Which
makes me wonder if the effect of having a slaying caught on video is going to
be so overwhelming to the public that we’ll be numbed out, so to speak, by all
the incidents.
WE
WON’T BE capable of keeping straight the specifics of any one incident. They’ll
blend to the point where we just won’t think much of the happenings to any one
given young man.
Could
we someday reach the point where people won’t care to watch because they’ll all
seem the same?
That’s
my fear about all the incidents that have occurred since the moment last week
when local authorities let it be seen the death of Laquan McDonald on a video
captured by a camera mounted on a police squad car’s dashboard.
In
that incident from over a year ago, we saw the would-be defendant trying to
flee police before collapsing to the ground – and also wisps and jerks of the
body indicating McDonald continued to be shot at after he likely was down for
the count.
KIND
OF LIKE if a professional boxer were allowed to kick his opponent in the groin
after knocking him out and the referee had already reached “10” in his count.
That
particular video has stirred up so much resentment among many (but not all) in
the public that the police public image has taken a massive blow. It also has
people feeling sorry for the McDonald family – the ones who settled last year
for $500,000 to avert a civil lawsuit against the city of Chicago.
Which
may be the reason (who am I kidding, of course it is) attorneys in other cases
are now fighting to get similar video made public as it relates to their
criminal defendants.
I
am aware of two other now-deceased young black men whose violent passing was
captured on police video, and one of them now has his death made public for
anyone voyeurish enough to watch. Although I think the kind of people who
really want to watch this are also the ones who wanted to see Tonya Harding’s
wedding night video.
IN
THE OTHER case, a judge ruled against public viewing, and a federal judge will
be asked next week to consider overruling that decision.
It
just seems the potential for dollar signs and forcing the city into a payoff is
motivating all of this. Because to be honest, most of these videos are so crude
that they really don’t enhance the public understanding of a criminal case.
The
cameras always are trained on the defendant to capture every nuance that shows
their potential for guilt. “Truth” is not relevant in such cases.
Even
in McDonald, if you’re not receiving a narration of what is happening, the
incident seems more confusing than venal.
OF
COURSE, THERE’S the other bit of video that’s now out there – the stuff from
the Burger King franchise across the street from where McDonald died. (Yeah, "Hah, Hah." Burger King captured McDonald's death on video). The
Chicago Tribune got a copy of the security video, and sure enough there’s an
81-minute gap in the images from the night he died.
Which
is feeding into the conspiracy theories that Chicago police tampered with
Burger King’s images as part of a cover-up – which even has the enriched
McDonald family joining in the cries.
Part
of an effort to detract attention from the reports of how Laquan himself was
less than a stellar excuse of a human being – which isn’t really the angle that
the people wanting to turn this whole affair into a Rahm Emanuel impeachment
party want to focus on anyway.
To
me, it’s just too much, and almost makes me reminisce for the days when the concept
of “video on television” meant something stupid like repeatedly screaming “Yes!”
at the television screen every time Boy George and Culture Club came on M-TV
singing “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me.”
-30-
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