When you know what’s going to happen next
For example: If I tell you (and it’s true) that Kalief Browder was black and 17 when this started, you pretty much know the ending, right?
In the picture he’s cute, scrubbed, clipped, neat and crisp.
Then the story begins and in a sentence or two, despite all the hope and good looks you can see in the photo, you’re well aware of the high level of risk Kalief runs — just statistically speaking. And sure enough, here comes trouble.
In the early hours of Saturday, May 15, 2010, ten days before his seventeenth birthday, Kalief Browder and a friend were returning home from a party in the Belmont section of the Bronx. They walked along Arthur Avenue, the main street of Little Italy, past bakeries and cafés with their metal shutters pulled down for the night. As they passed East 186th Street, Browder saw a police car driving toward them. More squad cars arrived, and soon Browder and his friend found themselves squinting in the glare of a police spotlight. An officer said that a man had just reported that they had robbed him. “I didn’t rob anybody,” Browder replied. “You can check my pockets.” …JenniferGonnerman,NewYorker
You need anymore input at this point? Have you got the middle and end of the story figured out? Even though the police found nothing to connect him with a mugging? You still have a little faith in the police? Not all police officers are brutal bastards. Are they?
Check out this officer. When he has no evidence to back up his assumption of Browder’s guilt, he manufactures “proof.”
As Browder recalls, one of the officers walked back to his car, where the alleged victim was, and returned with a new story: the man said that they had robbed him not that night but two weeks earlier. The police handcuffed the teens and pressed them into the back of a squad car. “What am I being charged for?” Browder asked. “I didn’t do anything!” He remembers an officer telling them, “We’re just going to take you to the precinct. Most likely you can go home.” Browder whispered to his friend, “Are you sure you didn’t do anything?” His friend insisted that he hadn’t.
At the Forty-eighth Precinct, the pair were fingerprinted and locked in a holding cell. A few hours later, when an officer opened the door, Browder jumped up: “I can leave now?” Instead, the teens were taken to Central Booking at the Bronx County Criminal Court. ...JenniferGonnerman,NewYorker
Okay. But they finally had to let him go. No evidence against him… But no, this was just the beginning. And, come to find out, he’d been in scrapes before this. He was sent to Rikers out in the East River. Lousy reputation. Vicious, dangerous place. The prison officers are part of the violence.
Male adolescents are confined in the Robert N. Davoren Center—known as R.N.D.C. When Browder arrived, the jail held some six hundred boys, aged sixteen to eighteen. Conditions there are notoriously grim. In August of this year, a report by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York described R.N.D.C. as a place with a “deep-seated culture of violence,” where attacks by officers and among inmates are rampant. The report featured a list of inmate injuries: “broken jaws, broken orbital bones, broken noses, long bone fractures, and lacerations requiring stitches.” …JenniferGonnerman,NewYorker
It gets worse. The details are horrific. The kid’s stuck there with no hearings, no appearances in court, no determination as to his guilt or innocence — no trial. Just stuck in a situation that makes Monte Christo look like a fluffy romance.
Nor did he ever see his court-appointed lawyer except in video conferences.
And then the guards starting putting him in solitary.
“I think the department became severely addicted to solitary confinement,” Daniel Selling, who served as the executive director of mental health for New York City’s jails, told me in April; he had quit his job two weeks earlier. “It’s a way to control an environment that feels out of control—lock people in their cell,” he said. “Adolescents can’t handle it. Nobody could handle that.” …JenniferGonnerman,NewYorker
And no trial. Still no trial. He tried suicide.
In 2013, after getting out of a three-year stretch in prison — much of it in solitary — and returned to his family. By then he was so damaged that he couldn’t imagine living. Still, he managed to get his GED and went on to community college. Friends helped him along the way — family, local friends, and new friends like Rosie O’Donnell and Jay Z. But despite his own efforts and those of his friends and allies, he was destroyed by a justice system that appears to be much worse than just “broken.”
That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise, she went upstairs to investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that her youngest child had hanged himself. …JenniferGonnerman,NewYorker
But you knew this was going to end badly.
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Citizens taking responsibility for the behaviors of their local police? It’s happening in Ohio and it’s like a breath of fresh air.
It’s been 199 days since Tamir Rice was shot to death by a Cleveland police officer. And for a group of community leaders in the Forest City, that’s too long to wait for prosecutors to charge the officers involved in the shooting. Instead, they went to a municipal court judge Tuesday morning and asked him to issue a warrant for the officers on charges of murder, aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide, and dereliction of duty.
If that sounds confusing, it’s not just you. The activists made the request under an obscure provision of Ohio law that entitles citizens to file an affidavit demanding an arrest. While a few other states have similar clauses, the law is little-known and seldom-used—especially in cases of murder. A close reading of the statute suggests that it’s unlikely to seriously change the direction of the case, since any murder charge ultimately has to go through a grand jury. But the filing of affidavits sends a signal, and might add some pressure on the prosecutor to file charges against Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback.
“What you see here is one of the most American things I’ve seen in my life,” said Walter Madison, an attorney for the Rice family, at a press conference on the courthouse steps after filing the affidavits. “The people have taken the opportunity to make the government work for them. This is not a circumvention. This is simply applying the law that is available.” …TheAtlantic