So, more on the killing of Korryn Gaines by Baltimore County, Maryland police. In my last post I covered the double standard vis a vis cops and secrecy. To wit, if you or I act in advance to conceal actions from public view and those actions culminate in someone's death, the concealment will be treated as evidence of intent and we will almost certainly go to prison. Costumed government employees who have shiny badges, on the other hand, will be allowed to "investigate" themselves, declare that they've determined they did nothing wrong, and move on to the next violent encounter.
My friend David Klaus forwarded me this piece from Time, which includes more verbiage from Baltimore County police chief James Johnson. Quoth Johnson:
For hours, we pleaded with her to end this peacefully.
This implies that the standard of operational success, from the vantage point of the Baltimore County Police Department, was a peaceful end to the encounter.
But a peaceful end to the encounter was available to them at any time. All they had to do to achieve that was get in their cars and drive away.
No, I'm not saying that is what I would expect them to do. I'm just pointing out that a peaceful end to the encounter wasn't the priority. The apprehension of Korryn Gaines was.
How high a priority, and how far a priority from peacefully ending the encounter?
High enough and far enough that if apprehending her proved impossible, they were willing to execute her rather than leave her alone.
And yes, it was an execution. We don't know exactly what happened because the police department acted to ensure that the public couldn't see what happened, which is damning in itself. But even the official police account states that it was a police officer who fired first and that Gaines only returned fire in (not the terms the police use, of course) defense of herself and her five-year-old son.
Police -- and not just individual officers, but entire departments and apparently most of them -- don't seem to like it very much when people know who they are or what they're doing.
For decades, protesters have reported that when the riot police swoop in, they've all covered their badge numbers (in addition to their faces) so that there's no way to know which one of them did what to whom.
Nearly every time a police officer shoots someone, the department declines to name that officer unless there's severe pressure to do so.
Here's the latest, and it's pretty over the top:
Baltimore County police shot and killed Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old black woman, after an hours-long standoff on Monday -- during which Facebook and Instagram, at police request, temporarily shut down Gaines' accounts. ... Police Chief Jim Johnson says Gaines was posting video of the standoff to social media as it was unfolding, which prompted police to request the deactivation of her accounts. ... Johnson says that as negotiations were happening, police asked social media sites to deactivate Gaines'[s] accounts to "preserve the integrity of the negotiation process" as well as the safety of officers and Gaines'[s] child.
Think about that for a minute. Here's Johnson's premise in plain English:
"She was showing people what we were doing, and we can't have that -- witnesses make it harder for us to spin our stories the way we want them spun."
Is it possible that Korryn Gaines was a bad, violent person who was shot by police while threatening them with death or grievous bodily harm? Sure, I suppose it's possible. But when someone goes out of his way to make damn sure you can't know what he's up to, then someone else ends up dead at his hands inside the time and space bubble of secrecy he just intentionally created, the default reasonable presumption is that malice aforethought was involved on his part.
If a mere mundane pulled the kind of stunt the police pulled in this instance, with the same outcome, it's unlikely that any jury or judge in the country would buy his story or show any inclination whatsoever toward mercy.
That should be the outcome in this incident as well, but we all know it won't be. Unless there's a massive public outcry, the cops involved in the killing of Korryn Gaines will be put on paid vacation ("administrative leave") for a couple of weeks, then the department will issue a press release announcing "we investigated ourselves and decided we did nothing wrong, k thx bai."
For obvious reasons, I hope you never end up in a standoff with police and need to show the public what's going on. But just in case that does happen, don't rely on Facebook or Instagram to have your back. Download Cell 411 for your smart phone. They won't keep you from streaming video of whatever's going on around you, even if the "We're SPECIAL -- We've got BADGES" club asks them to.
The last video Korryn Gaines was able to get out to Instagram before she was killed:
