By Thornton Kimes
|
by Staff Writer I can't claim much police mcnastiness scholarship, though that could change any time. My 1980's post-anti-nuke-protest-short-time-in-jail-prison is a bit faded in memory, except for an I-can-laugh-about-it-now brief phobia about jangling overstuffed key rings. What strikes me hard about the death of four cops and Lovelle Mixon, who didn't want to go back to prison badly enough to kill for one last second of freedom, is video and written images. Mixon's mother, begging for forgiveness from the families of the cops, when the blame for her son's nightmare of a life of dreams crushed, deferred and defined as meaningless by his own parole officer and who knows how many other people can be placed squarely elsewhere on vastly more guilty shoulders-everyone who has ever voted for tougher punishment for crime, who refuses to hire people released from prison, and so much more. The television news zealously did it usual thing, crushing whatever remains of Mixon's reputation, while one of his sisters vigorously defended him. I wanted to hug her for that. The San Francisco Chronicle ran articles about what Black men and others face coming out of prison, the economy threatening to only add to the devastating three and more strikes against most if not all of them; mentioned the dueling street shrines and one cop looking at messages left for Mixon, shaking his head and walking away. Arnold Schwarzenneger and others honor the cops, the only comfort Lovelle Mixon's family gets is from the streets of Oakland, from everyone already outraged and traumatized by Oscar Grant's shooting death, from the rest of us who know they need a lot of love too. |
Oh how we all need that!
Lovelle Mixon's family and Oscar Grant's are united in their pain and the utter mind-fuckery of the media and the messages we get to varying degrees in school and elsewhere. The court system and the lawyer defending Johannes Mehserle in the Oscar Grant case are using Mixon's lethal resistance to being taken back to prison to delay justice for the Grants.
Oscar Grant's mother noticed.
Lawyers are paid to be human computers, putting irrelevant stuff behind mental bars to do the job they were hired to do-defend or prosecute. The deaths of four cops are irrelevant! We all know it, though Mehserle's shark wants us all to believe he really needs another month and a half to lawyer-up again.
I've been avoiding Oakland. A lawyer and a judge remind me why I should be there.