Oscar Grant III (1986-2009) was killed in the early hours of January 1st 2009 by the police of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART, the trains of the San Francisco bay). He was shot in the back by police officer Johannes Mehserle. When Grant was shot he was face down on the ground, unarmed and, just before he was shot, had a knee in his back. You can see it (kind of) on YouTube.
Why was Grant shot?
Some say it was all a mistake, that Mehserle thought he was pulling out his Taser to stun Grant but pulled out his gun by mistake.
Others say it was because Grant was black and a black man, even face down on the ground with a knee in his back, is still somehow a deadly threat. Grant is just the latest in a long line of unarmed black men killed by the police. Sean Bell was the latest well-known one in New York. There are too few white ones to think that race has nothing to do with it, to think that they are all “mistakes”.
Some in the press have been quick to point out that Grant has a police record and has been to prison. As if that somehow makes a difference in this case.
Mehserle has not been charged with any crime. He has left the police force and does not speak to the press. Grant’s family is taking him to court for $25 million in damages in a wrongful death lawsuit.
The video that we have comes from the mobile phones of the passengers on the stopped train. Right after the shooting, the train doors were closed and the police took many of the phones, but they did not get them all. There is also video from the BART cameras in the station. That video has not been made public.
There have been protests in Oakland. One march on city hall turned violent, burning cars and breaking shop windows.
Oakland is across the bay from San Francisco. It is a mixed race city of 400,000. For cities of its size it has one of the highest murder rates in the country. Black men in Oakland are being killed and thrown in prison in high numbers. Bill Cosby says it is due to a lack of a moral upbringing on the part of blacks.
John McWhorter would call the shooting, at worst, an “imperfection” of post-racial America.
Grant and his friends were coming home from a night in San Francisco to bring in the new year. A fight broke out on the train. When it arrived in the Fruitvale station, the police stopped the train and pulled off Grant and some of his friends. They did everything the police told them to do.
Grant, 22, worked in the meat department at Farmer Joe’s Marketplace. He lived with his girlfriend and their four-year-old daughter. He has served time in prison for selling drugs but seemed to have been setting his life straight.
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