Trayvon Martin, From Pursuit to Gunshot - What Part Am I Missing Here

So far we have a 911 call in which we hear that George Zimmerman is following Trayvon Martin, despite being instructed by the police not to do so. Consistent with Zimmerman's report that, part way through his following Martin, Martin started running, we have the report of a friend of Martin's that he had noticed that he was being followed by a strange man and that she had told him to run.

Next we have the police recitation of Zimmerman's account of how he came to shoot Martin,

Police disclosed to the Orlando Sentinel that there is about a one-minute gap, after Zimmerman called police and before he fatally shot Martin, during which police say they're not sure what happened.

In Zimmerman's version of events, he had stopped following Martin and had turned around and was walking back to his SUV when Martin approached him from behind. The two exchanged words, then Martin punched him in the nose, sending him to the ground, and began beating him.

The police department is apparently attempting to overcome concerns over its competence in handling the investigation by leaking like a sieve - but only information prejudicial to Martin. But what I want to know is this: How did we go from having Zimmerman warm and dry in his car, being told by the police not to follow Martin, to having Zimmerman out of his car and engaging in fisticuffs with Martin?

Even if we assume that Martin got the upper hand at some point, and even if we're willing to take Zimmerman's story at face value, are we to believe that Martin turned around, ran toward Zimmerman, used some form of superpower to stop Zimmerman's moving car, pulled the door open, pulled Zimmerman out and then started to beat him? That doesn't seem very likely, does it?

So what I want to know is how Zimmerman came to be out of his car and in a physical confrontation with Martin, and why it would not have been perfectly reasonable for a 17-year-old who was not doing anything wrong to be very concerned about being stalked then accosted by a man who had no legitimate business accosting him, and who outweighed him by a good 100 pounds. Perv? Mugger? What would go through your mind?

It is inescapable that it was Zimmerman who created the context for Martin's fears, and that it was Zimmerman who in flagrant disregard of the instruction he received from the police chose to continue to chase Martin, and who chose to get out of his car and physically confront Martin. Are we to believe that after all of his bravado, and after starting that confrontation, Zimmerman didn't try to get physical with Martin when Martin continued to try to get away from him? Had Martin shot Zimmerman at that point, wouldn't he have the stronger case for self-defense?

And if that's the case, how the bleep does Martin's act of self-defense, after being stalked by a dim-witted, gun-toting police officer wannabe, become legal grounds for Zimmerman to kill him? Even a keystone kop should be able to see the problem with allowing a person who creates a violent scene to claim self-defense based upon his victim's acts of self-defense. What was Martin's supposed reason for breaking off his stalking of Martin and returning to his SUV, and his explanation for how Martin went from fleeing from being stalked to being a physical aggressor?

Whomever is leaking stuff out of the police department, do us a favor: rather than leaking irrelevant information about Martin, how about leaking the rest of Zimmerman's statement, as surely at least one officer involved in the investigation thought to inquire as to what happened between the time he was safely in his car and when he was being punched in the nose. And how about leaking the autopsy report, as it surely sheds some light on the distance between Zimmerman and Martin at the time of the shooting, and whether Zimmerman was on the ground with Martin on top of him or standing clear of Martin and removed from any reasonable fear of harm.

Law Enforcement and Dead Suspects

Glenn Greenwald makes a valid point here, but I believe he nonetheless draws the wrong conclusion:

Beyond that, the formal position of the Democratic Party for years -- since John Kerry enunciated it when running against Bush -- has been that Terrorism should be primarily dealt with within a law enforcement rather than war paradigm, and that Terrorists should be viewed as criminals, not warriors; and yet many of the same people who once rejected the war paradigm now turn around and cite war theories to justify bin Laden's killing as a "proper military target" (that isn't necessarily contradictory -- it's possible to argue against a war paradigm while still recognizing that that's the paradigm created by our law -- but the comfort in citing war theories among those who long argued against them is quite striking). Obviously, in a law enforcement setting, one is barred from shooting an unarmed, non-resisting suspect; that can be justified only by resort to war and military theories.

