Certainly a sin and conceptually a crime

Two points - scapegoating and infantilization.

Backstory. Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by Atlanta Police Department (APD) after resisting arrest for DUI, assaulting officers and firing one of their tasers at them. The Mayor fired the officer who shot Brooks without any investigation. Now the District Attorney has brought eleven charges against him, including murder, before the investigation is completed.

As Mayors loose their grip on their cities, increasingly they are using the police as their scapegoats. The public servants doing the most dangerous work are immediately fired without any semblance of due process in cities across the nation. Basically Mayors and DAs are abandoning governance norms and are resorting to the old biblical scapegoating. Some designated victim must be sacrificed for the sins of the community. And the scapegoats are the police.

And the result is predictable. APD is reporting police no-shows for shifts. In just the past two weeks some 20 officers (of 1,770) have left the force. A 1% turnover rate in two week. Were it to continue, we would be down by a quarter by the end of the year. On a police force that already had a hiring and retention problem, routinely running 25% below its authorized level of 2,000.

Scapegoating by the political leadership of the hardest working civil servants is an ill-omen for the continued prosperity of a city.


The second point is epistemic. All the usual pro forma declarations. All deaths are a tragedy. No one deserved to die. We should not speak ill of the dead. We should understand what happened and why so that we can attempt to prevent a similar tragedy happening again. Some tragedies are unpreventable.

Where does the responsibility for this tragedy reside? With Rayshard Brooks. He did not choose to die but he chose to make a series of bad decisions that led to his death. It detracts nothing from the tragedy of his death to acknowledge this.

What do we know of him? We know that he was an unskilled laborer. He had a wife and three daughters as well as a stepson. That is what the mainstream American media has focused on, emphasizing his friends, his hard work, how nice a guy he was.

But . . . Why did he run? Why did he resist arrest? Why did he attack the police? Why did he fire a taser at them?

If we go by past parallel tragedies such as Michael Brown of Ferguson, Eric Garner of NYC, George Floyd of Minneapolis - all these guys did not deserve to die and all had checkered pasts such that an arrest threatened to undo whatever minimum progress they had made pulling their life together.

If that is the case with Rayshard Brooks, it provides more evidence that the key issue is how do we distinguish precarious individuals who are pulling things together from dangerous serial criminals. When they make a bad decision like driving drunk, breaking New York's arcane licensing laws for street sales, behaving erratically while passing forged currency or threatening behavior while pilfering a store, how do we hold them accountable without undoing their own efforts to get their lives in order?

That, to me, seems the crux of the issue. Not mysterious, ghost in the machine, systemic racism or oppressive power structures. We can define a specific problem and probably come up with some specific and acceptable solutions.

Instead, we default to the religious ideology of critical theory and social justice as well mob action and failed political leadership from which no one benefits.

So what do we know further about Brooks that can give some context for his otherwise inexplicable actions? From Everything We Know About the Killing of Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta Police by Chas Danner.

It is not everything we know by a long shot but in comparison to most of the hagiographies, it is reasonably complete.

It does include this detail I had not seen reported before.

Brooks seems compliant at first, then tries to break free of the officers, who then try to tackle him to the ground.

A cell-phone video of the incident recorded by a bystander shows Brooks and the two officers scuffling on the ground. Rolfe tells Brooks to stop fighting and warns him that he is going to get Tased. “Mr. Rolfe, come on man. Mr. Rolfe,” Brooks says. Officer Brosnan has unholstered his Taser and Brooks gets ahold of it during the scuffle, breaks free, stands up, and punches Rolfe. Brooks does not try to use the Taser. Rolfe fires his Taser at Brooks — who then begins to run away with Brosnan’s Taser still in his hand. Rolfe follows close behind, continuing to try to use his Taser to stun Brooks.

From the video and reports, it was obvious the two officers and Brooks were wrestling on the ground and Brooks was sufficiently powerful to effectively prevent constraint. I had not known that the wrestling had transitioned from wrestling to physical assault, i.e. punching an officer.

Overall in comparison to other American papers, it is an evenhanded account. But is it complete? No. You can see that partly in the comments section where, for I presume a liberal readership, there is a lot of pushback on the completeness.

I have not been following the case closely but have probably scanned half a dozen or dozen accounts. Most focus on the hagiography and why this represents racism.

None, not one, has reported on the fired officer other than to occasionally note that he was experienced with several years with the APD. His life is turned on end. Does he have a family? Does he have children? Does he have any material blemishes on his record? All these seem equally relevant issues for reporting but I have not seen a single effort by the press to show his humanity.

And while we can easily get the puff pieces on Brooks, was that the full story?

Apparently no. I had gleaned a couple of items from news sites that I regard as generally unreliable but also sites that are willing to publish uncomfortable truths. But they are miniscule.

But here is the second striking thing. The British Daily Mail USA edition actually has the news that others won't provide. This happens all the time.

When I lived in the UK, the Daily Mail was a down market tabloid indulging in questionable journalistic practices to provide the news they believe their readers to be interested in. It was not a paper I read there.

But it has to be acknowledged that they are markedly successful compared to, for example, the New York Times.

The NYT has a circulation of some 440,000 in a country of 330 million people. The Daily Mail has 1.2 million circulation in a country of some 60 million.

