The longer version of the story in Mother Jones raises all the right questions, and uses quotations from other police officers to do it. To wit:
"They had time," a Detroit police detective told me. "You don't go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That's how it's supposed to be done."
The worry is that the Special Response Team used more firepower and acted in more haste than necessary in an attempt to meet the needs of its A&E partners. In that spirit:
"I'm worried they went Hollywood," said a high-ranking Detroit police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigation and simmering resentment in the streets. "It is not protocol. And I've got to say in all my years in the department, I've never used a flash-bang in a case like this."
This tragedy gives two noble professions a bad name: policing, of course, which routinely gets black eyes from its own, in ways 'The Wire' dramatizes better than anything else I've ever seen or heard of; and mainstream journalism, which is less interested in this story than in Honey Boo-Boo, whatever that is.Why this is still news in 2012: observers of this story in the independent journalism crowd (here, from "Black Talk Radio News, and here, from the Voice of Detroit) fear that the involuntary manslaughter charges against Joseph Weekley, the officer who killed 7-year old Aiyana Jones, are about to be dismissed.
The militarization of American law enforcement is one of the most disturbing legacies of the U.S. response to 9/11. First, we sent off tens of thousands of young men and women to Iraq and Afganistan, most of who did not really have viable options for college or a career, where they were trained to kill and approach everyone not a U.S. military uniform as a potential enemy. When many of these clearly traumatized young people got home they went to work for police departments across the country. Those same departments, thanks to the Patriot Act, other federal legislation, bundled together with state and local money went on spending sprees buying up staggering amounts of military grade hardware. Now we have turned these military trained, military armed men and women loose on the American public.
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