Johannes Mehserle: Not the Devil

There's something about the power of a random bystander's camera or video phone:  The power to mislead and influence people into believing that they're seeing the entire truth of any situation.  People tend to forget the stories before and after the few-minutes clip they see on their nightly news or are linked to via YouTube because "seeing is believing," even if the only thing being seen is one tiny fragment of a larger picture.  If you live by this philosophy, you might not realize why the Mona Lisa, for example, is such an important work of art, because chances are great you're focused on one brush stroke in the background.

This isn't a new phenomenon brought about by the instant connectivity provided by the internet and YouTube, but rather something we've been seeing for quite awhile.  Look back to that March night in 1991 in Sacramento, California.  An inebriated man is leading a high-speed chase, a chase he admits in his own words occurred because a DUI would be disastrous to his parole (which translates to the selfish lawless that you can drive drunk, you just can't get caught), on a freeway and then through a residential area.  When finally he stops the car, his passengers get out and are arrested without incident, but the driver taunts the police, fights them, resists arrest.  None of this is seen on the video George Holliday taped from his apartment of Rodney King on that night; what does appear on that video is a gang of white cops beating a black man.

An incident that would have gone unnoticed instead went down in the annals of time as the quintessential race-motivated beating of an innocent man because people were presented with sensationalist reporting feeding on their very fear and paranoia driven by one random bystander's video.  The now infamous Los Angeles Riots of 1992 were the result, where 53 people lost their lives, over 2,000 were injured and nearly countless damages occurred.  Riots wherein truly innocent people were made to suffer.

I can't help but feel that the country is being made to walk through the fire again with Oscar Grant's unfortunate death in 2009.  With the recent trial of Bay Area Rapid Transit officer Johannes Mehserle, we see the riots beginning to swell already.  Organizers start with good, peaceful intentions to exercise their right to convene civilly in protest of something they feel is wrong only to degrade themselves once more into an animalistic frenzy of violence and destruction.

One need only do a rudimentary search on YouTube to find a collection of videos and set oneself up to make his own judgment, videos that fail to mention that Oscar Grant was detained because he was positively identified by the train operator as one who was involved in starting fights that prompted the officers to be called in the first place, or that he had physically resisted arrest by trying to scramble back into a train car to be whisked away and avoid any punishment for the physical altercation.  What we see, instead, is essentially a remake of an old classic:  White cops brutalizing an innocent black man.

I don't buy that Mehserle, a trained officer who graduated from the academy in the top five of his class, mistook a heavy 40-caliber Sig Sauer for a taser, but I do buy his parallel line of defense:

"...Officer Mehserle... attempted to restrain Mr. Grant and to seek his compliance by ordering him to put his hands behind his back to be handcuffed, but Mr. Grant resisted and refused to submit to handcuffing. Officer Mehserle was pulling at Mr. Grant’s right hand and arm, which remained under his torso near his waistband. Mr. Grant had not been searched by any officer for weapons, either prior to his initial detention or after being seated near the wall...

"...(Officer) Pirone said he heard Mehserle say, "Put your hands behind your back, stop resisting, stop resisting, put your hands behind your back." Then Mehserle said, "I'm going to taze him, I'm going to taze him. I can't get his arms. He won't give me his arms. His hands are going for his waistband." Then Mehserle popped up and said, "Tony, Tony, get away, back up, back up." Pirone did not know if Grant was armed. Mehserle had fear in his voice. Pirone had never heard Mehserle's voice with that tone. Mehserle sounded afraid."

Johannes Mehserle, having already responded to several calls involving illegal weapons that early New Year's morning, had believed Grant to be armed.  Contrary to the popular, and erroneous, belief that Oscar Grant had been handcuffed and so couldn't have been reaching for any weapon, real or otherwise, he was not restrained by handcuffs.  He had been resisting arrest, and the officers were clearly unable to place handcuffs upon him.

It is unfortunate that Oscar Grant had decided to resist arrest that night on the BART platform, and it's unfortunate that an officer already shaken up from a hectic night of duty made a decidedly poor decision in his attempts to subdue a criminal.  It is unfortunate that people claim it was racially motivated (prompted by one officer's, not Mehserle, use of the word "nigger" in a parroting fashion after being called a "bitch-ass nigger" by Oscar Grant himself), and it's unfortunate that the rioting has already begun.

However, I don't vilify Officer Mehserle, and I feel that his sentence of two years plus time served is more than reasonable for his actions in the line of duty.  I can't join the raucous cacophony of angry YouTube viewers chanting the played-out "F*ck the police" line, and I refuse to accept criminals becoming the faces of innocence in the name of racially motivated politics.  

I don't put any stock in "seeing is believing" when seeing is only half of understanding.