Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Officer Randall Kerrick (right) has been charged with voluntary manslaughter after he shot and killed an unarmed man who was reportedly looking for help after getting into a car accident. Jonathan Ferrell, 24, was a former Florida A & M football player.
Ferrell apparently was in a car wreck and was seeking help by knocking on the door of a house. The woman inside called 911 out of fear.
The police found Ferrell a short distance away and he ran toward them — presumably thinking he could get help. Instead, the police tasered him and when he continued toward them, Kerrick shot him repeatedly. They later found a wrecked car believed to be Ferrell’s.
H.W. Otwell: “The next question in my mind is why the victim acted in the manner he did? Why did he charge the officers?”
Who says that he acted in this or that manner and charged the officers?
Oh! Right the officers did, and we can’t question the truthfulness of any statements made by them can we.
I am to the point when I speak with police and they say the sky is blue, I know they are lying, because when I look up it’s grey skies above me.
A new crime has been unearthed: Injured While Black (I.W.B.)
I’d need to know the specifics of what happened to have an opinion. Did want to correct story in one detail however. Victim is a former Florida A&M player, not Texas A&M.
What is police but to repress? What is army but to war? What is weapons but to maim and kill? In each is but its calling.
“Over 100 times per day in America, police officers break into private homes to serve search warrants for consensual, nonviolent crimes. They aren’t preventing violence, they’re creating it. They aren’t saving lives, they’re putting lives at risk.
Until that stops, there will be more bodies.” -Radley Balko
New Orleans Cop Gets Four Years For Fatal Drug Raid Shooting Caught on Video
By Radley Balko Posted: 09/12/2013 3:19 pm EDT | Updated: 09/12/2013 4:11 pm EDT
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/12/new-orleans-cop-gets-four_n_3913888.html
Excerpt:
As District Attorney Leon Cannizarro explains in the clip, the pin-camera video from one of the raiding officers was critical to his decision to bring charges. Which is why, if these raids are going to continue, every one of them should be recorded in a format that cannot be altered or tampered with, and those videos should be archived and subject to open records laws.
I’ve been critical of Cannizarro in other contexts, so I should add that it’s good to see a prosecutor impose some accountability. But let’s be clear here. Throwing cops in jail for making split-second mistakes under unimaginably perilous circumstances isn’t going to prevent future Wendell Allens. The problem is that bad policy keeps creating those unimaginably perilous circumstances in the first place. Over 100 times per day in America, police officers break into private homes to serve search warrants for consensual, nonviolent crimes. They aren’t preventing violence, they’re creating it. They aren’t saving lives, they’re putting lives at risk.
Until that stops, there will be more bodies.
HuffPost writer and investigative reporter Radley Balko is also the author of the new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.
Always grateful to North Carolina, along with her sisters Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, for making Kentucky look progressive by comparison.
An unarmed man has been killed by a police officer. This is a tragedy and shouldn’t have happened. The agency involved investigated the incident and took what appears to be the appropriate action. The next question in my mind is why the victim acted in the manner he did? Why did he charge the officers? I watched a CSPAN Program in which the stand your ground laws were being discussed. One speaker was a retired lawyer and judge who was African American. He now spends time talking to and teaching young men of color what to do and not to do when approached by police. He made mention of the fact that sudden movements and belligerent attitudes should be avoided. This case as well as the trial will most probably be in the news and as always emotions will run high.
“police … emancipated from the constraints of the law.” (from link posted by ap at 10:22 am)
Chris Hedges certainly has a way with words. Thanks for the link.
ap,
I had forgotten about that horrible shooting in 1999 in NYC. 40 plus shots at an unarmed man. It still disgusts me.
Licensed to Kill: The Growing Phenomenon of Police Shooting Unarmed Citizens
By John W. Whitehead
September 16, 2013
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/licensed_to_kill_the_growing_phenomenon_of_police_shooting_unarmed_cit
Excerpt:
Here’s a recipe for disaster: Take a young man (or woman), raise him on a diet of violence, hype him up on the power of the gun in his holster and the superiority of his uniform, render him woefully ignorant of how to handle a situation without resorting to violence, train him well in military tactics but allow him to be illiterate about the Constitution, and never stress to him that he is to be a peacemaker and a peacekeeper, respectful of and subservient to the taxpayers, who are in fact his masters and employers.
