INNOCENT JOGGER KILLED BY A COP

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Ahmaud Arbery who was a 25-year-old black man was killed in 1974 while he was jogging in the early evening through a Glynn County Georgia neighborhood on the wrongful suspicion that he was a burglar. He was killed by a Memphis, Tennessee investigator    and his son who both lived in the neighbourhood.

The victim had been pursued by the two heavily bearded men in a truck after the two men (a district attorney’s investigator and his son) spotted him jogging in their neighborhood. The black man  was unarmed when he was shot twice in his chest with a shotgun when he paused after he came to a chain link fence, his empty hands visible to the men who opened fire on him.

The two Georgia men who were caught on video shooting the unarmed jogger to death February claimed that they were chasing a suspect behind a series of burglaries in the area. But a local police official said the last break-in the neighborhood was reported nearly two months before the shooting. The last known burglary in the neighborhood happened on January. 1, more than seven weeks before the Feb. 23 incident that ended Arbery’s life at the age of 25, Glynn County Police Lt. Cheri Bashlor told CNN

Gregory McMichael and his son were originality cleared of any wrongdoing because, at the time, it was lawful to shoot a fleeing felon except the jogger wasn’t a fleeing felon.

It wasn’t until May 2020 that the authorities, after public pressure  realized that there was some crooked dealings that let the two men off the hook for the shooting of the blogger.

Gregory McMichael, a retired 64-year-old district attorney’s investigator, and his 34-year-old son, Travis, were both arrested and charged with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery

The father and son charged with murder in the high-profile Ahmaud Arbery case had a frontation with a young black man in the same Georgia neighborhood previously.w weeks before the fatal Feb. 23 shooting,

Georgia attorney general has promised that his office will investigate ylocal authorities’ handling of the death of Ahmaud Arbery with emphasis on  the the role the dstrict attorney  played in this case. 

In the 1985 landmark case about 15 year old Garner’s killing, the Supreme Court ruled that you can’t shoot a burglary suspect simply for running away. This ruling makes the responses to Arbery’s killing even more atrocious. That he may have stopped at an unfenced construction site before running on doesn’t justify anything that happened. Arbery was unarmed, and the men who opened fire on him as he ran for his life, Gregory and Travis McMichael, were vigilantes who assumed that a black man running must be the criminal they were looking for and they chased him down in a pickup truck.      

                                                           

The killers were a father and son team. The father, 64, had served as a police officer and investigator for the local prosecutor. It makes me wonder just what kind of police work he did on the beat. A cop should know he had no business escalating a situation with a jogger based on a hunch amounting to racial profiling. Any cop who wore the uniform would know the Garner case, and that using lethal force to apprehend a fleeing burglar was out of the question. He would also realize that running empty-handed is not the MO of leaving the scene of a typical burglary unless the burglar was already being chased by someone.

After the shooting, the two men told Glynn County cops that they pursued Arbery with a .357 Magnum revolver and a shotgun because they suspected him in a spate of local break-ins There hadn’t been any break-ins for some time at that particular time of the shooting.

If armed people in civilian clothes bear down on you, run, but be prepared to fight. Chasing someone down in a truck and cornering you is terrifying, and any sensible person would resist. I can only imagine Arbery’s confusion and terror as going out for some exercise ended in a failed struggle for his life. The courage he showed as he fought against two armed men is humbling. If some angry stranger were waving a shotgun at me as he closed in, I’d grab the barrel, too. Arbery did exactly what he should have done.

The story of a black man executed by white vigilantes based on fear and one repeated a multitude of times in American’s history. That it happened at the hands of a retired police officer is a disgrace to the profession. The Garner case was making its way through the courts as the nation’s lynchings by rope were winding down. The last recorded one happened in 1981. Arbery’s death reminds me that while the ropes are gone, lynchings are still happening by other means.

His death reminds me that some places in the United States are trapped in its old ways. Until video of the incident was made public, the Glynn county police and prosecutor seemed prepared to let the Police officer McMichaels walk free, reminiscent of the prosecutors and police who turned their backs on the extrajudicial killings of blacks perpetrated by their friends and colleagues for over a century in the postbellum south. Whether a suspect is innocent or guilty, vigilante justice is a crime against the rule of law.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, is an unflinching record of America’s racial violence. It has recorded 594 lynchings in Georgia. Rusted metal boxes are suspended from the memorial’s roof, one for each county in America with a reported victim. Their names are inscribed on them. The one for Glynn County, Georgia has three victims on it: Henry Jackson, Robert Evarts and Wesley Lewis. There is now  a fourth. His name is Ahmaud Arbery, lynched in 2020 for jogging in a white neighborhood.

Narcotics officers who kill innocent people in the war on drugs often don’t even face suspensions, let alone criminal charges. But the conduct of three Atlanta police officers in the killing of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston was so unscrupulous that all three faced criminal charges. Kathryn Johnston (June 26, 1914 – November 21, 2006) was an elderly Atlanta, Georgia, woman who was killed by undercover police.  Yes. She was a black woman. Does that come as a surprise?

The three officers had entered her home in what was later described as a 'botched' drug raid. Officers cut off the burglar bars and broke down her door using a no-knock warrant. Police said Johnston fired at them, obviously thinking they were home invaders and they fired back in response. She fired only one shot out the door over the officers' heads and they fired 39 shots, five or six of which hit her. None of the officers were injured by her shooting at them at all. Two of the offices were found guilty of her death.

