| I am not Trayvon Martin - but are you George Zimmerman? |
[Apr. 15th, 2012|01:25 am] |
While I feel that the hearts of everyone who has ever said, "I am Trayvon Martin", are in the right place - something in my gut tells me that the real issue here has been missed due to a racial tension mishandling by a third party. I'll get to the last part in a moment. But first - I am a dad, just like the father who waited for his son to come home. It agonizes me to think about that, what it means to wake up and your teenager never came home, and you wait and worry until the police cars show up. But even as I feel a twinge of pain reading those stories, I look at my son and never think that he is like Trayvon. My boy is lily white, and he's going to be the son of a lawyer, and I like to hope that someday we will live in a decent neighborhood. So all the points - legitimate points in many cases - made about being targeted due to skin color, they just aren't going to apply to my boy.
But the Martin-Zimmerman case bothers me so much, because my son could still end up dead in this exact situation. I know that race jumped in to this, and I'll get to that, but I don't think this is about a black kid in America, wearing a hoodie. I don't think this is about suspicion, about profiling, it's not really about any distinguishing feature of Trayvon, except maybe his age. This is barely about that poor kid, dying in the street of his (nearly) own neighborhood. His dad's fiance's neighborhood, and a place he had every right to be. It's terrible that he died, but I'm far more disturbed at the reaction surrounding the guy with the gun.
George Zimmerman is a guy who feels the need to play Cop. He needs - Needs - to strap on a gun, patrol his neighborhood and harrass anyone who looks like the don't belong there. He likes to confront these loitering suspicious people, knowing that he's got his big bad gun, and they will be intimidated by him. He calls the police all the fucking time, so he can be involved with law enforcement - practically a law enforcer himself. How low must your self esteem be to have to do this? This is his Hobby, it's what he does for fun, and it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to picture him confronting crummy looking punk teenagers more often than not. I bet this gives him a real thrill, to walk up to some punk teen, probably taller than he is, maybe in much better physical shape, and scare that kid with this gun and authority. Just like a cop.
George lives in an elaborate fantasy world where he can pretend to be a neighborhood badass. Something is deeply wrong with George, and while it may be some cliche'd armchair psychology here, but how small must your penis be for this to be the only way you can feel good about yourself? Why isn't George a Cop? Police are hiring all the damn time, why isn't George in the academy? I'm thinking because the cops have some standards, and one hopes that they are looking for people who want to defend the law, not people who are compensating for something. Police have physical standards, and they have psych standards, and I don't think George would have made the cut - just speculating. Also, when cops kill someone, there is a protocol, there are psych evals, there is an inquiry, and the guys who pull the guns have been vetted. It's not perfect, there are many bad cops out there, but a flawed system for putting the right mind and right heart behind the badge, is a lot better than no system. These cops - the ones in LA who shot that kid on the freeway - this is also a really tragic death of a kid who's life should have gone another way, but they followed the rules they were given. And they have rules. That's why they are cops and that's why they are the ones who decide when to shoot.
To put this in terms of the law, and I don't know much about Florida law, but Casey Anthony walked, so any goddamned thing could happen in those "courts" - here's how it works in a Model Penal Code state, like Texas. Self Defense is a Justification (as opposed to Excuse), and it is available so long as you meet some established criteria. A lot of attention has been focused on the "Stand your Ground" laws, which extend the so-called "Castle Doctrine" to where ever you are standing. Lemme sum up: in General, you have a duty to retreat from danger, unless you are in your home, including the immediate surroundings (definitely porch, maybe yard, depends on state). "Stand your ground" means that when confronted with life-threatening danger, you no longer have a legal duty to retreat. This, however, is only one small part of the Justification defense, and it has really nothing to do with this crime. The big one, the major factor in Self Defense, is what they call "Clean Hands". This means that you cannot have done anything to provoke or seek out a dangerous situation. Let's say that again, in it's own paragraph, because it's a big deal.
