Justice for Oscar Grant

If you have not heard, Oscar Grant was a 22 year old young person who was shot and killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle on New Year's Eve in Oakland, California a year a half ago. Because of rebellions, organized protests, and the fact that the shooting was recorded on multiple cell phones, Johannes Mehserle has become the first California police officer to be tried for on-duty murder. The jury went into deliberations Thursday afternoon, and they will restart deliberations this morning to decide a verdict.

In the first hours of 2009, Oscar Grant, a grocery store butcher, father of a young daughter, and a young black man, was riding the BART home with a few of his friends. They got into an altercation that caused someone to call police to the scene, thought the BART operator that night has said that the situation was nothing out of the ordinary. Videos, which can easily be found on YouTube, show Oscar Grant and his friends sitting against the wall of the BART train platform following the orders of the officers, all three of whom are white. When Grant attempts to stand up, Officer Pirone grabs him, pushes him down, and puts a knee into his neck to keep him face first on the ground. As this point, Mehserle appears to be patting him down when he suddenly pulls out his pistol and fires a shot into Grant's back. Grant said, "You shot me!" and he would later die. Mehserle's first action was not to call paramedics, but to make sure Grant was handcuffed. The cops immediately attempted to confiscate all video footage.

Mehserle's main defense is that in the heat of the moment, he thought Oscar Grant had a gun, so, fearing for his life, he attempted to tase him but accidentally shot him instead. What throws thorns into this narrative?

Johannes Mehserle did not call for medical assistance after he shot Oscar Grant, nor did he tell anyone that night or in the days after that the shooting that it had been an accident. Rather, he has told his closest colleagues and his girlfriend that he thought Grant had been pulling a gun, therefore seeking justification for his actions rather than claiming it was an accident. To this day Mehersle has also not apologized to the Grant family even though it is accepted fact that he shot and killed Grant, accident or not. This makes is tearing up on the witness stand a few days ago offensive to not just Grant's parents, family, and friends but to anyone keeping up on the details of his case. Indeed, when Mehserle choked up on the witness stand, Wanda Johnson, Grant's mother, left the courtroom and a young man stood up and said, "Maybe you should save those fucking tears, dude." (He was escorted out--one of six young black men that day to be barred from the courtroom--arrested, and charged with contempt of court.)

Furthermore, in the minutes leading up to the shooting while Grant and his friends were sitting up against the wall of this the train station, Mehserle was threatening them with his taser. This video shows the laser pointer of the taser trained on Grant's crouch, and Grant himself took this cell phone photo of Mehserle holding his taser. Grant was ordered to put the cell phone away, an order he complied with (as he and his friends did with all of the cops orders that night) by putting it in his pocket. Yet this is the same pocket in which Mehserle has been claiming he though Grant was keeping a gun.

In the time between this moment and the shooting, Mehserle had to have put away his taser and pulled his gun, which is much heavier and black instead of yellow. Mehserle, did not yell "Gun! Gun! Gun!" as cops are trained to do because, he claims, he wasn't 100% sure. He supposedly took actions to tase Grant because he feared for his life, although the prosecutor has made the other important point that cops do not tase someone with a gun because an electric shock can cause them to pull the trigger. It is much more likely that Mehserle was using lethal force to meet lethal force.

This was all in the the context of a situation violently escalated by the police, who never told Grant and his friends why they were being arrested. Officer Pirone, who has been sacrificed by the defense as the "evil" cop, was calling Grant a "bitch ass [n-word]" while using excessive force to pin him to the ground. It was at this point, while Grant was face first in the ground, his friends sitting next to him, and a train of people watching and filming, that Mehserle shot Grant in the back. One of Grant's friends, Jackie Bryson, has testified that Mehserle said "Fuck this" before shooting. (Though it's also been mentioned that Bryson had a bit of an inconsistent narrative and has not told the full truth, to which he responded: "“Why would I? They were the police. They just shot my friend. I’m scared of all police...I would never stand up and shoot somebody in their back! Like I'm the bad one! Come on now!”)

Since Grant's death and massive protests from much of the Oakland community, for whom police brutality is not a new issue, the trial was moved out of Oakland and into L.A. No black people are on the jury. Mehserle, it has been reported, was living with his attorneys in L.A. and paying former police officers--including one man to believes that the officers who beat Rodney King were not using excessive force--to testify as experts and verify his claims.

The rest of the country waits for the unanimous decision of the the twelve people who make up the jury. Will they choose second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, or acquittal? (Definitions can be found here and here.) Which would you choose if you were on the jury? Julianne Hing makes the important point that this is "a tougher legal question than it is a moral one. Because...[police officers] are allowed to use any kind of force that corresponds to the level of threat they perceive they're under. So it's difficult to prove cops have been guilty of excessive force and intentional abuse; the only defense a cop needs is that he or she fears life-threatening danger." This is why police officers have historically had virtual immunity under the law.

For me, the case highlights the status of cops and young black men in the white imagination. I continue to hear middle and upper class white people discuss and linger upon the stress of being a police officer and how difficult it is to act quickly in such high pressure, potentially life-or-death situations. I don't dispute this at all, and I find myself thinking similar thoughts. But what I question is this move towards putting oneself in the police officers shoes, and concurrent lack of serious empathizing with not just Grant or his mother or his family, but entire communities of color that endure police brutality as a real, daily threat. As Chela Simone writes, "The horrors of police terrorism are no 'over active paranoia’ for the young and black in Oakland. It is real life...These young men were celebrating one more year of life, and found themselves being initiated into black manhood in Oakland." It was just that "that night some thing went wrong." Our society is structured in such a way that as middle-class white people, we are told narratives that help us empathize with cops, while being fed a deluge of negative, dehumanizing stereotypes about young black and brown men. These are deep societal issues, but I worry about the ease with which the jury may empathize with Mehserle and the logic that says, "No matter how horrible his action was, it was his subconscious instinct that drove him to shoot the gun, and he cannot be held liable for his actions."

Instead of jumping to thoughts about what it must've been like to be Mehserle that night, what about what it must've been to be Grant that night, and to be accused of having a gun for no reason and then suddenly realizing that you're being killed. Or to be one of his friends, helplessly watching your friend get shot at point blank range while pinned to the ground by the people who are supposed to be protecting you. Or what it must be like to be Grant's mother, Wanda Johnson, who has received harassment for even pressing these charges, who has been at the court everyday of the trial, and who had to be hospitalized when she became disoriented outside the courtroom due to the stress and exhaustion that came from listening to days of testimony about the thoughtless, unjustified execution of her son. Or to be Cephus Johnson, Grant's uncle, who said, "What Mehserle didn't do when Oscar said 'you shot me' speaks for us." Or what it must be like to be a young person of color growing up in Oakland, and literally fearing for your life when you encounter racist police officers.

And the list goes on.

As Hing writes, the specific legal requirements of the jury's decision remain complex, but I don't see why Mehserle should not be convicted of second-degree murder, or at least voluntary manslaughter. But we will see the how the jury takes this historical moment, and if they will make a decision to hold a police officer accountable for his actions.

For three good pieces on the Grant case, read Julianne Hing's "Oscar Grant Trial: The Jury's Debate" in ColorLines, JR Valrey's "Johannes Mehserle pulverized on the witness stand" in SF Bayview, and Chela Simone's "What Can I Do? (Remember this is Bigger than Oscar Grant)."

The verdict will be out any time now.