No questions asked, no weapons seen, no words offered or exchanged. Defendant Bollinger blasted three shotgun rounds at the hapless and unarmed plaintiffs, striking them and wounding them as they sought to take cover from assault, leaving them in critical condition, bleeding face-down on the ground,” Pickett says in the Dec. 3 complaint.

The men say Bollinger was responding with no partner or backup to a report of a home invasion robbery by two black men who might be armed with handguns, at the apartment complex where Pickett’s cousin lived. The “sketchy information” about the robbers said only that they were black men, according to the complaint. Lewis stood by the security gate at the front of the apartment complex, smoking a cigarette, while Pickett punched in the pass code and said he was going to see his cousin.

Then, without a  warning, without investigation, without any knowledge of who was in the area, of who the suspects were or what they looked like, and in violation of all training and standard police protocol, Police Officer Bollinger approached the apartment gate and immediately shot Mr. Lewis and Mr. Pickett.

Pickett, who was a handyman and who has a son and was engaged to be married at the time, suffered seven gunshot wounds, including one to his head. Lewis, a husband and father of four, was shot once in the back and three times in the legs.

After other officers arrived and handcuffed them, the men said, “It became apparent that the wrong men had been shot as a result of Bolliger’s rash, reckless and life-endangering conduct.”

Though they lay bleeding and handcuffed, “in critical condition,” the men say, the officers “set out to cover up the shooting of these two innocent, unarmed men.”

The cover-up was a bogus story that Lewis and/or Pickett had pointed guns at Bolliger, according to the complaint. “The problem for defendant Bolliger and the rest of defendant police officers was that neither plaintiff was armed; neither possessed a weapon of any kind. Likewise, neither plaintiff was in possession of any of the stolen items supposedly taken by the suspect in the robbery.

Nor did the people who reported the home invasion identify them as the robbers. T hey claim that the first photos taken of the scene where they were shot do not show any weapon nor any of the stolen items. Some of the responding officers to the scene failed to see any weapons purportedly belonging to either victims. Somehow, however, two handguns appeared and stolen items appeared as well. It was determined by subsequent forensic analysis before plaintiffs’ criminal trial, proved that neither of the victims were  in any way connected physically with the weapons or the items.

The men say it took nearly an hour for them to receive medical attention, and that when paramedics did arrive, “Bolliger refused to let them tend to the critically wounded plaintiffs. Picket had  said that Bolliger told him that “he did not give a fuck that he had shot the man  in the head.

 Bollinger and the other officers had staged a crime scene to conform to their story, arrested the men  on false charges, including murder of the pedestrian killed by the police car, attempted murder of Bollinger, and carrying loaded firearms, according to their testimony.

The officers also “conducted tainted six-pack lineups in an effort to get the purported robbery victims to identify (them),” falsified reports and gave false testimony against them, according to the victim’s testimony.

Pickett and Lewis say they spent a year in jail awaiting their trial and throughout a jury trial that started in December 2013 and eventually exonerated them.

They seek punitive damages for civil rights violations, unreasonable and excessive force, false arrest, malicious prosecution, and failure to intervene, train, supervise and discipline the officers .  Also named as defendants are Inglewood police Officers Navid Khansari, Joe Lisardi, Michael Han and Jack Aranda. As of this date.  I don’t know the results of the civil  trial.

Jordan Edwards, 15, was trying to leave a house party that had gotten out of control . But the black teenager would never get home that night because, as he sat in a car, a police officer shot and killed him.

The officer involved in the shooting, Roy Oliver, has been charged with murder, with a judge signing an arrest warrant. police Officer Oliver had already been fired earlier, because he “violated several departmental policies.”

Police in Balch Springs, Texas, a majority-minority Dallas suburb originally claimed there was an altercation in the vehicle. Edwards, who was unarmed, was sitting in the front passenger’s seat, with four other unarmed teens, including Edwards’s brother. who were also in the car.

Oliver shot at the car with a rifle. A bullet broke through the front passenger’s window and hit Edwards. Shortly after, Edwards was rushed to a hospital, where he died from gunshot injuries. No officers were injured in the incident.

Balch Springs Police Chief Jonathan Haber at first said that the the car backed up toward responding officers “in an aggressive manner.”

After his original statement, however, Haber said  that he “misspoke. ”He clarified that the car was in fact driving away from officers, not toward them. He added, “After reviewing video, I don’t believe that it [the shooting] met our core values.”

The party Edwards left was crowded, with unsupervised, drunk teens fighting before gunshots were fired. According to the family attorney, Edwards “was leaving a house party because he thought it was getting dangerous. Actually, the danger was waiting for him outside the party.

Thirty-nine of shooting victms by police were unarmed. Four were killed by police stun guns and another nine died in custody, a continuing problem in American jails. But the majority of black people killed by police were fatally shot to death.

Based on a tracker from The Washington Post, at least 232 black folks were shot and killed. (The Guardian’s figures include all deaths resulting directly from encounters with law enforcement, while the Post counts only people who were shot and killed by police.

The Post found that 34 percent of the unarmed people killed in 2016 were black males, which is quite disproportionate since black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population. There was also a considerable uptick in deaths caught on camera via cellphone and police cameras.  

I could go further in telling you more instances of cops killing innocent blacks but that will be for another article.

As far as I am concerned, shooting unarmed blacks is no different than lynching them.

Lynching has been a major component of racial violence in the United States since the end of the Civil War.  While Americans of every racial background have been subjected to this violence, a disproportionate number of lynchings have been in the U.S. South and most of the victims were African American women, men, and children. Equal Justice Initiative titled, Lynching in America, has a listing of over 4,000 murders by white people.

Alas. I have to conclude that a great number of white people in  the United States e are rabid  racists.