August 5, 2008
Creeping Totalitarianism Department
Tarika Wilson's Killer Found Not Guilty
Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, the Lima SWAT team member who killed Tarika Wilson and wounded her infant son, was not convicted. Not knowing all the facts of the case, that may even be the right decision.
I've always felt that the problem with these tragedies is not necessarily with the officers who pull the trigger, but with the very idea that it's a good idea to have cops doing armed home invasions.
Still, it's depressing that the system is set up to allow injustices like this.
(Hat tip: Pete Guither)
5 Comments
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It's always different when the bullet comes from a gun in the hands of a police officer. Sometimes it should be. But cop acquittals always leave a smell lingering in the courtroom.
Yeah. It's the police officer's duty to look for trouble and confront it, and sometimes they receive a court's permission to do things the rest of us can't do. So they deserve to be cut some slack for some of the things that can go wrong.
But boy do they get a lot of slack sometimes.
[Note: I have deleted the referenced comment.]
Wow. I never got a comment like that before.
Windypundit has a strict no-hate-speech policy for its authors, but I never decided how to handle it in the comments. Delete it as offensive and off-topic? Leave it in as a testimony to human depravity?
I'm tempted to delete it as pure trolling, but does it count as trolling when the poster is sincere? This appears to be a post from Bill White, who's the top guy at the American National Socialist Worker's party, so I'm pretty sure he means every word of it.
By the way, his email address is at (I'm not making this up) nazi.org, which is the website of (I'm not making this up either) the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party.
Any thoughts, people?
As far as Bill White's comment, I say delete it. It adds nothing to the discussion and would harm your ability to have a reasoned civil debate that may benefit someone.
"but with the very idea that it's a good idea to have cops doing armed home invasions"
Well, the fact is that drug crimes happen in upscale neighborhoods too. Yet these types of operations do not occur in upscale neighborhoods. Instead, the war on drugs is only fought in poor communities. If these raids - and the attendant collateral damage - happened in expensive condos and suburban gated communities (where of course there are certainly of drug users and dealers, as well as prostitution and other activities) they would be outlawed in exactly five minutes.
Now that I've had time to think about it, I've decided the comment was just trolling and I deleted it. Thanks for your input.
That's a good point about this stuff mostly happening in poor neighborhoods, but there have been a few exceptions. The first one to come to mind is Sal Culosi, shot during a sports betting investigation. He was an optometrist, so I'm guessing he lived in a nice neighborhood.
Then there's the first of these cases I ever heard of: Donald Scott. He was a millionaire, which made the possibility of seizing his ranch very enticing to the Los Angeles County Sheriffs department. They killed him in 1992. No drugs were found.
And in Princes Georges County, Maryland, a SWAT team raided the home of the mayor of Berwyn Heights, who seems to be a middle-class white guy. He survived, but of course they killed his pet dogs. No drugs were found.