Okay so, here’s the thing about Black Lives Matter (BLM): When it comes to black people and the police, there is no question that the police act as judge, jury, and executioner. They kill with impunity. There is no accountability or redress. This is how it’s been historically: The entire justice system appears to act in collusion with this, and structural racism (also known as white supremacy) has facilitated the ease of these attacks on a segment of the population that is a numerical minority. That is BLM’s beef with law enforcement in a tiny nutshell.
Now let’s step outside of that nutshell for a moment. When you step outside of that lens, here is what you see: The police act as judge, jury and executioner with the population at large. They kill with impunity. There is no accountability. And the entire justice system appears to act in collusion with this. This horrible case out of Brunswick, Georgia, appears to bear this out.
And when I say horrible, I mean horror-bull.
Caroline Small led Glynn County police and Georgia state troopers on a slow speed, four-mile chase in June 2010. Small had been a drug addict for several years and had been through rehab several times, most recently two days before this incident. Police responded to a call of someone using drugs in a hotel parking lot. Upon finding Small in the parking lot they asked to speak with her but she slowly drove off, which initiated the police chase.
After about 20 minutes of driving erratically though neighborhoods and commercial districts, a Georgia trooper was able to ram the side and rear of Small’s car and spin her around. The car spun and landed with its rear about two to three feet away from a telephone pole, with the trooper’s vehicle blocking its passenger side. A Glynn County police car blocked the car from the front. Officers left their cars, yelling for Small to get out of the car, which she never did. Small put the car in reverse twice and drove forward twice, but it was clearly a knee-jerk reaction—due to the proximity of both police vehicles and the telephone pole, there was no way she was going to be able to flee in her car which, by the way, had three punctured tires. The second time her car moved forward it did not get a chance to touch the police car in front of it: The officers opened fire, hitting the windshield eight times.
When watching the video you can’t see Small being struck twice in the face and head due to the glare in the windshield, but you really don’t have to guess at what has happened. The other thing you can’t see is Georgia State Trooper 1st Class Jonathan Malone, who says in his report that he leapt to remove Small from the car. What it does show is an officer attempting to make his way to the car on the passenger side first, then on the driver’s side, but because there is a small fence directly behind the telephone pole directly behind Small’s car, he has to climb over it to get to Small’s driver side. He appears to make that effort, then quickly goes back toward his right. Malone said he retreated because he saw his fellow officer’s guns pointed in his direction.
Two Glynn County police officers, Sgt. Robert C. Sasser and Officer Michael T. Simpson, fired their weapons at Small, they say, because they feared for their lives. That’s what they all say. Small’s vehicle was a dangerous weapon, they argue, and they feared that she was attempting to run them over. Okay.
You can see a 49-second clip of the police car dash cam video here.
It’s usually the next steps after an officer-involved shooting that clearly reveal the playbook for how police officers are shielded from accountability. Those next steps include the officers getting their stories straight, writing a report about what happened, and being interviewed by investigators to tell their story, their analysis, of what happened.
After this it becomes the prosecution’s turn to do its job. In terms of prosecutorial criminality, the case of Caroline Small is one of the absolute worst—if not the worst—case in decades.
It is so bad, I can’t even summarize it for Daily Kos readers. I can’t do it. I’ve been trying to do it all day and I just can’t. You simply have to read it for yourself here, and here.
It’s that bad.
I’m not even going to give you a hint. I mean … it’s that bad.
“This was a murder and it was covered up,” says one of the prosecutors who had inside knowledge of the goings on. Yep. Pretty much.
Needless to say, the two officers who fired their guns into Caroline Small’s windshield on that day in June 2010 were not indicted. Earlier this year a federal judge affirmed that the officers did not violate Small’s civil rights. A wrongful death lawsuit by Small’s family was also later tossed out. Fortunately, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) in conjunction with WSB-Channel 2 News decided to dig deeper as part of its investigative series on police shootings in Georgia. Had all of this information been made available to the public back in 2010, these officers, the chief of police and the district attorney herself would probably be chillin’ in a prison cell right about now.
Probably, that is, unless there’s a crooked judge or two running around out there.