What Happened in Fruitvale?

I've waited several days before posting on this because I not only wanted to make sure I heard the aftermath, but because I wanted to wait to see the video for myself before making any judgments. And now that I have, I can say that without a doubt it's one of the most horrifying live local events I've ever seen captured on video by the general public.

On New Year's Eve, an Oakland man named Oscar Grant was taken off a BART train for an alleged altercation. Apparently, during his arrest, he attempted to stand up. He was then put on the ground and pat down. Whatever the man did, that should have been the end of it, with the rest coming in the form of a ticket or a filed charge. But, having already subdued Grant, and with another officer on top of him, a BART police officer pulled his gun and shot Grant in the back, killing him.

The worst part about the video is that you can clearly hear everyone on the train calling for his release and complaining about the treatment, and the act doesn't appear to have been done in haste. In fact, it appears to be quite deliberate as the cop unholsters his weapon, stands up and THEN fires.

It's an unfortunate fact that police brutality is nothing new, and even more unfortunate that there's not a whole lot we can do about it. When you start giving people guns and telling them to uphold the law and "maintain" the peace, it creates a God complex where they'll feel that any action is justified if it's done to maintain the peace, even if that action is violent. Furthermore, a case like Rodney King that sparked the LA Riots only emboldens police to believe that if they can make some sort of connection between their violence and the line of duty, they will be exonerated for their behavior.

But we can't just assume that all people hurt by the police are victims of brutality. To me, brutality has to be based on an actual desire to inflict pain and harm, not just do it in the course of what you need to do as an officer. If we remove for a minute the argument that there was some sort of intent in any of this, the fact is that police are just human beings, and in the heat of the moment, especially a potentially dangerous one that requires police intervention, adrenaline kicks in and mistakes can be made. When the violence happens in these cases, I can't view it as only brutality, because sometimes criminals or people getting arrested do need to be physically subdued, sometimes in a way that causes bodily harm to them. In those cases, it's not always the police officer's fault, but we have trained them to be police in the hopes that they will be able to keep their cool to a greater degree than your average citizen. Even still, they are constantly put in dangerous positions in the interest of keeping the majority of people safe.

Here we have three men on the ground handcuffed with 4-6 armed police officers around them. To think that there is any reason, explanation or excuse for a police officer to draw a weapon and shoot someone being held on the ground by another cop is insane. So I believe that regardless of what happened on the platform in Fruitvale, whether intentional homicide or panic induced manslaughter, it was obviously excessive force and brutality. There was not another officer in the video who also had their weapon drawn.

People have tried to argue that the cop was going for his taser. I'm having trouble believing that someone trained as long as police officers are trained for wouldn't know the difference between his taser and his hand gun. That being said, I can't completely rule it out as I asked a police officer I knew about the difference between the two and the answer I got was, "depends on which taser you have, but the M26 is shaped exactly like a gun and the X26 is a bit shorter handled." The officer did say that guns are clearly heavier, but with adrenaline, things seem easier and lighter anyways, so the weight might not have mattered if the handle was the same. So, there is the possibility that this cop thought in the heat of the moment that he was drawing his taser. But what I'd like to know is why he was drawing a weapon of any kind at all. The victim is on the ground, handcuffed and has been patted down, with another cop holding him there. Why is he unholstering anything, gun or taser?

Regardless of what comes out in the news or in any subsequent trial, I doubt we'll ever fully know or understand what his thoughts were in the seconds before he needlessly killed Oscar Grant.

Either way, the advent of camera phones and the proliferation of digital cameras that take videos surely foreshadow that this will not be the last time an incident like this is heavily publicized, and begins to beg the question of how we can make sure that something like this doesn't happen again. I've embedded the video of the shooting below, just know before you view it that it is disturbing.