Debra Dickerson and Erroll McDonald
Dear Erroll,
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StumbleUponIt must be the day after Labor Day. Talk about a lack of drama. Page One. Washington Post: "O Canada! A National Swan Song? U.S. Economic, Cultural Weight Threaten Nation's Identity." Or, there's this: "Stricken With ALS, A Doctor Perseveres." My personal fave: "Tail End of an Odd Summer: Mildew Grew as Weather Put a Damper on Area Pools." Mildew on the front page? OK, they're all below the fold, but still. The primo stuff isn't much meatier. The only fiber is the latest cop-shooting of either an innocent, upstanding citizen or no good would-be cop-killer. All depends on your world view.
This is the 12th Prince George's County cop-on-civilian killing in 13 months. I'm always struck by how bizarrely inconsistent police statements about these things are (when defendants are bizarrely inconsistent ... well, you see where this is going). And this one is particularly woogy because of the many intersecting and overlapping boundaries in the D.C. area. I'll spare you most of the twists and turns and summarize thusly: An undercover P.G. County (Maryland) cop named Carlton Jones followed Prince Jones (25-year-old citizen, not a Maryland county) from Hyattsville, Md., through D.C., and into Fairfax, Va., supposedly trailing him because he was connected to the theft of a police weapon. Fairfax police say Jones (the dead one) repeatedly rammed his car into the driver's side of the unmarked SUV (officer) Jones was driving. Why? At this point, we don't know. A P.G. County Fraternal Order of Police spokesman says that Officer Jones got out and identified himself as a cop after (dead) Jones rammed his vehicle twice. Both men got back into their vehicles, and (dead) Jones tried to ram him again.
I'm having trouble with this one. Not the ramming (that would only surprise me if women were driving. We just had a couple of yahoos shoot a grandmother to death for driving too slowly in front of them. Their defense in court: "We were only trying to scare her.") but the getting back into the car after a ramming. What? He just scolded the scamp and was going to let the guy drive off once the pesky ramming ceased? I, an unarmed, non-police-officer, wouldn't get back into a vehicle in any danger of being re-rammed. What did the guy say when Officer Jones exchanged words with him between rammings: "My bad. Sorry, dude."? Something tells me the guy might still have been slightly visibly exercised. Why not get out, stay out, and arrest the asshole? Isn't ramming another vehicle a crime? It would also seem to be an easily provable one (the evidence would be quite, ahem, evident) and one, in this environment of routine overcharging of defendants, likely to be amenable to attempted murder, especially given that the victim was a police officer. But no. Officer Sherlock Jones allowed himself to be rammed again (ram me once, shame on you; ram me twice ...), fired into the rear of (dead) Jones' vehicle, and ultimately Dead Jones himself. Twelve times. Nine found their home. The killing occurred in the wee hours of Friday (before a three-day holiday). Lawyers for all concerned are already in place.
The interesting twist here is that Fairfax County is incensed that a Maryland cop "copped" in their town. Under Maryland law, a police officer has no power out of his jurisdiction, but Officer Jones never alerted local authorities to his presence, asked for backup, etc. (The spokesman said he only intended to watch [Dead] Jones.) The victims may have a leg up here, given the jealousy with which bureaucrats guard their turf. Stanley Crouch, always a voice of reason in these situations, writes that anti-police brutality activists routinely fail to take New York police up on their offers to undergo police training so they can see the pressures under which police operate. I wonder how undercover cops out of their jurisdiction in unmarked cars are trained to handle the situation Officer Jones was in, following a presumably unsuspecting suspect through three jurisdictions who may simply think you're about to car-jack him. Any mildew in Gotham today?
Peace,
(Not Dead Yet) Debra
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
Indian gaming may seem like a form of reparations in our tort-minded culture, but this is a false analogy. Indians are permitted to operate casinos because they have sovereignty over their reservations by treaties signed in the preceding centuries. When the federal courts ruled that states could not bar tribes from running casinos, states negotiated agreements with them regulating their operation (restricting alcohol, for example). Indian gaming, fishing rights, and sales tax exemptions are not gifts of guilty white liberals. They are an acknowledgement of legal obligations from another era.
--Andrew W.Cohen
(To reply, click here.)
I believe the best reparations would be putting forth the effort to treat Black Americans and Indians with the respect and equality human beings deserve. What good would money and property do, when white folks can still treat Black Americans and Indians as less than human, therefore less than equal? What would I, a Black American, rather have: 40 acres and a mule, or to be treated and given as much respect and equality is my white brother and sisters? Forget the money and the property, give me my equality and my respect. That is the best reparation any oppressed people can ask for.
--philiagoddess
(To reply, click here.)
The purpose of reparations is justice. The purpose of group reparations (vs. individual) is approximate justice. So it is necessary to decide how approximate we wish our justice to be. I believe that reparations for the dead (eg slaves) paid to their remote descendants is too crude. However, after slavery there was still a long-term injustice towards blacks: Jim Crow. This depressed the wages of Afro-Americans. Some of these victims are still alive. Since they would be mostly retired now, I suggest compensation through the Social Security system. This could be done in many ways, for example by adjusting the probability distribution of wages of blacks to mirror that of whites (on a year-by-year basis, up to some cutoff date), and then using that adjustment to adjust individual wage histories, and so finally increase Social Security payments.
--Bob Cox
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We do owe the black people. The whole country does, because we took their share of work for building this country up, for free, and on top we dragged them through the hell of slavery, and broken families, and constant humiliation. And even now 140 years after the Civil War, the prejudice continues. If we inherited all the good stuff from our predecessors in this country, we also inherited their debts. And the debt to the black people still needs to be paid.
--Amyntas
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Several questions:
1)If we're starting with home-grown folks, should we be planning to collect reparations from black slave owners' descendants?
2) Would you prefer African-Americans have quasi-sovereign nations to live on like Native Americans tribes, and thus be immune (to a large extent) from the state and federal government?
3) Did Bill Clinton oppose the war before or after he signed up for ROTC, and then dropped out once he realized he might get drafted?
4) Was Gore struggling along as a pauper while Bush was living high with his family's money?
--MRB
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Notes from the Fray Editor: Debra Dickerson does a splendid job of explaining The Fray. (In fact, our job--thanks Debra.) This is the post she mentions about the National Review. Views on reparations can be found all over The Fray, and we picked out some of what we hope she will think the more intelligent and thoughtful ones, above. And WillV liked Ms Dickerson's description of the shooting--Tuesday-- so much he thought she should be be hired by Slate to write a cops and crime column.