor Frank Jackson.

And let’s dispel with the issue of whether or not Mayor Jackson knew of the bill and the claim being filed in court.  Either you knew, Mr. Mayor, or you managed to surround yourself with such idiotic boobs that you must still be blamed for egregious poor judgment.  Mr. Mayor, you said, when you announced your run for Mayor in 2005, “If I don't restore hope to the ailing city within 200 days of taking office, I would consider myself a failure.”  And, then in your inaugural speech in 2006, you said.  "We have the right to expect that our families will be safe on the streets and in our homes.”  And you then made one of your first acts in office to introduce a new “use of force” policy that clearly states what previous versions only implied:  “excessive force shall not be tolerated.”
Cripes, Frank. Keep at least one promise, and consider yourself a failure. People are calling for your resignation.  Isn’t it about time?

What all the people attacking the Tamir Rice family refuse to admit is the simple truth that puts this entire matter to bed:  the two policemen in that cruiser failed to follow correct procedure when approaching the suspect.  It doesn’t matter who the suspect is.  What the cops did in that now famous surveillance video is simply a gross violation of procedure, and everything that happened after their wild and dangerous screech up to the suspect happened as a result of that violation of written police procedure.

On February 10th, 2016, it was announced that the City of Cleveland had filed a claim in court against the Rice family for ambulance services:  ten bucks per mile, as the boy was dying, plus $450 for Advance Life Support Services.  (See yesterday’s blog of “The Pickford Word” ) Twenty four hours later, there began a frantic back peddling, as city minions were swamped with irate phone calls and realized what they had wrought.  Thus began the mea culpa press conference.
Let’s take apart their apologia, shall we?

The Mayor’s spokeshole, Dan Williams, called the lawsuit “UNINTENDED”.   And then, even though the City denied ever billing the Tamir family, we angry ones remember that just 24 hours before, Assistant Law Director Carl Meyers trotted over to the courthouse and filed a claim in Cuyahoga County Probate Court.

Oh, right.   Because that happens all the time, Carl Meyers.   We “unintentionally” file law suits against one another:   Still in a “dream state” from the night before, watching “Better Call Saul,” you put on your best lawyer suit and tie, you “stumble” onto some legal papers while at the office, then on your way to the coffee shop across the street you trip on something and “accidentally” end up at the Courthouse, and then, “not noticing” what you are doing because you are watching Matlock reruns on your cellphone, you “didn’t notice” when you walked up to the Clerk of the Court and, in a completely “unintentional” manner, Carl Meyers, you filed a lawsuit against the Tamir Rice estate.  A name which you just can’t seem to place with the face.  A name that you just don’t remember hearing before.  Heavens to Betsy, you never would have filed the lawsuit if you knew it was THAT Tamir Rice.   So sorry.  

The attorney who filed this, and all the attorneys involved, are the reason that Shakespeare’s famous line from Henry VI, Part II, Act 3 Scene 1 line 53 will never, never die.  As long as there are sharks like Carl Meyers—there will be Thespians running along behind them chanting, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

To continue with the Shakespearean theme, Barrister Meyers, Which is the King’s English for Bite Me, Carl.  And while we’re at it, “A Pox Upon You!”, City of Cleveland.   You all knew exactly what you were doing.  In his embarrassing press conference, during which he made sure that we also got an apology from a black woman, the Mayor talked about his people constantly on the lookout for red flags.   “Thou art a boil. A plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.”  The name “Tamir Rice” is, uh, hello, what we would call a red flag.

You are lying.  You are all liars.  You said yourself in a statement . “This is a process that we followed, and in some instances we would not follow through with trying to go after an estate,” Mr. Williams said.  So, you’ve admitted that it is clearly a part of procedure to, (in certain special cases) drop the bill, the case, the lawsuit.  NOW—CONVINCE ANYBODY READING THIS THAT ALL OF THE PEOPLE IN THE LOOP DIDN’T RECOGNIZE THE NAME “TAMIR RICE.”  Convince anybody reading this that there was not an awareness on the part of powerful parties, people who make decisions, of what they were doing, and who there were doing it to.  These people, who enjoyed the power of discretion, could have handled it differently, as they had in the past, and set it aside.

