How many seconds would you have to die?

Outrage over the murder of Andy Lopez seems to have run its media course. And a short course it was. A few days.

Even while the gunblogosphere was spreading the news that a California sheriff’s deputy had assassinated a 13-year-old boy for walking down the street with an Airsoft gun, the story was already being dismissed. One of the more conservative gunbloggers sniffed (I paraphrase), "Too bad. But after all, he refused to obey a police command."

Carl-Bear Bussjaeger blew that notion away with his terrible, moving, "10 Seconds to Die." That poor kid, just minding his own business, was cut down before he even had a chance to comprehend what was demanded of him, what was happening to him.

Where has the outrage gone?

The Deep Thought blog I didn’t manage to write last week was going to be about the state slowly delegitimizing itself through its bizarre combination of cruelty, ineptitude, self-righteousness, and self-pity. I was going to talk about puppycides, extra-judicial capital punishment (like that dealt to Andy Lopez by Sonoma County Deputy Sheriff Erick Gelhaus), and the pampering of thugs (as exemplified by the $38,000 settlement paid to Keystone Kampus Kop, John Pike for all the "suffering" he endured after methodically pepperspraying non-violent students).

I probably won’t get back to that topic, at least for a while. But the fate of Andy Lopez, and the way his story faded from the MSM, the Twitterverse, and the blogosphere with record speed weighs on me.

How quickly any one of us could be a page 27 story with the line "the subject was engaged and the threat was neutralized." (The official line on little Andy Lopez.)

Conveniently for those California deputies, their squad car had no video or audio recording devices and apparently no bystanders were quick enough to lift their smartphones.

But Lopez’s murder reminded me of one that a Seattle cop committed in 2010. Here’s the video of brave policeman Ian Birk "engaging the subject and neutralizing the threat." As Carl-Bear urges, think about what you’d do in the victim’s shoes. Could you give the cop what he wanted in time to avoid being shot in the back? Could you even understand that it was you he was barking at in the time given?

The ending of the Seattle story was typical. Birk left his job, even though the official investigation found that he had acted "in good faith and without malice." City taxpayers forked over a $1.5 million settlement, punished for something they didn’t do. But neither the county prosecutor nor the feds brought any charges partly because Birk would have been able to make the legal argument that Seattle police training was at fault. And wouldn’t that have been embarrassing?

Something like that will probably happen now in Sonoma County.

And cops will go on blowing citizens away with impugnity. Until they day they’re made to pay real consequences.

Original report here

　

　

　

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