If you do anything to provoke, create, or seek out Trouble, then your hands are not clean. You do not get to call self defense on a deadly situation you played any part in the creation of. Why? Because if you can claim self defense any time you are threatened, and you happen to be a guy with a really small and useless penis, and you are deeply racist, you might buy a big fucking gun, go to a place where people you hate are hanging around, and maybe you feel really tough with your gun (like having two dicks), and see if those people you hate come after you. If you can call self defense for a situation you helped create - well hell, you could do this every Saturday Night. You and all your buddies. It could be like some kind of 18th century hunting club.
So you must have clean hands. You remember Bernie Getz, the last nationwide conversation about self defense? As scary as the details of that was, he had - at least at the beginning - clean hands. He was just sitting on a subway train. Shooting the last guy after he was already down - Bernhard's 5th shot? That can be debated for a long time whether it was self preservation or hatred that pulled the trigger. Only Bernie knows. But here's where my understanding of the law is, right now: when you put on your gun, get out of your car, and chase down the "bad guy", you don't have clean hands. The Police have legal permission to do that, you don't. Yes, citizens can arrest - but under limited circumstances when they have witnessed a crime. Citizens cannot arrest or interrogate a suspicion, even a neighborhood watch captain. If you go looking for trouble, and you find it, you don't get to use a Justification.
This whole case worries me, because I see a lot of guys out there who want to play put on their guns and feel that rush of scaring other people, particularly teenagers who dress like punks and have no respect for good hard working adults who begrudgingly pay their taxes. I see a lot of guys who would like to be George Zimmerman, and strut around their little community, striking fear into the hearts of the unarmed. Guys without any training, without any psych evaluator, without experienced mentors, playing cop sounds really fucking dangerous, especially thinking about my boy - who will undoubtedly dress like a punk and pay very little respect to hard working adults. And maybe if he's had a really bad day and he's sick of fat fucks like George harassing him, he might just throw that wannabe hero down and slap is face around. If George's description is true, that Trayvon managed to "get the jump on him" plays more to what an incompetent "cop" George was. Real cops don't get ninja-tackled like that, and for a very good reason - they aren't looking to get an intimidation boner. They are trying to keep people alive.
I am scared out of my mind that George gets off, walks away, and it's a big green light to every guy with a gun to start patrolling his streets for punk kids. And while I don't think George was thinking "black people" when he went looking for this trouble, I know a lot of heavily armed racist motherfuckers in Texas who are thinking that this would be a green light to thin out the herd of undesirables. Like it or not, this decision at the trial level is going to send a clear message, one way or the other. That either citizen patrol (read: random dude with a gun) has the authority of trained police, or we throw them in jail for being a stupid, irresponsible fantasist. I go with "B", and that's what the Model Penal Code reads. But Texas couldn't even get Joe Horn an indictment to even get him in to trial court, so who knows.
Yes, I see a lot of "Trayvon Martin's" out there. I also see a lot of George Zimmerman's out there, too. Which one is more likely to shoot my son?
...
The race thing: I believe that this became so racially charged when the cops - really the third party to this whole thing - decided not to charge George with a flagrant act of stupidity resulting in the death of another (this is called everything from Manslaughter to Negligent Homicide; all felonies). Letting him go, and then citing a law which really didn't apply to the situation inflamed all this passion, especially considering the police force didn't have a great reputation regarding racial relations to begin with.
So they charge him, then they offer him a plea down to aggravated assault, and he gets a suspended sentence, no jail time and 3 years probation. Parents and the local community would be a little pissed, but it wouldn't leave the regional news. And in the end, they wouldn't have to punish George that harshly, but they would do the right thing, and brand George as a Felon for the rest of his life. George could live without the scrutiny of trial, without prison, but he would know that he isn't a hero. And he would never be allowed to carry a gun ever again.
Just my thoughts, but they've been brewing for two weeks, and I wanted to write them down, since I'm kinda awake tonight, and everyone else is asleep.
- T. |
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