Thoughts on an Execution: The Death of Mario Woods

Mario Woods was executed by a semi-circular firing squad of San Francisco police on December 2nd, 2015.

Three different videos of the slaughter, taken with cellphone cameras, were made public. They spread widely, triggering protests and a fiery townhall meeting. The videos were analyzed in freeze-frame and used in turn by the San Francisco Chief of Police, Greg Suhr, to claim his officers were justified in the firing of a large number of rounds at a man with a knife threatening to attack an officer...

Chief Greg Suhr told the crowd of about 100 gathered at City College of San Francisco's southeast campus that Mario Woods had extended his arm while holding a kitchen knife and moved toward an officer during the incident in The City's Bayview.

and analyzed by a news station, KQED, to claim that Mario did not have his arm extended and was not posing a threat when the first shot was fired...

A KQED analysis of an Instagram video showing last week's fatal police shooting of Mario Woods appears to contradict claims by Police Chief Greg Suhr that officers opened fire only after Woods made a threatening movement... a careful review of the short Instagram video Suhr referred to suggests that officers opened fire a fraction of a second before Woods’ arm moved. 

What happened or didn't happen in the instant before the first shot was fired is not all there is. What else we saw and heard in the videos is crucial to understanding, on a larger scale, what is going on:

• We saw ten or so officers surround an obviously confused and frightened individual, all pointing their drawn weapons at him, all obviously ready in a hairsbreath to pull a trigger at any provocation - imagined or not.
• We saw a firing squad, with no one in command (in fact, if not in structure). We saw men with a license to kill with no plan other than to shout and reshout at someone huddled up against a wall.
• We hear one officer fire, and then we heard the others, almost certainly reflexively, create a fusillade, continuing their hail of bullets even after Woods lies on the sidewalk, dying.

More broadly...

• We see the end result of the militarization of the police - not in their weaponry, as is evident in many other incidents, but in mindset.
• We see the end result of policies that give short shrift - probably no shrift - to de-escalation and respect for human life.
• We see the end result of racist policing - a young black man surrounded by all white (as far as I can discern) cops from a police force famously known for messaging racist texts with nary a concern; a young black man in a predominantly person of color neighborhood so surrounded and then terminated with extreme prejudice.

We have now seen one of the most brutal executions on record, going beyond stupidity (as in the case of Demouria Hogg); going beyond one racist, sadistic, power-mad cop (as in the case of Laquan McDonald or Walter Scott). If anything, this case is similar to one in Cleveland a few years ago, where the police essentially went insane, firing 137 rounds at a stopped car (Apparently, 136 bullets were NOT enough). As was written there

...we have uncovered yet another way for police to kill and get away with it: a firing squad. And they don't even have to load one of their guns at random with a blank.

The prosecutor in the case said

We're asking our officers, based on their training, not to be compelled by fear to kill people when there's other reasonable, objectively reasonable, options available to you.

Good luck with that.

Unless and until the use of force laws are changed; unless and until reality becomes and officers realize there is a plausible chance they will be convicted of murder when they fire their weapons; unless and until the public demands, and officers are trained, and retrained, and trained some more, in de-escalation techniques as their primary response; unless and until the public demands real respect for human life - demands that young black and brown men not be treated as sub-human - and officers are hired who practice such:

The 1200 extra-judicial police killings a year will continue.

That's the way it is.