A Larger Storm Brewing
I think one of the worst things about this is that when the people have had enough and decide to throw down, the police will still not understand why they're being tacked to the shed. We saw that after the Oakland riots in the BART shooting. The cops literally don't get it.
We had some street violence in Seattle a few years ago in the wake of a prosecutor deciding to not charge a police officer with any crime after a shooting. The internal review came back, and it was so bad that the police department decided they couldn't bury it—which is usually the city's standard practice in such cases, like the time the report came back on the officers caught on videotape beating a wheelchair-bound black man and planting evidence on them to warrant an arrest. No, really, the city report came back and the city attorney refused to release it to the public record.
In the shooting incident, the review concluded that not only had the officer fired his weapon inappropriately, it was also demonstrable that he lied and tampered with evidence in order to justify the shooting. The department appropriately fired the officer. In light of the evidence, however, Dan Satterberg, the prosecutor, decided there was no reason to charge a police officer with any crime for such actions. And, yes, people lost it. A couple of cruisers were smashed up, and I think it was on Cap Hill someone actually tried to set the station on fire. And, yes, all the platitudes about how such violence is inappropriate go here. Still, though, Satterberg has no idea why people were so angry, and SPD itself is still as corrupt, racist, and excessively violent as ever.
Advocates can tell us all they want about bad seeds and good cops. The question is at what point people will no longer give a damn.
It will be an ugly day. And then everyone will come out with the platitudes about how horrified they are. And then things will go back to business as usual.
