Good Speech

The prosecutor took a long time about getting to what he surely knew was the only thing anyone cared to hear him say. Much of that time was devoted to a lecture directed at the news media, at social media, and at the citizenry in general. It was a lecture on the importance of patience and the grand jury process.
It seemed to me that the very structure of these interviews fostered courtesy, a posture of respect, on the part of the person conducting the interrogation. Prosecutors need the cooperation of both witnesses and jurors. They also must do their work in a manner safe from legal challenge. So they are forced to cultivate patience: patience with procedure; patience with witnesses, many of whom are afraid or upset or inarticulate or barely audible; and patience with lay jurors operating on the basis of common sense and whatever bundle of attitudes and information they happen to bring with them into the jury room.
This was apparently a highly unusual grand jury, one conducted with particular patience -- indeed, it sounded from his description almost as if he elected to run it as a second trial, one that would identify which of the witnesses were most credible and how their testimony fit with the physical evidence. That's unusual, although perhaps our system would work better if it were the standard practice.

Will it be as satisfying as an acquittal at trial, which this result strongly suggests would have occurred had the grand jury operated along more standard practices? I expect some will argue that the differential treatment constitutes an unjust preferential treatment for the officer (though if so it seems to me that the way to fix that injustice is to take more time to present a full and fair analysis of the facts at grand juries generally). On the other hand, if the facts are clear, the facts are clear and it is right not to put the public through another year or more of trauma over what was clearly going to be an acquittal.

In any case, the speech strongly conveyed a sense of a governmental authority figure taking pains to make sure that nothing was hidden, that everything was understood, and that the public could see that the system worked in a highly controversial case. Those qualities of competence and transparency we could use a lot more of from government.

UPDATE:

Apparently not everyone was persuaded.





I'm putting this up so that she can have her say. At the moment she is terribly angry, and clearly views the process -- which seems to have been very thorough, and which has now released the evidence for the public to analyze on our own -- as a lie. When time has passed, it will be interesting to see what statutory changes her group proposes to address these issues. That part sounds like an interesting idea.

UPDATE: The released documents related to the case, thousands of pages in length. I'm sure people will pour through them carefully over the next weeks. Hopefully, the transparency involved will help mitigate the anger. In time, people may come to agree with the grand jury.

Or not.

14 comments:

Eric Blair said...

She is about to find out how little her 'party' actually cares about her.

Texan99 said...

All this talks about legacies and so forth. All I see is poor impulse control, starting with the gentle giant roughing up a store clerk who had the temerity to ask him to pay for the stuff he was walking out of the store with. Root cause No. 2: a total refusal by friends and family to accept that screwing up has predictable consequences. I'll never understand why parents think it's a good idea to paint their criminal children as pathetic victims. It's not as though they'd ever seen that improve the lives of anyone else's children.

Grim said...

I tell you what I see. Everybody who thinks the process was pretty good for government work -- a tense situation made better by transparency and thorough, careful work -- is thinking about this in terms of the facts of the one case. That's how the law works, after all. If you think this was the right decision under the law, then you're concerned about what happened in this particular case between these particular individuals.

If you are outraged to the point of race war, you're not thinking about this particular case. You're thinking about a general sweep of hundreds of things to which this is being added. The ACLU statement was explicit about this. "The grand jury's decision does not negate the fact that Michael Brown's tragic death is part of an alarming national trend of officers using excessive force against people of color, often during routine encounters. Yet in most cases, the officers and police departments are not held accountable."

So for the people who are furious, this riot is not about this case. Even if the Brown case is the proximate or efficient cause, it's in no way the formal or final cause. In that sense, there's really nothing the prosecutor could have said that would satisfy them, because he can't speak to hundreds or thousands of incidents -- nor would it be appropriate to judge this case in light of the trend the ACLU is talking about. That's not how the law works.

On the other hand, the President's remarks last night were plainly harmful.

Elise said...

The points that stuck with me about this case were that the government and the police department in Ferguson were not representative of the racial mix in Ferguson - and that voter turnout in Ferguson in the local elections prior to the shooting was in the 12-16% range.

If this speaker's call to action creates greater involvement in the election process at the local level - the level that really matters in cases like this - that will be a great good.

RonF said...

"The grand jury's decision does not negate the fact that Michael Brown's tragic death is part of an alarming national trend of officers using excessive force against people of color, often during routine encounters."