Once you have fully indoctrinated this young man (or woman) on the idea that the police belong to a brotherhood of sorts, with its own honor code and rule of law, then place this person in situations where he will encounter individuals who knowingly or unknowingly challenge his authority, where he may, justifiably or not, feel threatened, and where he will have to decide between firing a weapon or, the more difficult option, adequately investigating a situation in order to better assess the danger and risk posed to himself and others, and then act on it by defusing the tension or de-escalating the violence.
I’m not talking about a situation so obviously fraught with risk that there is no other option but to shoot, although I am hard pressed to consider what that might be outside of the sensationalized Hollywood hostage crisis scenario. I’m talking about the run-of-the mill encounters between police and citizens that occur daily. In an age when police are increasingly militarized, weaponized and protected by the courts, these once-routine encounters are now inherently dangerous for any civilian unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I’m not the only one concerned, either. Indeed, I’ve been contacted by many older cops equally alarmed by the attitudes and behaviors of younger police today, the foot soldiers in the emerging police state. Yet as I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this is what happens when you go from a representative democracy in which all members are subject to the rule of law to a hierarchical one in which there is one set of laws for the rulers and another, far more stringent set, for the ruled.
…
The problem, notes Jerome Skolnick and former New York City police officer/Temple University criminal justice professor James Fyfe in their book Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, is that police work is often viewed by those in the force as an us-versus-them war rather than a chance for community-oriented engagement and problem solving. The authors also point to a lack of accountability as one of the reasons why police violence persists. They acknowledge that, yes, police officers are placed in dangerous situations that at times require immediate responses. But they maintain that that doesn’t excuse using more force than is needed to subdue someone, the lack of professional training that leads to such fear-based responses, or treating citizens as enemy combatants.
As Titania Kumeh reports in Mother Jones, this has been coming on for a long time. Remember back in 1999, when four plainclothes New York police officers shot and killed a 22-year-old unarmed immigrant who was standing in the doorway of his apartment? The cops thought the young man was reaching for his gun—it turned out to be his wallet—and fired 41 shots at him, landing 19 on his body. The cops were acquitted of all charges.
In 2003, an unarmed man, kneeling before four Las Vegas police officers, was shot with an assault rifle because one of the officers “feared” the unarmed man was feigning surrender and about to grab a gun. A jury ruled the shooting excusable.
In 2006, plainclothes police officers, again in New York, fired 50 shots into a car after it reportedly rammed into their unmarked van, killing the 23-year-old driver who had just left his bachelor party and wounding his two friends. Police claimed they had been following the men, suspecting one of them had a gun. Again, the cops were cleared of all charges.
In 2010, in California, police shot and killed a young man who had allegedly committed some sort of traffic violation while riding his bicycle. After an altercation in which the young man resisted police and fled to his mother’s house, police officers pursued him, kicked down his mother’s door and opened fire.
That same year, in Long Beach, California, police responded with heavy firepower to a perceived threat by a man holding a water hose. The 35-year-old man had reportedly been watering his neighbor’s lawn when police, interpreting his “grip” on the water hose to be consistent with that of someone discharging a firearm, opened fire. The father of two was pronounced dead at the scene.
Skip ahead to 2013 and you have the 16-year-old teenager who skipped school only to be shot by police after they mistook him for a fleeing burglar. Not to mention the July 26 shooting of an unarmed black man in Austin “who was pursued and shot in the back of the neck by Austin Police… after failing to properly identify himself and leaving the scene of an unrelated incident.” And don’t forget the 19-year-old Seattle woman who was accidentally shot in the leg by police after she refused to show her hands.
Make no mistake, whereas these shootings of unarmed individuals by what Slate terms “trigger happy” cops used to take place primarily in big cities, that militarized, urban warfare mindset among police has spread to small-town America. No longer is this just a problem for immigrants, or people of color, or lower income communities, or young people who look like hooligans, out for trouble. We’re all in this together, black and white, rich and poor, urban and suburban, guilty and innocent alike. We’re all viewed the same by the powers that be: as potential lawbreakers to be viewed with suspicion and treated like criminals.
Whether you’re talking about police shootings of unarmed individuals, NSA surveillance, drones taking to the skies domestically, SWAT team raids, or roadside strip searches, they’re all part of a totalitarian continuum, mile markers on this common road we’re traveling towards the police state. The sign before us reads “Danger Ahead.” What remains to be seen is whether we can put the brakes on and safely reverse direction before it’s too late to turn back.
Here’s my perspective (having only the facts offered in the news article)
A common scheme of burglars is to bang loudly in the middle of the night on the doors of houses trying to see if nobody is home (and then enter if nobody answers) A less common trick is to make up some lie that there has been a car accident or that someone is injured and when the homeowner opens the door they rush in. The latter happens much less frequently but does on occasion. I have seen these incidents myself.
