#BlackLivesMatter | The Gad About Town

Defending Abuse Creates Abuse

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

The officer was acquitted. He had shot and injured the driver of a car. He was acquitted and restored to his police force.

The officer claimed he had been hit by the car and knocked to the ground. He had fired in self-defense, heroically. There was a video of the incident, though, and it showed no such thing. The video showed that he remained standing as the car moved past him, not even at a car-like speed, and he fired point-blank at the driver on the driver’s side. The driver was not badly injured. The officer was arrested for assault, and he was also arrested for fabricating evidence.

The prosecutor said on the record at the time that if officers can get away with shooting people and lying about it, “the system is doomed.” The officer’s own lawyer recently told The New York Times, “There was no way around it—he (the officer) was dead wrong.” The two lead lawyers on both sides agree: The officer had lied about the incident. He was wrong. But he was acquitted by a jury and eventually restored to the force, and he successfully sued the city and won his back pay.
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Sandra Bland’s Final Free Moments

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old civil rights activist who died in the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, last Monday, might be alive today and her name unknown to all of us if the state trooper who pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change had not become irritated at her refusal to extinguish her cigarette while she sat in her car.
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#SandraBland: #SayHerName

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

One of my friends is driving cross-country with her son right now as I type this. He turned 18 last week and this trip from New York to Yellowstone Park is a last family hurrah before he ships off to college and the rest of his life in a month or so.

I know deep down that they will arrive out west, have a grand time, and enjoy the long drive home, that the experience will be spoken of fondly for years to come between mother and son. If she happens to be pulled over by a law enforcement official in any part of the country for any reason at all, that experience, too, will be merely one more tale in the fun collection of anecdotes: “Man, don’t even THINK about speeding in” (insert state name). And we her friends will enjoy the story.

My friend and her son are white, as am I. If she gets pulled over by a law enforcement official in any part of the country for any reason at all, the anecdote will not lead me to wonder these questions:

Why was she asked to get out of the car? Why was she arrested? Did the arresting officer have a body camera on his uniform? Was it functioning? Was the dash camera on the arresting officer’s vehicle turned on? If not, why not? Why is my friend, or her son, dead today?
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