How Much Longer Is This Gonna Go On?

Ever since Ferguson many whites seem to think that blacks are being hypersensitive about getting stopped by cops. Here's a reality check: this dashboard video shows what happens when a black man, Levar Jones, is stopped by a white Trooper, Sean Groubert, for a seatbelt violation in South Carolina.

This time around, however, the cop has been charged with assault. Here's a summary of what went down:

Jones was stopped Sept. 4 as he pulled into a convenience store on a busy Columbia road. With the camera recording, Groubert pulls up without his siren on as Jones is getting out of his vehicle to go into the store.

"Can I see your license please?" Groubert asks.

As Jones turns and reaches back into his car, Groubert shouts, "Get outa the car, get outa the car." He begins firing before he has finished the second sentence. There is a third shot as Jones staggers away, backing up with his hands raised, and then a fourth.

From the first shot to the fourth, the video clicks off three seconds.

Jones' wallet can be seen flying out of his hands as he raises them.

Groubert's lawyer, Barney Giese, said the shooting was justified because the trooper feared for his life and the safety of others. Police officers are rarely charged in South Carolina. In August, a prosecutor refused to file criminal charges against a York County deputy who shot a 70-year-old man after mistaking his cane for a shotgun during an after-dark traffic stop.

The defense lawyer's argument is preposterous: he essentially is saying this his client should go free because he shot an innocent man for complying with the orders of a police officer. This is like one of those dirty cop movies: if you want to kill a suspect, tell him to do something, and when he does it, pretend that you were afraid he was going to do something else. If he doesn't comply, you can shoot him for disobeying orders. It's win-win!

Black men have to deal with this crap all the time, and without the dashboard cam we would have no idea what really happened, and the cop would have walked away with a commendation for being so "vigilant."

But video cameras have their limitations: much of the action is out of the frame; Groubert can't be seen, and Jones is no longer visible after a few seconds. It's just dumb luck that things were lined up properly: if Groubert had been just a little smarter, and pointed his car in a slightly different direction, he would be getting a commendation for saving the lives of all the people at the convenience store. You gotta wonder: is the dashboard cam intentionally oriented to capture as little of the action as possible? Why doesn't it fully capture all the action in front of the vehicle, as one would naturally expect?

Right-wing closet racists will blame this all on Jones. As everyone knows, Jones should have had the "talk," which explains how black men must deal with the police: they should move extremely slowly. They should tell the officer what they're going to do, then ask permission to do it in simple terms that a four-year-old can understand, with as "white" an accent as they can muster. Then they should move only after verbal confirmation from the officer, and then only as slowly as an arthritic 90-year-old man

To be fair, cops do get shot in cases like this. A month before this shooting, Michael Pimentel, the chief of police in Elemendorf, Texas, stopped Joshua Manuel Lopez at 11:30 AM and was killed at a in a subsequent "altercation." It appears that Pimentel was after Lopez for spray painting city vehicles.

The suspect had an outstanding warrant for graffiti. None of the stories I can find explains exactly what happened. My question is, was Pimentel killed by his own service weapon, or did Lopez have a gun? If Pimentel was in fact shot with his own weapon, it's clear he was a victim of his own shoddy police work.

A lot of the stops cops make on blacks and Hispanics are for trivial stuff like this, frequently for an unfastened seatbelt, or minor traffic violations, or suspected marijuana possession, things they never bother with in ritzy white neighborhoods. They call it "broken windows" policing, and they claim it gets results and they insist the numbers bear them out.

But when you stop blacks at 10 times the rate that you stop whites, of course you're going to get 10 times as many people holding drugs, and 10 times as many people who resent being harassed by the cops and resist arrest. And 10 times as many "unfortunate incidents."