In response to the family’s action, city lawyers have placed the blame for Kawaski Trawick’s death squarely on Kawaski Trawick. As they put it in a filing last fall: “Plaintiff(s)’ culpable conduct caused or contributed, in whole or in part, to his/her/their injuries and or damages.”But a suit can only do so much. If there’s a settlement or a judgment, it’s likely the city and its taxpayers, not the officers or the NYPD, that will pay.
Police violence is directed against working people and youth of all racial and ethnic backgrounds
- Betty Francois, 91, died on January 11, two days after she was shot in her Victorville, California home by a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy. Police claim that Francois, who was legally blind and deaf, pointed a shotgun at the deputies after they gave commands for her to drop the weapon, giving them no option but to shoot the elderly woman. Francois had called the police to her home in fear that there had been an intruder and was seeking their help.
- A candlelight vigil and protest were held in Syracuse, New York on March 11 for 17-year-old Judson Albahm, who had been killed by police a week earlier near his home in the suburb of Dewitt. Four officers from three different departments opened fire on Albahm. According to the police account, the teenager repeatedly pointed a black handgun that fired metal BBs at them and refused orders to drop it after an extended foot chase, prompting them to open fire.
Albahm had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and Oppositional Defiant Disorder as a child, and was well known to the Dewitt Police Department, since his family often called the police for help when he was in distress or suffering a mental health breakdown. He was experiencing such an episode when he was killed by police. - Anne Arundel County police officers killed 79-year-old Leonard John Popa at his home in Pasadena, Maryland, on March 18. Police were called to the home for a welfare check by a member of a medical rehabilitation facility after Popa made suicidal statements to the medical worker over the phone. Police entered Popa’s home through an unlocked door and found him sitting in bed with a gun in between the mattresses. The police claim that efforts were made to “deescalate” the situation, but the officer “feared his life was in immediate danger” after Popa raised the gun, prompting him to open fire, killing the elderly man in his bed.
In each of these killings, the victim was white. Each of these tragic deaths has gone unreported in the national media, which has not challenged the police account of events. There has been no questioning of the claims by police that they feared for their lives and that it was necessary to kill in self-defense. No attention has been given to why such killings happen with regularity and how the events could have been handled differently.
As of April 14, there have been at least 265 police killings in 2021 across the United States. The police continue to kill at an unrelenting rate of three people per day, a bloody number that has held steady for years, despite popular protests and outrage over one killing after another.
The trial of former Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, for the murder of George Floyd, a black man, which is currently in jury deliberation, provides an opportunity to examine the phenomenon of police violence in the United States. The gruesome forensic review of Chauvin’s cold-blooded murder, livestreamed online, has focused the attention of millions in the US and around the world on the issue.
While the mainstream media and the Democratic Party proclaim that the country is experiencing a “national reckoning” with race and policing, they present the unabated reign of terror by police as a solely racial issue, ignoring its impact on people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, during a monologue Friday night, declared that police reform would happen only when “white people’s kids start getting killed.” As the lazy and ignorant news anchor would know if he bothered to do any research, scores of “white people’s kids” are shot by police every year. Google the name Mykel Dexter Jenkins, a white man shot by police in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on March 19 at the age of 29, and one will read heartbreaking messages posted by family and friends on the legacy page established after his death:
“To my loving Son! Love you and will always keep you in my heart! Love you! From Mom.”
“Continue to shine down on us brother.”
“Mykel Jenkins brought so many gifts to our life. We will never forget him! He was always so happy and full of life. He could make anyone laugh!”
“You were one true friend Mykel and I’ll never forget you! I love you and R.I.P. till we meet again. This isn’t goodbye only see you later!!!”
“This tree of life is for you sweet brother. May it grow so big for you to climb it to the very top to watch over the ones who loved you dearly.”
Whether the victim is named George Floyd or Mykel Jenkins, whether the skin color of the victim is light or dark, wanton police violence leaves profound grief in its wake.
