Controversy - BART Shooting Verdict

Today the verdict was announced in the Grant Oscar BART shooting case.

Here's a little background information on what happened the day of the shooting:

On January 1, 2009, police were called to the Oakland Fruitvale station of BART after passengers complained about fights on the train. One of the responding officers was Johannes Mehserle, a BART police officer. Bystanders took cell phone video of what followed - three suspects were sitting on the platform when one tried to get up. The video shows officers pushing him back down, at which point one of them puts his knee on the suspect's head. Another officer stands above him, pulls out his weapon and fires a single shot into the back of the man laying on the ground. The man, 22-year-old Grant Oscar, died. Today, the officer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter which typically carries a 2 to 4 year prison sentence.

One version of the video can be seen here.

I have two conflicting opinions on this. The first is that you probably should never put yourself in a position to have one police officer with his knee on your head and another has his gun drawn on you. You should never resist arrest. Oscar Grant had a background of two prison terms for various felonies including drug dealing. He also did time for running from the police with a loaded weapon (an incident that he was Tazed in). Does any of that mean he should have been shot in the back while laying face down? Absolutely not. Might he have done something that was not captured on the grainy cell phone video that would have provoked the officers? Maybe.

Here's my other opinion: I believe that being a police officer might be the hardest job in the world. You constantly see society at their worst, and if you trusted everyone, you would end up dead. In this case, Mehserle claims that he meant to draw his Taser, not his gun. Was it truly a horrible mistake?

Let's talk a little about involuntary manslaughter. The actual definition is as follows: the unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought. Basically, you killed someone without actually meaning to (as opposed to you set out with the purpose of taking life). Another example of this would be accidentally backing your car over a child. So, if he truly meant to pull his Taser but in the heat of the moment pulled his gun instead, wouldn't that be involuntary manslaughter? The idea behind this lesser conviction (as opposed to murder) is that you shouldn't lock someone away for life who did not set out to be a murderer - they still deserve to be punished, but at a lesser sentence.

Also, there's the race deal. It breaks my heart to see that racial prejudice still exists in our country today, but I'm sad to report that it's alive and well. You see, Mehserle is a white man while Oscar was a black man. There are claims that if both men would have been white, the same actions would not have been taken. There are claims that he may have received a harsher punishment if there had been a black person on the jury (there were none).

Finally, it's really sad that there was reason to be nervous if you were in Oakland today. It turns out that police and city officials were worried that once the verdict was read there would be riots throughout Oakland. It makes me really sad that people can't find any other way to get their point across other than completely destroying their own city. What happened to community pride? Luckily, it seems that there were a few relatively minor incidents, but still sad that we live in a society that still thinks violence gets a point across.

Personally, I'm very torn in this case. I firmly believe that you should never be in a position to have the police arresting you, but I do understand that sometimes it happens. I like to think that our police officers are trained to react calmly in situations that would scare the crap out of us normal people (the same way that EMTs and paramedics are trained to see people in horrible crashes, but still remain rational). I'd like to think that there would be safeguards in place that would allow an officer to feel the difference in a taser gun and a pistol when they are in his hand. I think it's a truly sad situation and that both Mehserle and Oscar's lives have been destroyed.