Cop shoots armed man: Sees reverse prosecution
I'm now writing a weekly column for the legendary Chicago Defender. This is my first one.
When it comes to black men in America, justice isn't blind--it's cockeyed.
For the latest evidence of this fundamental fact, take a look at what happened in suburban Park Forest. In July of 2013, the cops were called after an unruly old man at the suburb's Victory Centre assisted living facility refused to voluntarily go to get checked out for a suspected urinary tract infection.
By the time the police arrived, the old man, possibly experiencing dementia, was leaning on his cane with one hand and yielding a 7-inch fillet knife with the other. He was ordered to drop the weapon. He refused as police rushed his room. One of the cops attempted to taze him but missed. The next cop fired, hitting the old man with four beanbag rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun. Hours later, the old man died.
We've seen this scenario in one sequence or another so many times before and since that it is nothing more than a cliche: The hapless perp goes to the morgue. The warrior-cop goes free.
No crime here, folks, now move along.
And for more than five months, it looked like it was going to be the same old story.
Then last April, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez did something virtually no other American prosecutor had done in the 461 deadly police confrontations that had happened in 2013. Rather than come up with the usual conclusion that it was "justifiable homicide," Alvarez accused the trigger-pulling cop of using "unjustified" and "unreasonable" force and charged him with reckless conduct.
And that's when the cock-eyed Justice appears to have reared her ugly head. In this case, the cop squeezing off the rounds, Craig Taylor, was black. The man on the wrong end of the barrel, John Wrana, was white.