But this is not the way the story of police killings is presented in the national media.
On Saturday, the New York Times, which has been at the forefront of the systematic campaign to falsify history through a racialist prism, published an analysis of the continued epidemic of police violence, co-authored by John Eligon, the paper’s national race correspondent. The article focuses on black and Hispanic victims, only alluding to the fact that the largest number of those killed by police are white. A casual reader of the Times’s coverage of police violence will come away with the impression that all of those killed by police are members of racial minorities.
The deliberate silence of the national media and the Democratic Party on the killing of white workers and youth implies that these killings are legitimate, and there is no reason anyone should take notice. In presenting police violence as a racial issue, of whites against blacks, the media aims to divide the working class and cover up the socioeconomic background of those who are being killed and the social processes that led to their deaths.
Data collected by the Washington Post records 6,214 police killings in the period between January 2, 2015 and April 14, 2021. The victims are overwhelmingly male (95 percent) and predominately white (46 percent). Blacks make up the second largest group (24 percent), followed by Hispanics (17 percent), Asians (1.6 percent), Native Americans (1.4 percent) and all others (0.7 percent). The average age of a police violence victim is 37. In more than one in five cases the person who was killed was exhibiting signs of mental illness.
Most of those who have been killed, if police reports are to be believed, were brandishing a gun or a knife. But in other instances victims were holding a beer bottle, a pen, binoculars, wasp spray or a chain. At least 207 were killed while holding a toy weapon. In many cases these killings are justified as “suicide by cop.” Approximately 7 percent of victims have been gunned down while unarmed.
Racism is a factor in many police murders and accounts for the fact that blacks and Native Americans are killed at a rate disproportionate to their share of the national population. However, a previous analysis of police violence data by the World Socialist Web Site found that when the economic and social demographics of the cities and counties where people are killed by police are taken into account, the glaring racial disparities that are the focus of the media and the Democrats largely disappear.
Overwhelmingly, it is workers and young people—of every skin color, gender, sexuality and national origin—who are the victims of the police. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of the social and economic conditions in the United States.
American society is defined by immense social inequality. Just 664 billionaires control $4.1 trillion in wealth, more than two-thirds higher than the $2.4 trillion that is held by the bottom half, approximately 165 million people. Inequality has soared during the pandemic as millions of Americans were thrown out of work or had their wages slashed, while the stock market soared thanks to the CARES Act bailout, pushing billionaire wealth to record heights. Meanwhile, millions have lined up in miles-long food lines in order to feed their families, many seeking aid for the first time.
The police, as Frederick Engels noted, are “special bodies of armed men” created to defend the capitalist system and the inequality it creates. Many officers are veterans of the last three decades of imperialist war in the Middle East, and police departments have been equipped and trained to use the weapons of war. With experience in counterinsurgency, they are conditioned to kill. The police are the first line of defense against the working class, deployed by the capitalists to police discontent in impoverished neighborhoods, suppress protests and break strikes.
Ending police violence requires putting an end to the capitalist order which the police defend. The protest against police violence and racism must be infused with a class consciousness. The killing will only end when the working class takes power for itself on the basis of a socialist program, reorganizing society to meet its needs, not those of the capitalist elite that dominates society.
What Police Impunity Looks Like: “There Was No Discipline as No Wrongdoing Was Found”
To understand why police are so rarely held accountable for killings, you should know about Kawaski Trawick, and what didn’t happen to the officer who shot him.
Whatever the jury ultimately decides about the culpability of former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd, we already know the case is an anomaly. Officers who kill civilians are rarely prosecuted, let alone convicted — many aren’t even disciplined by their departments.
To understand how police impunity works, it’s worth looking at another case, that of Kawaski Trawick.
