Michael Brown. That name you know. It was in all the papers.
He was the black teen shot to death August 9 by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. The officer, who was not charged with a crime and has now resigned, claimed that Brown, after being slightly wounded and then chased by Wilson, abruptly turned and came unarmed toward the officer to attack him. It made no sense.
Russell Smith. That’s a name you likely forgot. It was in the papers a bit, although Seattle Weekly published a detailed report on his death (“Nowhere to Run,” Dec. 4, 2013).
He was the unarmed black man shot to death in Seattle on March 22, 2013 by a group of white police officers from Bellevue, working with the Seattle Police Department. They were serving an arrest warrant in Columbia City. Smith, 51, an ex-con wanted for armed robbery, allegedly tried to flee in his car when the Bellevue SWAT team arrived in the morning darkness in a Bear Cat armored vehicle. It didn’t make much sense, either.
Though the dead end street was blocked, leaving Smith nowhere to go, he took off, allegedly almost hitting officers with the vehicle. Three cops fired 21 rounds, narrowly missing other officers in a crossfire. Smith, behind the wheel, raised his hands, then put them over his face as he was hit with eight bullets at close range, one in the side of his head.
The shooting included elements that also arose in the Ferguson killing. None of the officers were charged with a crime, and many questions were left unanswered—among them, whether Smith was trying to surrender when shot. A similar question lingers in the Brown case.
There were indications that Smith—who was starting his car to go to work when the cops suddenly descended, shining flashlights in his face and pointing guns—impulsively backed out of his driveway because he was confused and frightened.
The record also suggested there was a safer way to arrest Smith. According to 428 pages of police reports, photos, and video from the scene, a Bellevue detective had stood just feet away from Smith two weeks earlier, watching him walk into a meeting with his corrections officer. He was not arrested in that secure setting, police claimed, because they needed more proof. Yet they also still needed more proof when they launched their raid: The arrest warrant’s purpose was to collect more viable robbery evidence.
In other words, they killed the unarmed suspect during a raid they hoped would prove he’d actually committed a crime. Smith may be dead, but irony isn’t.
There was another similarity to Ferguson. At an inquest into the Smith shooting held earlier this year, a King County jury couldn’t decide whether Smith was trying to surrender when killed. But jurors gave thumbs-up to the shooting anyway, as did the Missouri grand jury last week after leaving unsettled the question of Brown’s attempted surrender.
No one should be surprised. Such juries—as opposed to adversarial trial juries—can be manipulated to issue a desired verdict. In one 12-month period, for example, federal grand juries failed to issue indictments in only 11 of 162,000 federal cases presented by prosecutors. Likewise, some form of justifiable homicide has been the outcome of almost every King County inquest into more than 200 police-related deaths in 65 years of record keeping. Inquest hearings notoriously favor police.
But surrendering isn’t necessarily an option, either. In Seattle in the past two decades, 31-year-old mentally disabled Filipino Antonio Dunsmore was riddled with SPD bullets—28 entrance and exit wounds—after he was cornered and killed for pointing a clear plastic water pistol; Edward Anderson, a 28-year-old black man, was hung up in a fence when a Seattle cop pointed a gun 12 inches from his Adam’s apple and shot him “accidentally”; Erdman Bascom, 42 and black, was killed by police raiders when they saw him standing in his living room with a TV remote; and John T. Williams, 50 and native, was using a knife to carve wood when he was shot and killed four seconds after a cop stepped out of his car.
Jittery cops, poorly led and trained and immunized from bad decisions, guarantee this will continue.
What can be done? A few years back at the Central District’s First AME Church, when a crowd gathered to talk to city officials about the latest police shooting, I listened as a black man stepped forward and said he’d found the solution.
“I’ve been stopped by the police, and they say ‘Do you mind if we search you?’ ” he said. “Of course I mind. But you’ve got the gun, you’ve got the power, and I want to live until tomorrow. So do what you want to do.”
Hands up, don’t shoot, he was saying. It seemed laughable. Today it’s a mantra to live by. E
randerson@seattleweekly.com
Rick Anderson writes about sex, crime, money, and politics, which tend to be the same thing. His latest book is Floating Feet: Irregular Dispatches From the Emerald City.
