Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

It comes as little surprise but is no less outrageous that the New York police detectives who subjected an unarmed man to fifty-bullet barrage and managed to handcuff him before he died have been found not guilty. It’s not surprising because the man killed, Sean Bell, was African American and so were many of the witnesses. As Holly on Feministe points out:

There was no jury, just the judge, who acquitted the three cops on the grounds of faulty prosecution.

Justice Arthur Cooperman said he found problems with the prosecution’s case. He said some prosecution witnesses contradicted themselves, and he cited prior convictions and incarcerations of witnesses.

He also cited the demeanor of some witnesses on the stand.

In other words, how dare you bring witnesses to testify against police officers who have run afoul of the criminal justice system before? They’re too sketchy to be in my courtroom. Seriously… isn’t this the crux of the problem? A blatant example of who is listened to in our courts and who gets the shaft? This is exactly why it’s horrifyingly unsurprising that cops walk.

It’s almost too convenient, isn’t it? African American men are disproportionately imprisoned, which means that their testimony is less believable, which means . . . (you get the idea).

The verdict is also unsurprising because the police, structurally, in the US have a position not as public servants but as enforcers above the rest of us. They are held to looser standards for murder than the rest of us; any group permitted to carry weapons and not held to higher standards inevitable becomes oppressive. They are more likely to enforce petty and arbitrary laws against drug use than to actually protect anyone.

What Jack at AngryBrownButch notes, however, is also true: even a guilty verdict, in this case, would only have approached justice:

This is the crux of the problem: the situation is framed within a system that is so completely fucked up to the point that little good could possibly come out of it. Our ability to achieve justice is limited by the fact that the only recourses for justice available in our society are inherently unjust. So instead, we’re left grasping for approximations of justice that will invariably be unsatisfactory in the end.

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