“Why are you in my home?” Trawick asked. Less than two minutes later, he lay dying on the floor. A few months ago, I examined what happened in those 112 seconds. Video from a body-worn camera shows one of the officers — Black and more experienced — repeatedly trying to stop his white, less experienced partner from using force.Two years ago, Trawick was alone in his apartment in the Bronx when two New York City Police Department officers arrived in response to 911 calls about Trawick walking through the building with a serrated bread knife and a stick. Trawick, who had a history of mental health and drug issues, had locked himself out of his apartment but had gotten back in after firefighters pried open the door. When the police officers arrived minutes later, they pushed the door ajar and found Trawick, a personal trainer and dancer, standing near his stove, holding the knife and stick.
“We ain’t gonna tase him,” Officer Herbert Davis told Officer Brendan Thompson, as Trawick stood about seven feet from them. Thompson fired his Taser anyway, which (as can happen) enraged Trawick, who ran toward the officers. Davis again tried to stop his partner, this time from shooting his gun. He briefly pushed Thompson’s gun down, saying, “No, no — don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.”
Thompson fired three times, paused for a moment, and then fired a final shot. Trawick died almost instantly. You can see and hear it all for yourself, in a video we made using surveillance and body-worn camera footage. (Davis and Thompson both declined requests for comment.)
Last Wednesday marked two years since the shooting, so I checked in with the NYPD about it. The department had said late last year that it had finally finished its internal investigation and that the police commissioner — who has complete discretion over discipline, as many chiefs around the country do — would soon be deciding what to do.
Last week, the NYPD told me that Commissioner Dermot Shea had indeed ruled on the case. The officers were completely cleared. “There was no discipline as no wrongdoing was found,” the department said.
Here is the NYPD’s full statement. It noted that there was also a “tactical review” to determine “what, if anything, could have been done differently.”
Experts I spoke with pointed to a litany of poor decisions and tactics by the officers.
The officers could have tried to make a connection with Trawick, as the NYPD trains its officers to do, and at least answered his repeated questions about why they were there. They could have waited for help and “just closed the door,” as one former NYPD detective told me, since department policy is to “isolate and contain” people in crisis. They could have decided to not use force, as other officers did when they had encountered Trawick in a similar situation weeks before.
Thompson could have warned Trawick before firing his Taser, as the NYPD encourages officers to do so. After he used his Taser, Thompson could have kept it in his hand, rather than putting it on the ground and leaving himself with only his gun.
Yet as perplexing as the NYPD’s conclusion may seem, it is also the logical culmination of a series of decisions that have again and again narrowed the avenues for accountability.
The rare occasions in which officers have faced even the possibility of significant punishment have usually come after the public has seen what happened, for example, after a bystander filmed Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck. Trawick’s killing happened out of the public eye. And the NYPD worked to keep it that way.
For a year and a half, it refused to release body-worn camera footage, arguing in response to a public records request and lawsuit that doing so would “interfere” with the department’s internal investigation and would be an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
But the NYPD did offer its perspective about what happened. “It appears to be justified,” one of the NYPD’s top officials told reporters the day after the shooting.
The police’s perspective shaped the early coverage. Citing “law enforcement sources,” the New York Post reported that a “musclebound man” who was “nicknamed ‘Chaos’” had been shot “when he charged at cops twice with a stick and a knife.” (Trawick was about 5 feet, 5 inches tall, and his family told me they’ve never heard that nickname. The video shows he ran at the officers once, after he was hit by a Taser.)
The NYPD eventually decided to release footage, after the Bronx District Attorney’s Office published it as part of a report last November that laid out its decision not to pursue criminal charges against the officers. The DA’s decision, too, was no surprise: Local prosecutors, who work closely with the police, are particularly hesitant to indict officers.
The DA’s report had troubling revelations buried inside it. While the report’s highlighted timeline didn’t mention it, the report revealed more than two dozen pages in that Davis had tried to stop his partner from shooting Trawick. It also disclosed that other officers had previously decided there was no need to use force when they answered remarkably similar calls involving Trawick. On page 36, the report cited those interactions as “examples of disparate outcomes that deserve mention.”
