The Trial Over Ahmaud Arbery’s Killing
He was chased and shot to death on a residential street. But will a jury rule that he was murdered?
The ballet of the pen is at times, divine
He was chased and shot to death on a residential street. But will a jury rule that he was murdered?
A six-month investigation of Glynn County police records and court documents by The Current show a persistent lack of accountability among county law enforcement that stretches back a decade. Between 2010-2019 the district attorney’s office declined to prosecute a single county police officer. Glynn police officers have been involved in at least six controversial shootings and named as defendants in at least a dozen civil lawsuits alleging misconduct, including racial profiling and wrongful death.
We gathered documents from both Brunswick police and Glynn County police and in order to have a baseline, we also were collecting records from police in Savannah and Chatham County… What we found out was that, one: there actually is no law across the state of Georgia that mandates police departments anywhere to keep certain data or not… Glynn County has only retained three years of police — policing data, traffic stops, 911 calls.
I’m almost ready to say that when it comes to achieving a goal — especially an ambitious one — I believe your outcome isn’t so much determined by what you do, but who you do it with. Outcomes, like math problems, are determined by a factorization of known quantities. Math is never magic. There is an inescapable fatalism in it. Embrace it, because you cannot outwit it or outrun it. Make the absolute most of every piece you’ve got on the board, and remember what every good chess player knows: pawns win games. Spend no time mourning the weakness of your fellow cast. Improve it whenever you can, but if you make an enemy, never let it be by accident. After all, in real life pawns don’t wear pawn costumes and queens wear no crowns.
The mission of the police union is to protect police jobs at all costs. They’re usually led by old-school types who are often the biggest opponents to any accountability. In Minneapolis, the Police Union president, Bob Kroll, is a very controversial figure. He is already vowing to fight to get the 4 officers involved in the death of George Floyd reinstated, and he, himself, has had 29 complaints against him as a cop.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.
In her first year alone, non-violent drug crimes resulting in prison terms doubled, with a full two-thirds ending in imprisonment. And while Minnesota’s record of extraordinarily vast racial disparities in imprisonment certainly didn’t begin with Amy Klobuchar’s tenure, during the eight years she served as chief prosecutor her insistence on longer sentences for less serious crimes actually drove up the number of prison inmates in the state by one-fifth, despite the fact that crime rates in Minneapolis had been dropping at least three years before she took office.