The incident reportedly happened at 02:30 AM. I can understand that the homeowner was worried and was justified in calling for assistence. I can also see the police, just to be prudent, assuming that this could in fact be a burglar, who are often armed, and should assume such for their own safety.
I don’t believe the police knew of the car accident at the time of the shooting.
I would have to read the specifics in the investigation as to why the Taser was deployed. If the victim had ran up to the officers in a threatening manner (not responding to orders to stop, putting his hands suddenly in his pockets which could be interpreted to going for a weapon, making threatening statements or not responding at all, putting his hands out as if he is going to tackle one of the officers or making gestures indicating a combative posture) I could see given the information the officers had using a Taser but even this to me is debatable and I can see it going either way.
But, after the Taser failing, I cannot see reasonable justification for the shooting. The fact that a Taser shot doesn’t work does not mean the next course of action must be using a firearm. The firearm would not have for that matter been justified in the beginning. No weapon was displayed by the victim and I didn’t see anything that would give cause in my view for its use.
I would agree based upon what I have read that if true would lead me to believe there was PC to arrest for Manslaughter.
Scary story. I guess in North Carolina you need to protect yourself from anyone who needs help.
The Origins of Our Police State
Posted on Sep 16, 2013
By Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_origins_of_our_police_state_20130916//
As in most police states, cops serve as judge and jury on city streets—“a long step down the totalitarian path,” in the words that U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1968 when he decried expanding police powers. And police departments are bolstered by an internal surveillance and security apparatus that has eradicated privacy and dwarfed the intrusion into personal lives by police states of the past, including East Germany.
Under a series of Supreme Court rulings we have lost the rights to protect ourselves from random searches, home invasions, warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping and physical abuse. Police units in poor neighborhoods function as armed gangs. The pressure to meet departmental arrest quotas—the prerequisite for lavish federal aid in the “war on drugs”—results in police routinely seizing people at will and charging them with a laundry list of crimes, often without just cause. Because many of these crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The police and the defendants know that the collapsed court system, in which the poor get only a few minutes with a public attorney, means there is little chance the abused can challenge the system. And there is also a large pool of willing informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police.
The tyranny of law enforcement in poor communities is a window into our emerging police state. These thuggish tactics are now being used against activists and dissidents. And as the nation unravels, as social unrest spreads, the naked face of police repression will become commonplace. Totalitarian systems always seek license to engage in this kind of behavior by first targeting a demonized minority. Such systems demand that the police, to combat the “lawlessness” of the demonized minority, be, in essence, emancipated from the constraints of the law. The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ these tactics against the wider society. “Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”
…
“During the last couple of days the police have been telling people in the neighborhood that if they go to court to testify about the beating of JaQuan they will be arrested and go to jail too,” Myrtice Bell, LaPierre’s grandmother, told me.
LaPierre, who was on probation for allegedly resisting arrest during another routine stop, a charge he says was false, and who has a pending charge of being in a vehicle with other men in which an illegal weapon was found by police, appears destined to be swallowed into the vast prison system. He will become, if he is railroaded into prison, one more person among the more than 2 million behind bars in the U.S. His experience, and the experience of others in poverty-stricken communities, should terrify us. Our failure to defend the rights of the poor in the name of law and order, our demonization of young black men, our acceptance that they can be stripped of the power to protect themselves from police abuse or find equality before the law, mean that their fate will soon become ours.
Better than 50/50 the cop is acquitted, or the charges dropped.
jessemathewson 1, September 16, 2013 at 9:33 am
…
And I am crazy when I say that people need to defend themselves from these thugs.
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The gravamen of these type cases is determining who “these thugs” are — the shooter or the one shot.
The deceased and the realm that identifies with him has one view while the shooter and the realm that identifies with him has another view.
That varies from state to state, evidently based upon the law of any given state.
For gods sake, did you see his vehicle? He survived a horrible car accident, which he had to kick his way out of, only to be shot multiple times by Barney Fife!
Stand your ground fans need to be less Quick Draw McGraw when they are in a non-stand your ground state:
(JT’s link). Sounds like it is a traditional common law self defense state.
I sense a campaign issue in the upcoming elections there.
A lot more facts needed to understand this. “A former football player” is totally irrelevant serving only to seek a bias.
Reblogged this on Jesse Talks Back and commented:
And I am crazy when I say that people need to defend themselves from these thugs.
Sounds logical.