I'm reminded of a law enforcement officer's statement about a fugitive, who had killed several police officers, to the effect of, "If he wants to survive his arrest, he had best be naked and unarmed when the police arrive." There are two sides to that comment: First, the police take it very seriously when somebody has killed their fellow officers. But second, and very importantly, once you cross the line and kill a police officer, that's a line you can be expected to cross again. The implication may well be that, absent something close to a guarantee that the suspect is harmless, the suspect will be shot - but it's also stated that despite his past actions the police would take him into custody if they could be certain that he posed no harm. You can argue that, at least as stated by that officer, their threshold of certainty was too high, but you can also understand why they would err on the side of self-protection.

If the police were to raid the compound of a suspect, perhaps John Yoo's wet dream would come true and they would use a very large number of officers to... I'm not sure what... intimidate him into surrendering without the necessity of close quarters combat, we might have ended up with a long stand-off. (Why am I thinking, though, that long-standoffs with people like bin Laden, holed up in armed, fortified compounds, tend not to end well.) But it seems very likely that had a similar raid occurred inside the U.S. against a known, violent terrorist who had years to prepare his compound against intruders, had armed bodyguards posted in his home, and who was known to be armed as a matter of habit, even if he turned out after-the-fact to have been unarmed, the suspect would have been shot. We would have been told about the guns in the room, and that he appeared to be reaching for one of them, the officers in the incident would have been cleared of wrongdoing, and the amount of controversy would be minimal.

If it turned out that the suspect was successfully captured and later killed, sure, that would change the complexion of the case in the minds of many, but the case for that is presently speculative. (I find this type of parsing of the word "after" to be a bit silly.) I see no reason to be upset because some people, when asked of such a theoretical possibility, respond that they wouldn't care - first because opinions presented in isolation cannot be automatically extrapolated to the public at large, and second because even if the public does hold that position it's human nature. If you were to ask a random person, "Do you support the death penalty," a coin toss would be a reasonable predictor of his answer. If you were to make the question specific, "Do you support the death penalty for people like [John Gacy / Jeff Dahmer / Ted Bundy / Osama bin Laden]", you would have an 80-90% chance of getting a "yes". For erstwhile death penalty opponents I'm not going to argue that it's unreasonable to point out, "But you just said..." or to try to encourage them to think about and reconcile the inconsistency in their opinions, but an off-the-cuff reaction of, "This guy is different," should not come as a surprise.

Greenwald acknowledges this side of human nature, and goes so far as to state that he "understand[s] and respect[s] it", particularly when it is expressed with honesty. He proposes a slippery slope, to the effect of "If this guy is different, why won't the next guy also be different such that we can once again ignore our professed values." I would respond that acting on the exception makes it easier to make the same rationalization in future cases, but that is something you simply have to accept. We're human - even for the most logical of persons, emotions will at times overwhelm reason. Compare and contrast the reactions to a "gotcha" question to the effect of, "What would you do if your wife were raped and murdered" from Michael Dukakis and Mario Cuomo. The acceptable answer was, "I would want the offender dead, but I would want other people to stop me from killing him," not an explanation of how you would rationally stick with your principled opposition to the death penalty.

Contrite?

I would hope so.

A British Columbian man has learned the hard way that you don't ask a U.S. border guard to be polite when he asks you to turn off your vehicle's engine.

Desiderio Fortunato, of Coquitlam, B.C., asked the guard to say please and instead received a face full of pepper spray.

“I just said please,” Mr. Fortunato explained Thursday. “He said 'get out of the car or I spray you' and ... I thought he was just trying to scare me off or something and I was pepper sprayed from a foot or two away.”

I have to say that in many years of crossing the border, my experienced with U.S. border guards has been consistently good. This is more emblematic, I think, of how the use of devices like TASERS and pepper spray have become perceived by many law enforcement officers as acceptable means of obtaining compliance with their orders, or possibly enforcing their authoritah, even when there is no risk posed to anybody's safety, life or property.