Oh Cleveland Powers That Be (hereafter, Cleveland PTB), are you all so dense that you didn’t know the firestorm that would ensue, and the humiliation it would cause?  Or are you just so apathetic and arrogant that you just didn’t care?

Clearly, there is a confederacy of dunces out there who will trumpet that “the money hungry Rice family got to skate on the bill, why aren’t they happy?  What are they crabbing about now?”  Can’t you just hear them?  But here’s what confederacy misses: the very fact that this bill in the name of TAMIR RICE got filed as a debt in court speaks to the insensitivity on the part of the Cleveland PTB, and the systematic incompetence of the people running the city.  Let me rephrase this:  Cleveland PTB and Cleveland PD have proved that they are crooked and incapable.  The same cancer to the system which caused Officer Timothy Loehmann to be hired in the first place is the same cancer to the system that figured sending out this bill and filing in court would actually be a good idea. 

Again, this is systemic, Cleveland PD and Cleveland PTB.   Just like Ferguson’s bizarre and brazen move of non-compliance that caused the Department of Justice to sue Ferguson—ironically happening on the same day as the Tamir Rice Estate filing happening, 500 miles away … so the Cleveland Powers That Be thought they could pull this and get away with it. 

Nope.  One wonders if John Kasich blasted off an angry call in the middle of the night.
Read more about shooter Timothy Loehmann weeping so hard he soaked his Academy homework illegible, and Loehmann failing his gun test.  Read about Cleveland PD body slamming a mentally ill girl until she’s dead, and how they shot a hostage fleeing a home invasion in his underwear.  And lastly, read the exciting Adventures of Cleveland Robocop Michael Brelo—at moviesforyourmind.net.   LITTLE BOOK OF LYNCHING.

PostScript:   I am in touch LaTonya Goldsby, Tamir's cousin, and she has informed me that the family  learned of the $500 Court filing on the news.                          

By Meg Langford, and Mickey McClain

​Yes, Folks, the City of Cleveland has filed a creditor’s claim against the estate of Tamir Rice.  According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland.com), Assistant Law Director Carl Meyers filed a claim in Cuyahoga County Probate Court Wednesday, notifying Tamir's estate that it owes the city $500 for "ambulance advanced life support" and a mileage expense for the ambulance ride to MetroHealth Medical Center. Tamir died of his gunshot wounds the next day.
I am not blogging about this.  Yet.  Because right now, there are no words. 
Well.  Maybe a few.
Is this the County’s stunning and unmitigated cruelty?
Is this the County’s unfathomable and immeasurable depth of stupidity?
Or is this the County’s Declaration of War?
Do they want their city burned to the ground?
Tamir supporters have tried peaceful protest.  They have tried to work through the law on this.  To follow the law.  They have watched the wheels of justice grind with an agonizing legal lugubriousness.  How long are people supposed to sit still for this?    
(Consider reading the blog on The Pickford Word entitled “Holiday Banter”.  It speaks to this very hypocrisy in our society.)
Seriously:  why didn’t somebody in the courthouse or state house, someone with some tiny spark of intelligence, explain to everybody else, the reaction this affront would surely provoke?  Why didn’t the Mayor pass the hat, or pull five hundred out of his own pocket?  Anything to prevent the accusations of cruelty and the tsunamis of bad publicity that will wash over the City of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, and the state of Ohio.  I am ashamed to have born a Buckeye.  This city needs to heal, for God’s sake.  And this will only rip open the wounds,
My Prediction: oh so many just and reasonable souls will respond to a crowdsourcing request for funds.  And the Tamir Rice family will amass thousands to pay the five hundred measly dollars.  
And speaking of lawsuits, why did a Cleveland cop have to grab Tamir’s sister, slam her to the pavement, and handcuff her as she was trying to run to the side of her brother, who was bleeding to death.  A trained officer twice her size couldn’t have just taken her by the arm to restrain her?   Every good, decent police officer out there—of whom there are thousands--must be appalled.
To the Powers that Be in Cuyahoga County:  between the inevitable clean-up, crowd control, or just plain bad publicity for Cleveland, you will spend so much more than $500 dollars fixing this firestorm that you created.
Your Governor, Presidential hopeful John Kasich, says he has a task force in place whose purpose it is to bridge the gap between the police and the populous, and to improve the dismal state of affairs that is the relationship between Law Enforcement and the citizens of Ohio. I was almost positive that Cleveland was part of Ohio; maybe you just didn’t read the memo yet. That’s understandable, as it takes time and resources to come up with a brain trust to oversee a choice like charging the family of the child your cops murdered for the ambulance ride they begrudgingly gave Tamir – after the officers on site failed to administer first aid for four full minutes as the boy bled to death.          
Just after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, anybody who rebelled or displeased the state was not only executed, but the family of the deceased was sent a bill for the bullet.  This is all starting to sound way too close to home.
(Read the full TAMIR RICE chapter by clicking on the MENU BAR at the PICKFORD STUDIOS home page.  Peace out.

