go to the videotape

After hanging my show Monday afternoon I felt like I should celebrate so I went out to this little Italian restaurant a block or two from where I live.  I was there with one of my neighbors who is a retired cop.  Well you don't often get to talk to cops so I took advantage of the opportunity.  I've known this guy a few years and I like him.  He is a former seminarian, and seems fairly liberal.  I had him pegged as a guy who just wants to do good.  

I brought up the subject of Catanzara, because this has long been a piece of the puzzle that I didn't know what to do with.  How could over 50 percent of cops vote to make this guy the head of their union?  He didn't like Catanzara at all, didn't much care for the forces that put him in power, but didn't have much of an answer for why the majority of cops voted for him.  

The subject of Laquan McDonald came up, and he said that the cop, Jason Van Dyke, was defending himself and was justified because McDonald was lunging at him while Van Dyke was pinned against his car.  That went against everything I had seen or heard, but I have to admit that I had not looked at it all that closely, so I just acknowledged what he said without agreeing with it and ate the rest of my pizza and drank the rest of my beer and we parted on good terms.

The next day I googled for the video, maybe I had missed something.  It's short and it's at night, but there it is, McDonald lurching with knife in his hand, a line of cops maybe thirty feet from him, far from lunging range and he not lunging at all, and suddenly shots ring our from the left and he crumples and dies.  As plain as the nose on your face.  I invite my Beaglestonian brothers to google for it and tell me what they think.

Not releasing that video in a timely manner is the reason that Rahm is not the mayor today.  The story at the time was that Rahm was covering up for a bad deed by the cops that would tarnish his reputation.  But the story the ex-cop believed was that the video was held back because it showed that the cop was innocent and Rahm was holding it back to tarnish the cop.  See if the cop is innocent and the video shows it that turns everything around. 

Before I finished my beer and pizza, I asked the ex-cop if he knew of any cases where the cops were in the wrong about a shooting, and he had to think awhile and then came up with some anecdote from his days as a cop that didn't have much to do with anything.

How can it be that cops are always in the right?  It just doesn't sound reasonable, it is against the laws of statistics.

But if it's true that cops are immaculate, then there is no reason to have police review boards, to allow people to file complaints against the cops, to keep records of cops' behavior.  There is no reason to worry about police brutality because it never happens.  The police should just keep on doing what they are doing and everybody else should just keep their nose out of police business and hand over that paycheck without asking any questions.

It kind of goes back to that Objective Reality thing that I harp on.  If we both agree that I have a tree in my backyard then we can discuss whether it is a pretty tree or an ugly tree.  But if we can't agree that there is a tree at all then we have nothing to talk about.