Thursday, October 10, 2013

POLICE SHOOTING IN NATION’S CAPITOL RAISES SERIOUS QUESTIONS

Why the volley of shots fired at a fleeing woman driver? Was she killed after having come to a stop? Did the unarmed woman get shot after she got out of her car?

I always try to defend cops whenever I believe they are wrongly accused, but this deadly shooting may not be defensible. But Joan Shore, a Vassar College graduate who has lived most of her life in Europe, went too ballistic with the following post. But then, she probably presented the European viewpoint on this shooting.

MURDERING A MOTHER
By Joan Z. Shore

politicalmavens.com
October 9, 2013

It used to be that wild drivers were pursued by the police, caught up with, pulled over to the curb, and given a breathalyzer and a stiff fine.

Not anymore. And certainly not in our nation’s capital.

The frantic pursuit of a (possibly) manic woman — alone at the wheel with her infant daughter — through the streets of Washington, D.C., is the most bizarre murder story of all those we have witnessed in the past two and a half years.

Aurora, Colorado; Sandy Hook; Trayvon Martin; the Boston Marathon; the Navy Yard — each of those killings had a scenario that shocked the nation. But the murder of Miriam Carey takes us into another dimension entirely. Because here the killers were our very own police force, shooting a woman in cold blood who was unarmed and guilty of nothing but wild driving.

The New York Times described the final moments before Ms. Carey was killed:

__Ms. Carey managed to get out of the car, and was shot by several officers. According to a law enforcement official, she was not armed, and it was not known whether she presented an immediate danger.

So we are now living in a nation where the police can shoot first and ask questions later. Where one is assumed guilty until proven innocent….and there is not much proof a corpse can offer.

We are hearing scattered stories about Miriam Carey: her postpartum depression. (But she gave birth over a year ago; postpartum depression doesn’t last that long!) Her heavy touch treating her dental patients, which caused her to lose her job. (That alone could make her depressed.) Her shaky financial situation. None of this adds up to criminal behavior.

But she was chased and killed like a criminal.

An immediate and meticulous search of her home by the FBI and other investigators turned up nothing that would incriminate her on any grounds for any misbehavior — not even a hand gun or illegal drugs.

That this senseless murder happened in the nation’s capital is shocking but irrelevant: we can now imagine it happening anywhere in America. We have given over too much of our power, our freedom, our Constitutional rights to those who police us and those who govern us. We are on the path to subjugation, persecution and tyranny.

Where is our anger and outrage? Have we lost our senses? Are we waiting for a miracle to rescue us?

1 comment:

bob walsh said...

The cops need not be perfect. They should be reasonable. Whether they were reasonable in this case is a perfectly valid question. The setting of some of her transgressions almost certainly had something to do with the police response. If that something was disproportional will no doubt be kicked around with great vigor.