By Anthony Gregory
If the police found a dead body in the back of your car, hands tied
behind the back, with a hole in the head, and your defense was that the person
shot himself, how do you think they would react?
And yet
this has happened in police cars at least three times. This time, in
Durhman, North Carolina, a teenager, searched, arrested, handcuffed behind his back, shoved in
the back of a police car, supposedly shot himself in the head with a firearm
the police apparently had failed to find. If the cops’ story is true, we have a
case of a suicidal young man who could have easily made a fortune on the Vegas
strip mimicking David Copperfield, or at least done well as a contortionist on
a traveling circus act.
The police
chief explains: “I know that it is hard for people not in law enforcement to
understand how someone could be capable of shooting themselves while handcuffed
behind the back. . . . While incidents like this are not common, they
unfortunately have happened in other jurisdictions in the past.”
Yes,
they’ve happened in other jurisdictions. Or so other police have said.
Now, one
doesn’t have to be a paranoid troublemaker to suggest another possible
scenario.* A good detective would consider alternatives in the case of any
homicide, and if a non-police officer were found with a body in the back of his
car, the presumption would probably not be suicide. Of course, it is at least
possible that the cops in this case are simply lying—that they had held the gun
to the boy’s head to instill fear in him, and they accidentally fired the
weapon, killing him, and came up with a ridiculous story to cover it up—one so
ridiculous it just might work, as it’s apparently worked before. The other
possibility, which in a sane world anyone would realize is also much more
likely than suicide, is that a police officer simply murdered the kid in cold
blood, execution-style, for whatever reason.
If the inquiry goes as it usually does, and the officers involved simply
take a little time off and come back to work in a month or so, I predict we
will be seeing this kind of thing happen much more often. If all it takes to
explain this away is “he must have shot himself,” any economist will tell you
the incentive structure will encourage more such mystery shootings.
There will
be some outrage over this, some demands for more police accountability and
transparency, as there always are. But it will not result in any sort of actual
change in policy or meaningful restraint of officers. For one thing, American
culture is thoroughly statist when it comes to law enforcement issues. It is
the one area where folks skeptical of government are most likely to cave, as
respectable members of society still fear ordinary street crime more than the
police state emerging around them. Modern American police forces are
characterized by gangsterism and a fetishization of “officer safety” as the
primary value. The rest of us are just potential collateral damage in their war
on crime. And perversely enough, there exists among conservative and other
circles this myth that the media are too hard on police, and so they work
overtime to support their local law enforcers. In truth, of course, the mass
media hardly report the daily killings, injuries, false imprisonments, rapes,
burglaries, and crime sprees police are responsible for in most urban
jurisdictions nationwide.
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