1) Being charged at by an angry 6' 4" 295 lb. heavily muscled man is not a routine encounter.
2) According to the FBI, in 2012 nearly twice as many white people as black people were killed by police officers.

RonF said...

"If this speaker's call to action creates greater involvement in the election process at the local level - the level that really matters in cases like this - that will be a great good."

That depends. Will that greater involvement consist of people who will examine the issues, engage in rational debate and then vote on the basis of logic and experience? Or will it consist of people who believe whoever tells them things that confirm their pre-determine predjudices and then vote on the basis of racism and ignorance?

I'm afraid I suspect the latter - in which case, St. Louis will end up looking like Detroit.

Anonymous said...

I watched the full explanation, and then could not find it for a while, so I am posting it here.

Ferguson Prosecutor Robert McCulloch Conference, the evidence before the grand jury, and the differences between the media narrative and the evidence, and differences among testimony of the witnesses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4PZoCyjZd4

I think Grim is right about this: "So for the people who are furious, this riot is not about this case." And yet, this case is what was before the grand jury.

I have a deep distrust of anyone who tries to use a specific case in the service of "larger issues" because the result is injustice, often gross injustice.

Valerie

Ymar Sakar said...

On the other hand, the President's remarks last night were plainly harmful.

Maybe Hussein Obola was just forgetting himself momentary while awaiting his golf session.

The King must be obeyed... or else.

Grim said...

Ron:

The problem with point #2 is that the numbers still work out badly. If there were double the white population, then what you've got is not a disparity but a quantitative equality. But the actual figures are 72/13%, which is 5.5 times the figure; thus, whites are less than half as likely to be killed by the police.

It sounds to me like Ferguson has a particularly poisoned political culture, both in terms of the citizenry and the relationship between the citizenry and the elected officials. I don't agree with the President's claim that this generalizes to America, nor do I think it's properly claimed to be 'a part of a trend' that ropes in every bad thing that ever happens between a white officer and a black teenager.

Cass said...

... the actual figures are 72/13%, which is 5.5 times the figure; thus, whites are less than half as likely to be killed by the police.

And this means.... what?

Blacks are disproportionately represented among murderers (IOW, there's a *disparity* between their actual proportions in the populace and the proportion of murders that are committed each year).

Now I suppose we can blame the police for this disparity, but I hardly think police are causing blacks to kill each other.

You're acting as though race were the most important determinant here (rather than just the most visible). When even blacks are afraid of other blacks (statistically, they're right to be) then something other than policing or white racism is going on.

Grim said...

I'm not convinced of the importance of race at all, actually. I'm making just the rhetorical argument: you can't convince blacks that the system isn't aimed at them by merely citing the absolute figure ('twice as many white people were killed') because of the rate ('blacks are more than five times as likely to be killed').

What people on the other side are mad about is this sense of their being a 'trend' or a systemic problem in which blacks are unfairly targeted. It would be great to have a solid counterargument of the type Ron was attempting in point (2), but we don't have one. Blacks do have relatively worse outcomes, even where they don't have absolutely worse ones. So the absolute numbers aren't very convincing to people on that side of the discussion.

Elise said...

Will that greater involvement consist of people who will examine the issues, engage in rational debate and then vote on the basis of logic and experience? Or will it consist of people who believe whoever tells them things that confirm their pre-determine predjudices and then vote on the basis of racism and ignorance?

The same question can be asked of all voters in a democracy. I think it's a good thing for people to take charge of their own lives and to live with the consequences of doing so. Even when the outcome is undesirable it stills seems better than people feeling hopeless and powerless and blaming others for what happens to them.

Cass said...

Actually, Jason Riley makes precisely that argument in today's WSJ (I'm a huge fan of his writing):

According to the FBI, homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be murdered. And while you’d never know it watching MSNBC, the police are not to blame. Blacks are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all murders in the U.S., and more than 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Liberals like to point out that most whites are killed by other whites, too. That’s true but beside the point given that the white crime rate is so much lower than the black rate.

Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of “over-policing” certain neighborhoods to juice black arrest rates. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the emergency calls originate, and they spend much of their time trying to stop residents of the same race from harming one another.

If anything, these numbers suggest to me that whites may well be overrepresented as victims of officer-involved shootings. I'll have to crunch the numbers later when I have some time.

Grim said...

That's interesting, because I was just reading an article by a left-leaning friend that interprets a very similar set of information in exactly the opposite way.