By Carl M. Cannon
One of the
catalysts for the rage and rioting in Ferguson, Mo., was the sight of that poor
teenager’s body lying face down in the street hour after hour.
At 12:02 p.m.
August 9, one of their officers shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown six
times. By 12:05 p.m., a responding paramedic pronounced him dead. Yet his body
was still there in the summer sun at 4 p.m., the sheet not quite long enough to
cover his 6-foot-3-inch frame. Among the outraged onlookers in the Canfield
Green apartment complex was his mother, distraught, and barricaded from her
son’s body by police.
At least they
checked the pulse of the young man to make sure he was dead, which is more than
Fairfax County, Va., police did a year earlier when they gunned down John B.
Geer in the doorway of his own home. Gravely wounded by the bullet fired into
his chest, Geer closed the door as he collapsed and lay there alone, bleeding
to death as the cops assembled their ubiquitous SWAT gear and military-style
toys.
By the time these
faint-hearted officers battered down the door with an armored tank, Geer was
dead. His loved ones were present at the scene, too, including his father and
his daughters. One of them, 13-year-old Morgan, yelled at the officers, “Don’t
you hurt my daddy!”
The Ferguson
shooting was viewed through a racially tinged prism, which is understandable in
a predominately black town with a nearly all-white police force and where a
white district attorney refuses to prosecute police for even the most egregious
cases.
It was also
understandable, after many nights of civil unrest, that President Obama would
dispatch U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson, and that the Justice
Department would launch an investigation into possible civil rights violations
in Brown’s shooting.
But the nagging
nightmare is that the Justice Department has a much bigger problem on its hands
than the occasional trigger-happy racist cop. John Geer was not black. He was a
46-year-old employed white homeowner with no criminal record. Yet more than a
year later, Virginia authorities won’t even tell his family the status of their
investigation—or if there is one.
This is not an
isolated case, but how many are out there no one knows. A federal database that
can tell you how many auto thefts were committed two years ago in San Clemente,
Calif. (61), how many unprovoked shark attacks took place in Florida last year
(23), and how many law enforcement officers were killed on duty in 2012 (48)
does not include the number of annual fatal police shootings in this country.
Attempts at
ferreting out these numbers have been undertaken, usually by investigative
journalists, and the numbers are bracing. In the wake of the Ferguson case, USA
Today reported that 96 times each year—almost twice a week—white police
officers have killed a black person. That estimate came from teasing out FBI
data from 2005-2012. It is probably an undercount.
Three years ago,
the Las Vegas Review-Journal determined that police officers in Clark County,
Nev., shot 382 people over the previous 20-year period, 144 of them fatally.
That’s one county. Former FBI agent Jim
Fisher, now an author of crime books, searched the Internet every day in 2011
for police shootings, eventually documenting 1,146 of them, 607 resulting in
death.
Nor are there
figures showing how many times police officers have been charged criminally in
these cases. All available evidence shows that they are rarely held to account.
In St. Louis County, where a grand jury is looking into the Michael Brown
shooting, District Attorney Robert McCulloch has never prosecuted any police
officer for a shooting.
In one of them,
two undercover narcotics officers on stakeout at a Jack in the Box fired 21
shots into a car they were watching, killing Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley.
The cops said the two men tried to avoid arrest by driving their car toward
them. A federal investigation revealed that the men were unarmed and their car
was not moving when officers opened fire. That case also prompted
demonstrations in St. Louis. The DA’s response: “These guys were bums.”
Another flash
point in Ferguson was the refusal of police to name Michael Brown’s shooter for
six days. This kind of high-handedness is not atypical, either, and Eric Holder’s
Justice Department aids and abets it.
More than a year
later, John Geer’s family still doesn’t know the name of the officer who killed
him. The last day of Geer’s life was Aug. 29, 2013. His longtime partner Maura
Harrington had moved out with their two girls and the breakup seemed amicable
until that day. Geer became upset, started drinking, and tossed some of
Harrington’s belongings into the front yard. She dialed 911, hoping Fairfax
County police officers would calm him down. Instead, they killed him.
The Fairfax Police
Department will not discuss the shooting. County officials refuse comment
except to say that Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh, who also
has a track record of not prosecuting police officers, has an unspecified conflict
of interest and sent the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Alexandria. That
is a division of the Justice Department, but U.S. Attorney Dana J. Boente won’t
even acknowledge the existence of an investigation.
Tired of waiting,
Geer’s family recently filed a lawsuit. They asked for $12 million in damages,
but what they really want is answers—and they are not alone.
Carl M. Cannon is
the Washington Bureau Chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter
@CarlCannon.