The DA’s report did not contain the full, unedited body-worn camera footage, and the NYPD initially continued to fight a lawsuit demanding it.
The day before a December hearing in the case, the NYPD sent the footage to the complainants, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, because, after 20 months, the department’s internal review was complete. That footage, which the law firm shared with me, showed that as officers converged on the scene where Trawick lay lifeless, two of them told a sergeant that “nobody” had been hurt. “Just a perp.”
Shortly after ProPublica published a story about that, a lawyer working on the case for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest got a phone call from the city agency that investigates police misconduct against civilians. An investigator at the Civilian Complaint Review Board had a favor to ask: Could the lawyer please share the newly released footage with him? The investigator explained that the NYPD wouldn’t provide footage to the CCRB.
“I was shocked to get that call,” said the lawyer, Benjamin Reed, of Milbank LLP. “It’s disturbing that they had to come to us, after we had to fight with the NYPD for a year to get it. It’s just backwards. It’s obvious that they can’t properly oversee the NYPD if they can’t get footage.”
That is part of a long pattern of the NYPD obstructing the work of the overmatched agencies that are supposed to oversee it. In shootings and other serious incidents such as the Trawick case, the NYPD routinely refuses to give the CCRB footage and other records until the department’s internal investigation is over, which can take a year or more.
The delays can render the civilian board’s investigations effectively moot. The CCRB told me that its investigation into Trawick’s killing is still open, and that it has now received footage from the NYPD. But the police commissioner, who gets final say on punishment, has already decided there was no wrongdoing.
When I reported on the Trawick case last fall, one of the people I spoke with was Jonathan Smith, who worked on civil rights litigation at the Justice Department during the Obama administration and led the agency’s most significant investigations into police abuse. “This case is a lesson in how you don’t do one of these encounters,” he said, after reviewing the footage. “They should teach it in the academy.”
I reached back out to Smith to share the NYPD’s conclusion that there was no wrongdoing. “For them to find nothing wrong there,” he said, “it’s just stunning.”
Smith said it reminded him of another young man’s death he recently investigated for the city of Aurora, Colorado. Twenty-three-year-old Elijah McClain died after police officers twice put him in a chokehold and paramedics injected him with ketamine. The officers had stopped him after a 911 caller said McClain, who was walking down the street, “looked sketchy.”
Like Trawick, McClain wasn’t doing anything criminal. As in the Trawick case, local prosecutors decided not to indict the officers. And as in the Trawick case, an internal police investigation cleared the officers. (The independent review that Smith led concluded that the investigation had been “cursory and summary at best.”)
It’s all part of a pattern, Smith said: “Every department I’ve seen where there’s been a pattern of misconduct, you’ve also had a broken accountability system.”
There was one other call I made after learning of the NYPD’s decision. It was to Kawaski Trawick’s mother, Ellen Trawick. She had not heard about the department’s ruling.
“I just don’t understand it,” she said. “He hadn’t committed a crime. He hadn’t harmed anyone. They came into his own home and took his life for no reason. For them not to see that’s wrong, that’s just heartbreaking.”
Trawick and her family have filed a lawsuit against the city, the NYPD and the officers.
In response to the family’s action, city lawyers have placed the blame for Kawaski Trawick’s death squarely on Kawaski Trawick. As they put it in a filing last fall: “Plaintiff(s)’ culpable conduct caused or contributed, in whole or in part, to his/her/their injuries and or damages.”But a suit can only do so much. If there’s a settlement or a judgment, it’s likely the city and its taxpayers, not the officers or the NYPD, that will pay.
I asked Ellen Trawick what outcome she is hoping for in the suit. “I want the officers held accountable for their actions,” she said. “They took Kawaski’s life. But from what you’re saying there’s nothing going to be done about it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment