08/12/14 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Wrapping up now with our friend Will Grigg, great chronicler of American, mostly local, police abuse.
And his website is ProLibertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And his book is Liberty in Eclipse.
And he's got a radio show off and on.
I can never memorize what time it does come on, but you can find the archives there if you just look for the links there at ProLibertate.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, it's always good to be with you.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
So, well, I guess I just got one question for you.
Who's Mike Brown?
Mike Brown is now deceased.
He was an 18-year-old man from a little town in Missouri called Ferguson, and he was shot fatally by a police officer a few days ago as the result of what is being described by Chief John Belmar of the Ferguson Police Department as an encounter in the street.
And it is pretty clear on the basis of what is known from eyewitness accounts that Mr. Brown was unarmed at the time, that he had been fleeing from a police officer while unarmed, and that he had been shot, grazed probably once, and then shot a second time before he fell to the ground, raising his hands, pleading not to be shot anymore because he didn't have a gun.
He was killed by a shot that was fired from a distance of about 35 feet from the patrol vehicle.
And according to an eyewitness on the scene, one of his friends, a man by the name of Dorian Johnson, at no time did Mr. Brown pose a threat to anybody, including the police officer, who simply rolled up on them and then barking at them, demanding that they get on the sidewalk, took offense over the fact that Mr. Johnson explained that they were almost at their destination.
This didn't happen in the early morning hours or late at night.
This happened, as I understand it, in the afternoon on Saturday.
So in plain daylight, you have a couple of young men who are doing nothing to attract the suspicion of any reasonable person, who are accosted by a police officer, who flings in their face a vulgar expression, a gerund form, if you will, of the familiar Anglo-Saxon term for sexual congress, and tells them to get on the sidewalk.
Out of nowhere, apparently, came this instruction.
These are adults or near-adults.
In any case, if they're walking in the street, not causing harm to anybody, perhaps you could suggest that in the interest of their own safety, they might want to move.
Well, and this is no major thoroughfare with a double yellow line or anything.
Exactly.
This is a placid neighborhood.
It's not as if they were in any way impeding traffic or posing a risk to themselves.
This is an instance of a uniformed bully trying to provoke something with a couple of people who seem to be an easy target.
Now, according to Mr. Johnson, what happened is that after he very politely told the police officer that they were almost at his home, which is where they were going, and of course he didn't have to tell the police officer anything, the officer slammed on his brakes, threw the car into the reverse, actually he described it as a truck, and nearly hit them, and then tried to come boiling out of the car at them, out of the vehicle at them.
As he opened the door, the car door slammed into Mr. Brown, who's a very large young man, recent high school graduate, once again 18 years old, about to go to trade school.
And the door careened off of Mr. Brown, and then shut, slammed shut on the police officer.
And at that point, according to Dorian Johnson's account, the police officer reached to the window and grabbed Brown by the neck, and started to choke him, while saying that he was going to shoot him.
And Brown disentangled himself and fled, and as this happened, one gunshot was fired, and the two of them, of course, gave flight.
And at some point, Brown was hit a second time, fell to the ground, and then was shot from, once again, a distance of about 35 feet.
And the way that the police chief is describing this is quite interesting.
This is Chief Belmar's description.
Yesterday about noon, he gave this account on Sunday.
Yesterday about noon, in the 2900 block of Canfield, a Ferguson police officer had an encounter with two individuals on the street.
In fact, one of those individuals, and there is an ellipsis here, one of those individuals allegedly pushed the police officer back into the car, where he physically assaulted the police officer.
It is our understanding at this point in the investigation that within the police car, there was a struggle over the officer's weapon.
There was at least one shot fired within the car.
After that, the officer went back, came back out of the car, he exited his vehicle, and there was a shooting that occurred where the officer, in fact, shot the subject, and there were fatal injuries.
Note the impersonal construction of language here.
He didn't say that the police officer shot and killed this man.
He said there were shots that were fired and fatal injuries that were inflicted by some impersonal force other than the police officer in question.
That's very standard self-exculpating diction from a police official.
Well, you know, it just completely changed my mind and erased everything that you just told me, and now I see it the cop's way because he's so sophisticated with his propaganda there, Will.
Well, that's one of the purposes of teaching them to spew that type of verbiage, but one thing that I want to point out is that taken on a factual level, this account, apart from significant omissions, is not significantly different materially from what Dorian Johnson said.
The biggest question is, was the contact with the police officer as a result of the door slamming against the police officer after it had battered Mr. Brown, which is what Dorian Johnson, the only witness on the scene who didn't have an interest in defending the police officer, said the police officer actually precipitated this by thrusting open his door, and then after the door ricocheted off of Brown, he was hit by the door and then reached through the door to grab the guy.
The thing is, the claim that there was a struggle for the weapon is very key to what the police are going to do now in terms of trying to create a narrative, because the justification for this shot has to reside in the police officer's claim that he was in reasonable fear for his life or for the life of other people because this individual has supposedly tried to take the gun from him, and the account given by the police chief doesn't explain in any way why the contact took place, why it was seen as necessary by the police officer to have an encounter with these two people, or why there was a so-called struggle.
Now, the struggle described by Johnson makes perfect sense.
If somebody grabs you by the throat and threatens to kill you, you're going to try to extricate yourself from the grasp of that assailant and protect yourself.
That makes sense on its face.
Now, the police officer's view of things makes sense if you've been fitted with the proper ideological lenses, that is to say if you're a police officer or somebody who's a fellow traveler with the police, or if you're somebody who has digested the standard narrative here that young black men are dangerous by virtue of who they are rather than anything they do or what they appear to be doing.
Yeah, well, it sure is true that you can see from out of the cop's point of view that, well, he said a thing, and then rather than immediately complying, they said a thing back.
Well, that means, blam, escalation there.
And so, your throat is fair game from the point of view of cop, no problem there.
And, of course, the door thing, obviously, like you're saying, that even the cop's version makes the other witnesses' stories sound more correct that the door just bounced off the kid because the cop was so clumsy in attempting to attack him in the first place.
But from the cop's point of view, all this escalation is completely legitimate the whole time.
But then, is it, I don't know, what is the law on stop or I'll shoot from a cop?
Does it matter if it has to be, you know, a felony in progress or anything like that?
Or are they banned from doing that?
Is it a state-by-state issue?
And I'm not talking about morality, just legality, or will.
You're talking from a positivist perspective here.
What they're going to do right now, the police officer in question, his name is being withheld from the public.
He's benefiting from the so-called Garrity principle under Garrity versus New Jersey.
That's about a 50-year-old, a 45-year-old decision, which says that during an investigation of suspected police misconduct, if you, in the course of being interviewed by your superiors, talk about what happens, everything you disclose cannot be used for the purpose of criminal or civil prosecution.
It can only be used for the purpose of administrative rulings and perhaps interagency discipline.
So the first thing this cop did was he invoked his Garrity rights.
He got with his union rep and probably with an attorney.
And for the last couple of days, they've been trying to craft a narrative that would be compatible with the 1985 Supreme Court ruling, Tennessee versus Garner, which involved a set of facts which are not that dissimilar.
You had an 18-year-old man of slight build who was unarmed, who was suspected of a burglary, who was shot in the back by a Tennessee police officer.
And in that case, the Supreme Court said there are limits to the force that can be used if you're dealing with a fleeing suspect who's unarmed.
So they're trying to make this set of facts as they would present them comport with the Tennessee versus Garner decision.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Thank you very much, guys.
All right.
Will Grigg.
We're talking about the killing by the police in Ferguson, Ferguson, Missouri, on the outskirts of St. Louis, of a guy named Mike Brown at the hands of the local police there, and how this cop just started a fight for no reason escalated it to the point where he ended up murdering this kid.
And now there's so much more to talk about.
If there's any points of fact about the actual confrontation there that you feel are necessary to go back over, Will, I'd like to give you a moment to.
Otherwise, I'd like to move on to what you have to say about the reaction of the people of Ferguson and the reaction to the reaction by the police and on down that trail too.
On the subject of facts, of course, we know what the primary eyewitnesses said.
We know what we've gotten secondhand from police chief John Belmar.
And in the latter case, you have a narrative which is massage for the purpose of making the officer look reasonable.
And that's the standard that they're trying to meet is the so-called reasonable officer standard from the 1985 Tennessee versus Garner ruling.
The Garner in that case is not Eric Garner, who was recently killed on the streets of New York by the NYPD.
It was a young man by the name of Edward Garner back in 1974.
He was suspected of burglarizing a home.
It was late at night.
He was 17 or 18 years old, about five foot seven of slight build.
And the police officer who shot him, a man by the name of Hyman says that he was convinced that the suspect was unarmed, but he was trying to scale a fence to escape.
The officer shouted, stop or I'll shoot.
The suspect fled.
The officer fired several rounds, one of which hit Mr. Garner in the back of the head and killed him.
And under Tennessee law at the time and under the standards and practices of the police department employing the police officer, this was considered appropriate because if a suspect tried to flee or resist arrest, the Tennessee state law so that you could use all necessary force in order to prevent this.
This took about 11 years to get to the Supreme Court.
When the court ruled on it, what they said was that force may not be used, meaning lethal force against a fleeing suspect, unless necessary to prevent the escape.
And the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.
That's one of the reasons why police in Ferguson are placing such stock on the claim that there was a struggle for the officer's gun, which is something no other eyewitness to the event testifies to seeing, including of course, Mr. Johnson, who was right next to Brown when this took place.
If Johnson was in possession of the gun, forgive me, if Brown was in possession of the gun for so much as a peak or second, the police are trying to say is that he was not an unarmed suspect.
And supposedly, I guess that status had branded him for the rest of the encounter.
Or they could say that by trying to reach for the officer's gun, he was convincing the type of danger that a reasonable officer would take into account.
And given his violent tendencies, he cannot be allowed to escape.
This would supposedly justify the use of lethal force.
There's a possibility here that after being threatened by the officer for no reason, that Brown took preemptive action to try to prevent the officer from shooting him, because according to Johnson, the gun was already out by the time that Brown was fleeing.
And if the officer is saying, I'm going to shoot you when he reaches for his gun, it's an entirely reasonable thing to surmise that what Brown was doing was he was trying to redirect the officer's gun hand away from him so he wouldn't be killed.
So, what's going to happen is that the police are going to investigate this, they're going to exonerate the officer, we can, I think, lay odds on that, that the officer is going to be exonerated under practices and principles and standard procedure for Ferguson, and they're going to invoke the Garner reasonable officer standard.
And then after doing so, qualified immunity will attach.
And the only way that the police are going to be held accountable, the only way that the city of Ferguson is going to be held accountable is through a civil action that will be filed by the victim's family, that will result in a settlement that will be paid by the insurance carrier and indemnified to some measure by the tax victims within Ferguson's jurisdiction.
And I suspect that's how we're going to see things play out over the next several years.
Now, that assumes that things remain relatively stable in Ferguson.
On the evidence of what happened over the last weekend or so, it appears, first of all, that the residents of this town, I think two-thirds of them are black, have had a surfeit of being treated like serfs, subject to an army of occupation.
And secondly, that the police are doing whatever they can in order to exacerbate that attitude on the part of, and that conflict with the residents of Ferguson.
Because, as I point out in the piece I just published this morning on Lew Rockwell's blog, there's a video clip of your standard issue skinhead, armored cretin working for one of the police agencies there who's hurling invective at the protesters, referring to them as blanking animals and telling them to bring it on.
Yeah, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, you said that too fast.
Calling them, never even mind the blanking part, calling them animals.
And then, I'm sorry, you were saying?
And telling them to bring it on.
You know, come at me, bro, to use the standard vernacular.
And so, what you're dealing with here is a group of people, in terms of the described behavior of the officer that initiated this encounter and that shot Brown, and the documented behavior of this officer in this film clip, they're seeking to provoke and suppress rather than to protect and serve.
And I suspect that many of the people who arrived after the demonstration gathered steam on Saturday and then evolved to a march on Sunday were the type of people who were attracted by the prospect of tumult and violence, because they went and looted some of the stores as a way of supposedly expressing their outrage over what the state had been doing.
They attacked the local business owners.
And naturally, the police did nothing to protect property.
They wanted to restore order, they wanted to force these people to submit.
That didn't involve protecting the proprietors of the Quick Trip or some of the other businesses that were nearby.
To the extent that property was protected as this protest, this peaceful protest, unfortunately, calved off a violent uprising against property.
To the extent that property was protected, it was protected by armed property owners.
They showed up with their guns and they protected their property the way that the Korean merchants did during the so-called Rodney King riot.
And of course, like you're saying, the whole thing was provoked by the cops' response.
Oh, you guys are mad at us?
Instead of saying, now, now, listen, we're real sorry, but we're going to have a real investigation here.
And everybody, please go home, or even trying to be reasonable whatsoever.
They call out full military squad, the MRAP, the camouflage, the machine guns, and march down the street and provoke, you know, you want a war, we'll give you a war kind of attitude to everybody.
And then the riot breaks out and the Quickie Mart burns down.
But it was the cops who caused the riot.
And not just with killing the innocent guy, but then all their provocations after that.
And then they leave the store owners to their own devices to defend themselves from ending the war.
They find the smoldering embers of resentment, they pour accelerant on them.
You've got the so-called firemen acting as giddy arsonists.
And the other thing that I think is interesting is that several accounts, contemporaneous accounts, and this is one of the wonderful things about Twitter, from reporters and civic officials on the scene, described how police officers would refer to this as a war zone.
And they literally clamped down a cordon sanitaire around that neighborhood and didn't let anybody in or out after they brought in the paramilitary force.
You see these pictures of these people clad in full military regalia, wearing gas masks and wreathed in a haze of tear gas.
And this, of course, is, I suppose, what law and order looks like, particularly in places like Ferguson, Missouri.
The other thing I thought was interesting is that there was an alderman on the scene who was part of the peaceful demonstration, who was accosted by several of these people wearing gas masks and riot gear, and at least two of them pointed their weapons at him.
And he's a member of the local elected government, the civic government of Ferguson.
And when I saw that picture, it reminded me of my own experience in 1983 in Guatemala after the military coup that uprooted Efrain Rios Montt, who himself had achieved the presidency through a coup.
I was in a little town in Guatemala confronting people who dressed exactly the same way, and I had the same kind of weapons pointed at me because I mouthed off to one of them.
Their excuse was that they were a third world banana republic that was having a military coup.
This is middle America in 2014.
Right.
You know what?
Let me ask you this and talk about it real fast because we're almost out of time.
But I know that you wrote about this recently about the town in Michigan where they're saying, no, enough of that.
And we're using our democracy to fire this police chief and hire a new one.
How's that working out?
And does it more important question in the limited time?
Well, does that auger a real change in American society that finally the regular folk are getting fed up with this?
We're all black people now and we don't want to be treated this way.
You're talking about Victor Pierce, who said that the Lord had a plan for him and deposited him in this little town called, if I remember correctly, for heaven's sake.
I forget, too.
It's some township.
I think Barry Township.
Barry Township in Michigan, basically a fly spec on the map.
They have one police officer.
Most of the time they have four when he was made police chief.
They don't need a police department.
He created a reserve force of nearly 40 people and let them loose on the local population to plunder and harass them.
And he got four armored vehicles to the 1033 program in the Pentagon.
Finally, after his goons beat up a businessman back in May, people organized an effort to get rid of him.
And he was not inclined to go until it became a matter of media scandal.
Last week, he was forced to resign.
And so he really did succeed and get rid of him, huh?
Yeah, they forced him to resign out of shame and out of media exposure.
And besides that, he's already drawing attention from his 30 year career with the police force in nearby Battle Creek.
So some places I think people have reached peak jackboot.
I don't know whether that's going to be national, but we're seeing little pockets of resistance arise.
And, you know, may God prosper them and propagate this.
I hope this becomes a contagion.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and, you know, the quotes in the article that I read at the Detroit Free Press was they had a lady in her 70s saying, well, those people, they know what the law is where, but she doesn't know what the law is not anymore.
She's pretending in her mind is stuck back in 1960 something when at least the average white person could go about their day without being harassed all day.
But she doesn't know what's really going on out there.
And the only other quote they could find is somebody defending it was a government employee.
So their opinion doesn't count.
One of the residents I spoke with said that that Victor Pierce had found his constituency.
He was basically, I'm guessing, finding the Fox News constituency and filling their minds with nonsense about how this little township was, I guess, the strategic linchpin of the United States and was going to be beset upon by jihadists and school shooters and drug lords and all this stuff.
They have no measurable crime right there.
And so he managed to find the right constituency going from church to church and propagating the idea that unless they allowed him to create a garrison state in that little township that the terrorist would win.
And apparently, there's a larger number of rational people in that little township than there were people who know only what Bill O'Reilly tells them.
Right.
Well, and again, like you're saying, it was one of those where they got somebody who was prominent in, you know, it looked like a bad situation.
And but they pushed it so far that the town rallied around him instead of around them.
And maybe that's a really unique circumstance, but I hope it helps drive the message home that, you know, it's supposed to be.
And of course, we always knew that this is always a lie anyway.
But it'd be nice if they could at least leave it plausible for, you know, a little while longer, try to make it a little bit plausible that we come first and we're born free and we hired them to be our security force to protect us from, you know, real criminals who would violate our rights, that kind of thing.
That's the PR.
And they're so far away from that kind of frame of reality that they're jeopardizing their entire state legitimacy in the minds of more and more people all the time.
So for their own self-preservation, I think they really need to dial this back.
I was even thinking maybe I could write a letter to John Walsh, the most cop worshipping guy on all of TV and say, hey, listen, man, if you really want to protect these guys, you need to tell them to tone it down a little bit, dude, because people are starting to hate their guts like Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, I think that's a good idea.
Anyway, we're over time.
I already waste a bunch of your interview, but Will, thank you so much for coming back on the show and paying such close attention to these issues for us.
And we'll do this again soon.
All right.
You take care, Scott.
Appreciate it.
That's the great Will Grigg, everybody.
And yeah, I blew it on that outro.
I gave him a great outro on that first break, but my mic was off.
These things happen.
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