The macro issues related to the Feb. 26 shooting of Trayvon Martin, at this point, overshadow the simple question of why he is free and where he might be. The profile of Zimmerman ins today's Orlando Sentinel doesn't so much raise some of these issues as it fills in details once they are raised. I'm going to link the profile, then continue below the fold.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/...
The most basic issue, to me, is how Zimmerman managed to be armed.
In 2005, George Zimmerman was twice accused of either criminal misconduct or violence.
That July, Zimmerman — 21 at the time — was at a bar near the University of Central Florida when a friend was arrested by state alcohol agents on suspicion of serving underage drinkers, according to an arrest report.
Zimmerman was talking with his friend, became profane and pushed an agent who tried to escort him away, the report said. Authorities said he was arrested after a short struggle.
Charged with resisting arrest without violence, he avoided conviction by entering a pretrial-diversion program, something common for first-time offenders.
A month later, court records show, a woman filed a petition for an injunction against Zimmerman, citing domestic violence. It's unclear what led to the petition, but Zimmerman responded by filing a petition of his own the following day.
Records show injunctions were later issued in both cases. Reached by email, the woman would not comment on her past with Zimmerman or his current situation.
He shoved a state law enforcment agent, interfering with an arrest, and an injunction was granted against him for domestic violence. The NRA gives lip service to not allowing criminals or crazy people access to guns, but it has also fought to make Florida less and less able to to provent either. There is no license and registration process. The threshold for whether a criminal can own a gun isn't a propensity for violence. It is felony status. Gov. Rick Scott is more likely to be keept from packing because of his company's Medicare fraud convictions than Zimmerman was for shoving a copy and beating up his girlfriend.
There is something seriously wrong with neighborhood watch, if that is even what it is. One of the participants in Morning Joe this morning asserted that Zimmerman wsn't a part of neighborhood watch, which I think means that the national guidelines weren't followed, and I think possibly means this group took it upon themselves to patrol and stuff rather than do it through the auspices of their neighbors or the Sanford p.d. Just guessing at that.
From the same Sentinel profile:
It's unclear how Zimmerman was employed when he encountered Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, but he took his role as a Neighborhood Watch volunteer very seriously. Police say Zimmerman had called to report suspicious people on multiple occasions, just as he did when he saw Trayvon. In the past 15 months, he made 46 calls to Sanford police, according to records.
You can stack 46 telephone calls, I suppose, to suggest a lot of things after the fact. But before the fact, it should have been clear that this guy was at the very least an accident waiting to happen. I simiply don't believe the Sanford P.D. wasn't aware of whether he or any of his collegues were packing on their patrols, and if they knew, then it was criminal on the PD's part not to intervene.
It was pretty well established from the tapes that Zimmerman focused on young black men, that anything they did was suspicious to him.
From the same Sentinel profile:
Another neighbor, 55-year-old Frank Taaffe, defended Zimmerman as "not a racist."
Taaffe, a marketing specialist who had been a watch captain with Zimmerman until December, said he may have been "overzealous, maybe," but "his main concern is the safety and welfare of the community."
For someone to say this after the "f*
*ng c*n" quote surfaced, tells me as much about Taaffe as it does about Zimmerman. This was a vigilante group, shouldn't have been armed, definitely wasn't oeprating below the Sanford P.D. radar.
The question of arresting Zimmerman, at this point, isn't about arresting Zimmerman. it is about the investigating officers and their superiors. they let him go. Did they even confiscate his gun? That isn't clear. They didn't give him a drug or alcohol test. They didn't question his mental capacity. The accepted a "stand your grand" defense on its face, and I have to wonder at this point this is because he was a part of them - not on their orders certainly, but someone they were inclined to side with.
Sanford is going to be overrun pretty quickly, and its police department is going to be the subject and not the neutral protectors of law and order for demonstrations that involve much more anger than OWS or any of the deadly force controversies of the lasat 30 eyars. Law enforcement there needs to be federalized, and now. The department needs to be taken over. Its officers - I would say at this point every one of them - need to be moved out of the department.
This state - I've lived here for much of the last 22 years - has a problem relating to police deadly force and the justice system's unwillingness to do anything about it. This problem has been allowed to fester, and the festering has no spread - thanks go laws such as "Stand Your Ground," thanks to the unwillingness of prosecutors to challenge the officers they rely on in building cases, thanks to juries who are unwilling to hold officers criminally liable for what is perceived as doing their jobs - to a loser with no official status doing what he believes police are allowed to do. Something has got to change this. Even 20 years ago, this was so pressing a problem that it shoujld have been addressed. To not do so now will escalate incidents like this.