...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Thursday, July 24, 2003
      ( 8:49 AM )
 
Turning Eyes Toward Home

I haven't blogged much lately about local issues here in Oregon, and something I watched on tv on Tuesday prompted me to do so again this week. I was home Tuesday, recovering from my travel before going back to work. One advantage of being at home during the day (besides getting to play with your kid all day long) is that you can see the strange and wonderful world of public access on tv. The shows are unannounced and so it's always a surprise what you might get. Sometimes you get Democracy Now, sometimes you get Tootle and his dog boy Ruff.

On Tuesday, one of the local stations was replaying the taping of a community forum that took place in my neighborhood about 3 weeks ago. It was called so that the community could ask questions and hear (hopefully) answers from the Mayor, public officials and the police about what really happened to Kendra James. As a quick recap, on May 5 the cops pulled over a car that ran a stop sign at about 2am in the morning. They pulled the driver out of the car to search him. The cops' story goes as follows: when the driver, a young man, was pulled out of the car, Kendra James, a 20 year old mother of 2, jumped into the front seat, tried to pull away, was threatening the life of Officer Scott McCallister, and so he shot her. Dead. In defense of his own life.

But as I watched the July 1 community forum, facts came to light that I have never seen reprinted in the press. I was astounded as I watched Mayor Katz (who, thank God has decided not to run for another term next year), Chief of Police Kroeker along with the District Attorney and other officials hem and haw and not truly answer any questions put to them by the community. Community leaders, on the other hand, had quite a few pointed questions, based on their investigation into all the documents produced from the incident. So now I come to the main crux of my indignation about this case. Some of the unanswered questions that still remain:

-- Why was there so much reporting and claims by the police to smear the victim's name saying that Ms. James was the owner of some crack that was found under the driver's seat when the reality is that it was a rented car and had no connection with Ms. James except that she was a passenger?

-- Why were there abrasions, cuts, bruises on her face and a broken tooth noted on Ms. James' autopsy? How shocking that no where in the police report is there mention of hitting her.

-- Why were Officer McCallister and the other cops on the scene able to go to Applebees after the incident, sit down have dinner and get their stories straight about what happened before they were questioned or had to write incident reports?

-- Why was Ms. James shot in the abdomen and then pulled out of the car and laid on the pavement dying for an hour before an ambulance was called?

-- How can the police claim that their tazers and pepper spray were all non-functional and so then had to use deadly force? Are the police this badly equipped?

-- Why in the Oregon police academy are cops trained to use deadly force as an early option in a routine traffic stop?

-- Why does it take almost 1,000 more hours to be licensed as a barber in Oregon than it does to become a police officer?

-- Why, if the police claim that all Officer McCallister did was make a terrible mistake, was he not fired for killing someone? No matter that he may not be criminally liable for her killing, he really f*&!ed up and should have been let go. The rest of us get fired for far less devastating offenses.

-- Why, if the police are so intent on having "community policing" in my neighborhood, do they keep allowing the same "bad apples" -- known white officers who belligerantly harass citizens of my community-- to continue working in my neighborhood?

-- Why, at a community forum where people are given the opportunity to ask questions of the police and city officials were there so many people who stood up to say that their husbands, sons, wives, daughters, cousins and neighbors had been constantly harassed, roughed-up and even beaten in the last couple of years?

Since that July 1 forum, there has been nary a word of follow up. It's as if the government and police said, well we faced the hoards and now it's over. And yet, nothing has changed. There has been no move to create a community/citizen based review board of police actions, there has been no move to clarify the questions asked at the forum about what happened to Kendra James. There has been no reform of police training. What is going on here? In a state where no more than 10% of the population is minority (and that's ALL minorities - the African-American population is closer to 2% (according to the 2000 census), 34% of police shootings and reported police aggression are against people of color.

Isn't it time for a change? Just like it is our responsibility as American citizens to get rid of an administration that lies in order to go to war and cheats the people in order to give perks to its corporate sponsors, as citizens of our states and cities, we are responsible to vote out of office the local authorities that aren't doing the job they should, and to keep the pressure on our policing and law enforcement agencies to act within the standards of decency, non-discrimination and proper respect for the people they have enlisted to protect. The question that is going to haunt my neighborhood for a very long time is this: Did Kendra James really have to die that night?

| -- permanent link