Daily 30: Fri 12.05.2014
A Phoenix police officer shot to death an unarmed black man during a struggle and authorities said the officer believed the individual had a gun, in the latest fatal incident amid national turmoil over the policing of black communities.
On Thursday night, some 200 demonstrators protested against the killing of 34-year-old Rumain Brisbon, marching to Phoenix police headquarters and blocking streets, broadcaster CBS5 reported. The Phoenix Police Department said Brisbon was sitting in a SUV outside a convenience store on Tuesday evening, and two witnesses told the officer the occupants of the vehicle were selling drugs. With police forces across the country under increased scrutiny over killing unarmed black men, Phoenix police said in a statement that its officer called for backup, and then saw Brisbon appear to remove something from the car's back seat. It said the officer, a seven-year veteran of the department, gave him several commands to show his hands, before Brisbon "placed one or both hands in his waistband area" and fled. The officer chased and caught up with him, it said, and during a struggle the policeman believed he felt the handle of a gun while holding Brisbon's hand in his pocket. "The officer gave the suspect several commands to get on the ground but he refused to comply, yelling profanities at the officer," the police department said in a statement issued on Wednesday. At that point, both men stumbled into an opened apartment unit, it said, adding that the officer was unable to keep a grip on the suspect's hand. "Fearing Brisbon had a gun in his pocket the officer fired two rounds striking Brisbon in the torso," it said. The police department said back-up officers arrived after the shooting, and while they and members of the fire department treated Brisbon, he was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said Brisbon was carrying oxycodone pills, and that a semi-automatic handgun and a jar of what is believed to be marijuana were found in the SUV. The 30-year-old officer was not injured, police added in the statement. The shooting in Phoenix comes at a time of tension between law enforcement officers and the communities in which they operate. Two grand jury decisions not to indict officers who killed unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York City have triggered protests throughout the United States.
Loretta Lynch has seen this all before: the rising tide of community outrage, the loss of faith in the local police, the pleas for federal action.
The difference is that she's dealing with it while also preparing to face a panel of potentially hostile senators, meaning that her every move, now, as she leads the investigation in the choke-hold death of Eric Garner at the hands of police in New York, will be scrutinized tenfold.
With Eric Holder exiting and President Obama opting for restraint over passion with regard to the flash points of unrest in Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland, New York and elsewhere, Lynch, the African-American woman tapped to replace Holder as attorney general, suddenly seems to be the new national vanguard against possible police abuses. Fortunately for her, she's almost uniquely suited for the role.
After a Staten Island grand jury failed to return an indictment in the case of Garner's death Wednesday, Holder launched a Justice Department civil-rights probe and said Lynch, the U.S. attorney for New York's Eastern District, would take the lead. It came the very same week Lynch made her first rounds on Capitol Hill, meeting with lawmakers considering her nomination as AG.
Beyond the Garner case, should Lynch be confirmed swiftly in the new Congress, it's possible she could inherit DOJ's civil-rights investigation into the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, as well as its more sweeping inquiry into the general practices of its police department. With respect to both the Garner and Brown cases, there's tremendous pressure on federal officials to act. Moreover, there remains the possibility Justice will become more deeply involved in the shooting death by police of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland last month. Holder was in Cleveland on Thursday to meet with community leaders and to announce that a federal monitor would now oversee that city's police department because of a persistent pattern of excessive force.
While it's unlikely that police-abuse cases were in the forefront of Obama's mind when he chose Lynch as Holder's successor, she fits the current moment. Her first tenure as an Eastern District prosecutor in the late 1990s was punctuated by concerns over the New York Police Department's recklessness, most notably and publicly in the shooting death of Amadou Diallo and the assault of Abner Louima with a broomstick in the restroom of a Brooklyn precinct house.
Lynch was on the team of prosecutors who brought the case against the NYPD officers accused of assaulting Louima, tasked with securing a conviction in the most heavily watched case of police brutality in its day. Her co-counsel at the time, Alan Vinegrad, believes that will be to her great advantage if she takes command at Main Justice.