By Meg Langford,              
 
Eric Garner: July 17th, 2014.  John Crawford:  August 5th, 2014.  Michael Brown:  August 9th, 2014.  Three black men, all killed by police in the space of about three weeks.   And then there was Tamir Rice: November 23rd, 2014.   Then came Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland.  The list kept growing, the crisis exploding.  Rage intensifying.
 
And then there is the sad saga of Bernard Bailey.
 
Why begin our Black History Month series of excerpts with the killing of Bernard Bailey?  For the precise reason that you are asking yourself, “Who the hell is Bernard Bailey?”
 
Something mystical and horrible happened during the summer of 2014. 
 
Horrible, in that we saw the killing of three blacks by police who, in each and every case, egregiously violated the procedures that they had been taught in the Academy—procedures that are preached in the most respected law enforcement magazines and publications.  And “violation of procedures”, by the way, is best we can say about those particular officers. 
 
Mystical, in that millions of hearts and minds, within the space of a few short weeks, turned their attention to the issue of black rights in America.  Blacks, whites, minorities of all kinds, academic institutions, The Fourth Estate, all became attuned to the problem of police brutality and excessive force, particularly against black Americans. Yes, the official movement called “Black Lives Matter” has provoked criticism in the last two years, and some of that might even be dubbed legitimate.  But few can argue with the philosophical notion that black lives matter.  And the burning question of whether or not our population and our police support that principle is in the public consciousness to a degree that we haven’t seen for half a century.
 
People who think that a concern over these mounting numbers of dead blacks is somehow “anti-cop” couldn’t be more wrong.  About one million Americans serve as police officers or as police support staff.  And nothing could make the hundreds of thousands of good cops out there more miserable than having to quietly stand by while their partner punches a law abiding citizen in the head sixteen times and slams him into a cruiser windshield till the blood spurts, just for rolling through a stop sign—as in, the beating of Floyd Dent.  Or watching a cop yank a camera from the county coroner who is taking pictures of a black boy hanging from a swing set, and witnessing that same cop threaten the medical examiner for trying to document the crime scene—as in, the death of Lennon Lacy.  Or watching a cop threaten to Tase a young female and then slamming her to the ground because she won’t put out her cigarette—as in, the infamous arrest of Sandra Bland.  Or watching a child gunned down because the officers approaching the crime scene choose to ignore the explicit procedure they were taught in the Academy—as in, the shooting of Tamir Rice.
 
And then, there is the uniquely tragic case of Bernard Bailey. . .
 
Please go to “The Little Book of Lynching” on the site Menu Bar to read Mr. Bailey’s story.

​I’m something of a history buff.  And whenever January 24th rolls around, I find myself feeling that this is one of the eeriest days of the year—and certainly one of the creepiest days in the history of journalism.  This is the day when the Confessions of the Killing of Emmett Till hit the news stands.  To put it briefly:  The year was 1955.  Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam tortured and killed 14 year old Emmett Till for daring to speak to a white woman.   It was clear that they murdered him, but they were found “Not Guilty” in their Mississippi trial with an all white male jury.   Then, some months later, using the power of “Double Jeopardy” (the legal principal which states that you cannot be tried for the same crime twice), they sold their story to LOOK Magazine for four thousand bucks—just about enough money at the time for a shiny new red pick-up truck.
The article is graphic, disgusting, enraging.   Also not to be missed are the LOOK Magazine Letters to the Editor.  Some will make your blood run cold.  They are unforgettable; they are haunting.  Perhaps worst of all—they bear an eerie resemblance to the forums comments you would see today, if a similarly bloodthirsty and racist article were to be published on a major website.
 