But it is still a sensationalist paper and I rarely visit it except under very particular circumstances. Beyond everything else, it also has one of the most ad intensive pages of any I know. Pop-ups left right and center. Miss a click by a millimeter and you have launched a new page of ads. It is a grotesque reading experience.

But the one circumstance where I will go to them for factual reporting is any story which goes against the Social Justice grain of American reporters.

From Rayshard Brooks was on probation for four crimes. Their suheadings:

Rayshard Brooks was on probation and faced going back to prison if he was charged with a DUI, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The 27-year-old was shot and killed by police after he was found asleep at a Wendy's drive-thru in Atlanta on Friday, June 12

He was compliant with cops but after he failed a field sobriety test and blew 0.108 when breathalyzed, Brooks suddenly resisted when cops tried to cuff him

Brooks was shot twice in the back as he tried to make a break for it

The charges to which Brooks pleaded guilty and for which he was still on probation dated back to August 2014

He was convicted on four counts – False Imprisonment, Simple Battery/Family, Battery Simple and Felony Cruelty/Cruelty to Children

Brooks had not been in trouble since 2016 until last December when he went to Ohio without informing his probation officer - but the case was dismissed

Well that is a lot more information than in virtually all accounts from reputable American papers.

From their reporting.

Rayshard Brooks was on probation and faced going back to prison if he was charged with a DUI, DailyMail.com can reveal.

It was the fear of incarceration that likely caused Brooks to panic in the face of imminent arrest and caused him to make a break for it.

[snip]

But after Brooks failed a field sobriety test and blew 0.108 when breathalyzed (0.08 is the legal limit in Georgia), Rolfe who has since been fired, moved to cuff Brooks who suddenly resisted. Both officers were clearly taken by surprise.

As their bodycameras fell to the ground in the scuffle that ensued one shouted to Brooks to 'stop fighting' and warned him, 'You're going to get tased,' but the peaceable incident quickly escalated into violence.

[snip]

The charges to which Brooks pleaded guilty and for which he was still on probation dated back to August 2014 when he was convicted on four counts – False Imprisonment, Simple Battery/Family, Battery Simple and Felony Cruelty/Cruelty to Children.

He was tried in Clayton County and sentenced to seven years on the first count, with one year in prison and six on probation and 12 months for each of the other three counts, sentences to be served concurrently.

His sentence was revised, and he was sent back to prison for 12 months in July 2016 when he violated the terms of his probation.

Brooks had not been in trouble since that year until last December when he went to Ohio without informing his probation officer and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

That warrant was revoked and the case dismissed when he returned to Georgia on January 6.

A little incoherent. They have clearly gathered facts but not quite interpreted it. I am reading this to mean that there was serious domestic violence incident in 2014 which involved battery of his wife and/or children, deemed sufficiently serious to attract a pretty serious penalty. It is unclear whether he served any of that sentence.

He did spend a year in jail from 2016-2017 for violating his probation. Again, I am assuming that that was a pretty serious violation. And then he violated his probation again at the beginning of this year.

Why are these details important? It doesn't justify his death. But it makes it marginally more explicable. He committed some serious crime six years ago and had been in jail for a year and on probation since then and at least one violation of parole.

Domestic violence is a serious problem. Drunk driving kills 10,000 people a year. These are serious issues and he violated our norms and the laws.

But it does appear that he was at least trying to get his life together and assume responsibility. He had made bad decisions, committed serious crimes and was trying to get his life together. Just like Eric Garner. Just like George Floyd.

Police encounter serious and persistent criminals all day every day. Some are young and skirting the system with dozens of arrests and on perpetual lenient sentencing. Some are drunk or mentally unstable people, a danger to themselves and others.

And amidst all that dangerous chaos, might there be a mechanism by which we could identify individuals for whom there could be shown reasonable evidence that they were making acceptable efforts to get their lives on track? I don't know. Seems like from a information systems perspective that would be reasonably easy. Would it be legal? Possibly not. Could it be effective? Possibly.

But I think it would be an important distinction for an officer, when running a background check to be able to see whether the individual has some acceptable designation as an individual attempting a precarious self-reform from someone else who has no settled life pattern. It would allow an officer to modify their approach in a fashion that might be beneficial.

All suspects lie. Everyone claims what they think makes them the most innocent or most sympathetic. "I borrowed this stolen car from my cousin." "I was visiting my mom." Some small portion are telling the truth. How to distinguish them from those simply seeking to evade arrest.

In Brooks's case, might it be feasible for officers to know he really had a family and children? That he was employed. That he was marked as making genuine efforts to reform. That might inform them of better options.

Drunk driving does need to be taken seriously. But in an instance such as this, might it be acceptable, in order to avoid losing his job and becoming desperate, to let him walk home or have a friend come pick him up?

I think most of us would want the answer to be yes. We would want self-reformers to get a margin of slack compared to others. But then there are all the issues of risk, and liability, and information systems, and privacy, and equality before the law, and trade-offs from other good goals (like reducing drunk driving).

Right now we have a dead civilian who should not be dead. We have a fired police officer who it appears should not have been fired. We have craven politicians making not just bad but morally reprehensible decisions.

And as long as we are gas-lighting the public by making them think this is about race and as long as we are hiding facts from the public so they cannot make informed decisions, we are making things much worse. And when I say we, I mean the media.

They refuse to treat the public as the responsible body it can be, giving them the facts as they are.

Certainly a sin and conceptually a crime.

And why should we have to resort to a British tabloid to get the facts that are available in America?