"She brings the entire skill set—wisdom, judgment, common sense, experience, dedication," says Vinegrad. "She's got this aspect that not a lot of prosecutors have out there, the experience of having dealt personally in a very high-profile, sensitive, contentious federal civil-rights prosecution with all that entails."
But Lynch's performance then in Brooklyn—both as a line prosecutor and later as the U.S attorney—wasn't without criticism when it came to police-abuse cases and the challenge they present of navigating the volatile mix of rattled communities, nervous politicians, and less-than-cooperative cops.
The guilt of Louima's primary assailant, officer Justin Volpe, was never in doubt—during the trial, he switched his plea to guilty and received a 30-year sentence for violating Louima's civil rights. But the role of another officer, Charles Schwarz, was fiercely contested for years. Lynch and her fellow prosecutors charged that Schwarz helped hold Louima down in the bathroom during Volpe's assault. When Volpe testified Schwarz wasn't there, Lynch called him a liar. Schwarz ultimately was convicted.
He maintained his innocence—and New York's famously combative police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, backed him up, accusing Lynch and her team of having a "political agenda." Other police groups started a legal defense fund. On appeal, the conviction was overturned. The government tried again—Lynch had left the office for private practice by this point—but the jury ended up divided on Schwarz's guilt in the attack. Ultimately, he agreed to serve a five-year term for perjury, ending the matter.
"The case was overcharged. Clearly, there was an outrageous thing that happened in that case, but by one guy," says Joseph Tacopina, a New York lawyer who defended another indicted officer, Thomas Wiese. Wiese was convicted of lying to protect Schwarz, but his conviction was also overturned on appeal. "There was so much pressure put on the other members of the police department by the Feds to give evidence to fit their theory in that case." But if Lynch and her team went further than some critics believed was warranted by the facts in the case, she also disappointed some community activists who charged she didn't work hard enough as U.S. attorney to reform the NYPD after the Diallo and Louima incidents. In December 2000, the Rev. Al Sharpton complained to The Village Voice that he had been told in a private meeting with then-Attorney General Janet Reno that Lynch, who was then running the probe into whether the NYPD routinely used excessive force, hadn't pressed for federal oversight over the department. A lawyer for Louima, Carl Thomas, accused Lynch of protecting then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in a bid to stay on as U.S attorney during the George W. Bush administration. "I think Loretta Lynch is a weak prosecutor," Thomas, who died a year later, told The Voice. "She is to be blamed for not aggressively pursuing blatant police misconduct."No federal lawsuit against the NYPD was ever brought by the Justice Department under Reno and Lynch, and once Bush took over, the investigation ended.
Lynch's complicated history may be one reason why police groups largely have yet to weigh in on her nomination. "We've been in touch with our NYC locals and are still evaluating their experience with Ms. Lynch," says Bill Johnson, the longtime head of the National Association of Police Organizations. Jim Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, says the organization would take Lynch's "entire body of work into account, along with any insights we can glean," adding that the FOP still expects to meet with her.
The Senate Judiciary Committee still hasn't scheduled Lynch's confirmation hearing, making it increasingly likely it will take place next month under the direction of its incoming GOP chairman, Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Grassley's office said he hasn't settled on a line of questioning for Lynch, involving Ferguson, New York, or anything else. But Lynch can be assured that given the anger among conservatives over the president's actions on immigration, her hearing won't go smoothly.
Since her nomination, Lynch has stayed quiet, but her few public comments on the tension between the police and the communities they serve show a prosecutor trying to empathize with the concerns of both. "We live in a time where people fear the police," Lynch said at one luncheon in 2000, according to remarks first published in The New York Times. "But we must also understand that when people say they fear the police, as bad as that is, they are also expressing an underlying fear, that when they are confronted with the criminal element in our society, they will have no one to call upon to protect them. And that feeling of vulnerability and utter helplessness is the worst feeling that we can inflict upon fellow members of our society."
