truthfront

Tag: Crime

  • Carter Creek

    A woman walking her dog on the asphalt path found him half submerged in the water of Carter Creek with the rest of his body tangled in the waterside shrubbery. The woman told investigators that she knew he was dead because his head and torso were not moving underwater and his legs were pointed upward and impossibly corkscrewed together. The police roped off the area and examiners lifted the man from the cold water to find him headless. I’d say he’s been here longer than 24 hours, said an examiner, removing her sunglasses to wipe them with her shirt. I’ve no idea how his legs could twist up like that.

    News of the grisly discovery quickly spread and the detectives requested assistance to keep the crowd of reporters away. The two worked in the bright cold of a November morning one mile south of the capitol where giant trees lined the creek’s diagonal path northward toward the glimmering symmetry of downtown. The detectives studied the body for as long as possible before it was transported to the coroner. One detective traveled with the body and the other stood where the dead man lay minutes ago. He listened to the trickling water, the chorus of curious birds watching from branches above. Other examiners stalked the area, snapping twigs beneath their feet. The detective kneeled closer to the water and studied the thorny bushes, asking an examiner to take photographs. Fabric from the dead man’s clothes waved in the chilled breeze. Two officers in wetsuits and breathing gear searched the water for the man’s head or anything else of interest to the detectives.

    The detective scoured the scene for hours. The other called from the coroner’s office. Seems his head was chopped off with an axe, he said. Probably after he was shot in the chest. Two bullets near the heart likely killed him. Then he was decapitated. The body was then moved to the creek and dumped there. 

    The detective put the phone back in his pocket and an officer handed him a fresh paper cup of coffee. He opened the steaming lid and sipped. It was the second headless body found in the city that week. He shivered and got back to work.

  • James Forman on cop gangs

     

    [D.C. police] aggressiveness [in the 1990s] came at an appalling human and eventually financial cost. A 73-year-old retired postal worker was beaten after officers mistook him for a suspect; the man ended up with a broken arm. A 56-year-old-woman was beaten with a nightstick after challenging officers involved in an altercation with two of her children; another woman was cursed at, hit, and maced outside of the restaurant where she worked. Much like Staten Island’s Eric Garner, a 31-year-old deaf man named Frankie Murphy stopped breathing while an officer held him in a choke hold;  he died in police custody. After a dangerous ride in a police wagon–much like the one suffered by Freddie Gray in Baltimore–a 28-year-old former US Marine named James Cox won two separate lawsuits against the police. As a result of such incidents, D.C. paid out about $1 million per year to victims of police misconduct during the early 1990s. Yet the abuses continued.

    At the same time, a culture of impunity flourished with regard to less violent but more common police intrusions into the daily lives of black citizens. Swearing and yelling, making belittling remarks, using illegitimate orders, conducting random and unwarranted searches, demanding that suspects “get up against the wall”–these behaviors rarely led to lawsuits or newspaper coverage. But for residents of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, especially young people, this treatment became part of the social contract, a tax paid in exchange for the right to move in public spaces. Police mistreatment became part of growing up.[1]

    Whatever their individual intentions or motivations, officers were bound by a system that was the source of their orders, training, and beliefs. Their job was to make teeth rattle, “arrest those s.o.b.s,” and to prove that they were the biggest gang in town. In cities across America, they still do.[2]

    [1]  Forman, Jr., James. Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2017: 171.

    [2] Ibid: 183-184.