EMMETT TILL’S STORY IN ITS IN ENTIRETY CAN BE FOUND UNDER "THE LITTLE BOOK OF LYNCHING" TAB ABOVE.  IT IS EXCERPTED FROM PICKFORD’S STUDIOS’ UPCOMING BOOK, “THE LITTLE BOOK OF LYNCHING, PART TWO.” Then, following Emmett Till’s story, you will find links to the reprint of the “Look” article in its entirety, along with the Letters to the Editor.

​Please keep watching for additional excerpts from "THE LITTLE BOOK OF LYNCHING" during February, "Black History Month".

By Meg Langford
 
What to do, what to do, what to do—when you are at that annual, obligatory holiday gathering, surrounded by family, friends, and neighbors who are devout Republicans, and you hear them talking about the racist shenanigans that have been ravaging the year of 2015.  (And oh, sorry to be posting this so late into the holiday season, but I had to experience a couple such soirees myself, before I could formulate this answer.)
 
…So you’re mingling, and you overhear a gaggle of folks screeching about unruly Negroes.
 
REPUBLICAN:  …and why do they need to get so uppity, anyway?   What do they expect from all this marching in the streets, smashing windows, and looting, and setting things on fire?  So destructive!
 
AND YOU SAY:  Oh goodie, we’re talking about the American Revolution!  I just love history!
 
REPUBLICAN:  What are you yammering about?  We’re talking about that crap that came down in Ferguson and Baltimore this year, not something that happened a quarter of a millennium ago, for Pete’s Sake.  Pay attention; keep up!
 
AND YOU SAY:  Oh.  I’m confused, because it sure sounded like you were talking about the American Revolution.   I was just thinking about the colonists setting fire to stamps in response to the Stamp Act, and burning government figures in effigy.  And of course they set the HMS Gaspee on fire for no reason, other than the ship was holding men whose job it was to enforce the law.  And what excuse did the colonists give?  The commander, Lieutenant William Dudingston, would order his men to storm ships and search them without a warrant.  Hmph.  No measly warrant. .And then, of course, the colonists looted private homes like the one belonging to Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, to say nothing of all the Native American tribes whose corn stores and wigwams that the colonists also looted.  But they only did that because they had to survive, right?  And don’t forget the Boston Massacre, dozens of Sons of Liberty assaulting a handful of British soldiers, sixty against nine, the colonists hurling bricks and jagged glass, all in the name of freedom.  And those same colonists also tarred and feathered other government officials, tax collectors, who were just doing their jobs, and some of those poor folks died an agonizing death.   That’s all pretty destructive, wouldn’t you say?  And that is the noble history of the founding of our glorious nation.
 
REPUBLICAN:  Well, that was different!  Those government officials were the enemy.  They were violating the Magna Carta!  We needed to throw off the yoke of an oppressive government.  And the militia and their leaders were corrupt bullies—just look at what they did to colonists in prisons.  Beating them and torturing them.  What we are talking about has nothing to do with history.  We’re talking about today’s headlines, dammit.   All those disruptive thugs burning and looting things, trying to stop traffic and commerce, and shut down government, disrespecting the authorities, all to no good end.
           
AND YOU SAY:  I’m sorry.  An armed militia enforcing the law by breaking it, abusing their power?  Rioting in the streets and assaults on innocent people and destruction of property?  I’m still baffled.  That sure sounds like the Boston Tea Party to me.
 
 
         THOUGHT FOR THE DAY.  YEAR.  MILLENIUM.
 
When white men dump the tea into Boston harbor and protest and riot against a cruel and unjust militia, and against a government that has betrayed them, we call them “Patriots”.  We call them “Founding Fathers”.
 
     When black men protest a black man’s death at the hands of police, from the inner city to Baltimore Harbor, and when those riots spread from sea to shining sea, we call them “THUGS”.  We call them “NIGGERS”.

​Our latest blog post, commemorating the one year anniversary of the killing of Tamir Rice, is being posted as a new page on this site (see above). We are heartbroken at the senseless killing, and enraged by the failure of the Cleveland Police Department to admit its failure to protect the life of this twelve year old child, and bring his killers to justice. Rest in peace, Tamir.