Tulsa Police Officer Shoots an Unarmed Black Man with Car Trouble

I mean holy shit.  The guy has car trouble and he is clearly standing with his hands up talking to the cops.  He goes back to his car for some reason (arms still up) and they shoot him.

He’s dead.

Now, the good news is that this is being treated like a criminal investigation because the officers murdered someone.  The bad news is the inevitable backlash that will come as people say things like “well, he shouldn’t have been walking back towards the car” or “I wasn’t there so even though there is video, there is no way for me to really understand happened” or, of course “I’m going to withhold judgement until we have all the facts.”

We do have all the facts.  He was unarmed. He had car trouble.  He was black.

And now he’s dead.

Gene Wilder is also dead. But that is where the similarities end.

Oh yeah, and people have dredged up his criminal record that does not include any capital offenses as a means to justify the fact he was sentenced to death without benefit of a judge or jury.

How many more times does this need to happen until people stop trotting out the same bullshit arguments instead of acknowledging that there is a systemic problem?

This is not about that police officer friend or relative of yours who is a great person.  They probably are.  This is about a clear problem with the training of police officers when it comes to escalation and a problem with how our justice system is set up to excuse this kind of behavior when it occurs.

It isn’t that police officers are sometimes exonerated.  It is that they are almost never charged and even when they are charged, they are almost never convicted of doing anything wrong.

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