It doesn’t start or end with
the acquittal of Jason Stockley.
St. Louis is reeling after
another chaotic weekend of demonstrations against police violence.
Outraged protestors took to the streets beginning on Friday, after Jason
Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer, was acquitted on criminal charges
related to the death of Anthony Lamar Smith. The protests, which included
clashes with police, broken windows, and overturned trashcans, continued well
into Monday, according to CNN.
The case dated back to 2011,
when Smith, a 24-year-old black man, was pursued by Stockley—a white police
officer who is now 35 and lives in Texas—in a high speed car chase that ended
with Stockley firing several shots, hitting Smith. In 2016, the state of
Missouri released a probable cause
document outlining its case against Stockley. One line reads: “During the
pursuit, the defendant [Stockley] is heard saying ‘going to kill this motherfucker,
don’t you know it.'”
Though the incident happened
in 2011, Stockley wasn’t charged until 2016 after what prosecutors vaguely
described as “new
evidence” came to their attention. But St. Louis Circuit Judge Wilson
acquitted Stockley of first degree murder on Friday. Shortly after the
verdict was announced, in a move that likely incensed many observers,
Stockley spoke publicly to the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch about the case, saying, “I did not murder Anthony
Lamar Smith.” Then he added, somewhat paradoxically “It feels like a
burden has been lifted, but the burden of having to kill someone never really
lifts.”
What transpired in St Louis
after the verdict is a scene that’s become all too familiar in cities across
the country.
Protesters, mostly black, took
to the streets to voice their outrage at yet another acquittal of a police
officer charged with murdering a black citizen. In total, more than 80
people were arrested during the protests, with police officers at one
point mocking the protesters by chanting, “Whose
streets? Our streets!” while making those arrests.
Stockley’s acquittal may have
been the match that lit the fuse in St. Louis, but the protests were the
result of anger at a history of indignities suffered by black communities over
generations. In 2014, after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by
ex-officer Darren Wilson in neighboring Ferguson and that city exploded in
righteous anger, the U.S. Department
of Justice tallied the Ferguson police department’s interactions with the
local, majority black community over several years. One finding was that
Ferguson generated the bulk of its revenue
from municipal fines that unfairly targeted black residents.
But the most profound
indignity of all has been the pace at which black people die at the hands of
the police, and how seldom anyone is held accountable for those deaths.
An investigation by the Guardian
in 2015 found that young black men are nine times more likely to be killed
by police than Americans of other races. But the Guardian also noted that
convictions in such cases are rare.
Kristen Clarke, president and
executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, made
the case to CNN
earlier in 2017 that institutional bias runs incredibly deep in the criminal
justice system. “At the end of day, officers in their badge and uniform enjoy
the benefit of the doubt,” Clarke said. “But none of that should distract us
from the root cause of the crisis we face … [which is] the racial bias that
infects many aspects of policing in our country.”
Racial bias can be seen in
some of the other cases where officers have been charged in relation to the
deaths of unarmed black men and acquitted in 2017:
Year of incident: 2011
Officer:
Jason Stokley
Victim: Anthony Lamar Smith,
age 24, was shot after a high-speed
chase in St. Louis.
Year of incident: 2015
Officer: Raymond Tensing
Victim: Sam DuBose, age
43, was shot and killed while driving
on the University of Cincinnati campus.
Year of incident: 2016
Officer: Betty Shelby
Victim: Terrance Crutcher, 40, was
shot and killed
after his vehicle stalled in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Year of incident: 2016
Officer: Jeronomi Yanez
Victim: Philando
Castile, age 32, was shot and killed during a traffic stop in
Minnesota. Video of his death went viral.
The outrage on display in St.
Louis did not start—or end—with the acquittal of Stockley. St. Louis
police chief Lawrence O’Toole said in a news conference on Monday that law
enforcement had regained control. “The city of St. Louis is safe and the police
owned tonight,” O’Toole said of the Sunday night protests. He said later:
“We’re in control. This is our city, and we’re going to protect it.”
Jamilah King is a race and
justice reporter at Mother Jones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7DFq23-jvc
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