The Florida Shooting- A Personal Perspective

Back in the early 1980s when I was working with DEA in Los Angeles, I happened to be off duty one night at my Mom's apartment in West LA. All of a sudden, we heard a car horn blaring downstairs on the street below and a woman screaming. I mean screaming as for her life. I quickly grabbed by badge, stuffed my gun down the back of my pants, and ran down to the street. What I found was a guy in a car beating the daylights out of a woman, who was still screaming. I proceeded to pull the guy out of the car, stick my badge in his face and identify myself as a cop trying to calm him down. The problem was he would not calm down, and at one point, lunged back in the car and started hitting his girl friend again. Once more I pulled him out of the car and tried to talk sense into him, but he was out of control. A neighbor came out on her porch and I flashed her my badge and asked her to call 9-11. Nothing happened. I yelled up at my Mom, who was standing on her balcony and asked her to call as well. She did, but nothing happened. All this time, I'm wondering when this guy is going to attack me.  Finally, I told the next person who stuck her nose out the door to call the cops and tell them "Officer needs assistance."

In about 3 minutes, I got 3-4 squad cars and a helicopter. They took over, and, to make a long story short, got the guy under control, calmed him down and let him go without having to arrest him. The woman came over and thanked me for my assistance.

I guess at this point that I should mention that both the guy and his girlfriend/wife were black. I also should mention that I never drew my gun.

I have been doing a lot of  thinking about this Florida shooting of  17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch guy named George Zimmerman that has caused such a firestorm. My immediate reaction is that Mr Zimmerman, the shooter, should have followed the 9-11 operator's instructions not to go after the kid. I suspect that he had neither the training nor the experience needed to deal with this kind of situation-especially while armed. As for what was happening immediately before he fired the shot that killed the boy, that is not yet so clear. There is an obscured videotape and an audio that shows someone screaming, "Help." It also is possible that Mr Zimmerman made a racial epithet captured on the 9-11 call while chasing the boy. Listening to it, it is not that clear, but it sounds like the word, "coon", was said.

So what do we have here? A tragic incident, of course. A 17-year-old boy is dead, who may have not been doing anything wrong other than walking through a  neighborhood-wearing a hoodie, which is common garb among gang members, but often emulated by young kids who are not really troublemakers. (I have one in my English class and he is not even American-nor Hispanic.)  Is this a hate crime, whereby Mr Zimmerman decided to take the law into his own hands, especially seeing that the boy was black? Was it a tragic case of poor judgement? Everybody is now weighing in including President Obama and the ubiquitous Al Sharpton. This has become a racial issue, perhaps for good reason, perhaps not. Clearly, this young kid should not be dead. Clearly, a professional police officer with back-up could have handled this peacefully.

Last night, MSNBC's Ed Schultz attacked Sean Hannity and showed a clip of Hannity discussing the case on his own show. Hannity's position is similar to mine. It is a tragedy, but let's not rush to judgement. That is what Schultz got fired up over. To Schultz, Zimmerman is guilty of a racially-inspired murder- case closed. Why haven't the police arrested him already? Schultz, in his usual bombastic fashion, is convicting a man on a national news show.

Then this morning, I learn from Larry Elder's radio show (a replay I guess since it is Saturday) that there was a witness who gave a statement to the police to the effect that when he saw the event in progress, Zimmerman was on the ground beneath Martin, and it was Zimmerman who was screaming for help. Further, that he saw Zimmerman's face bloodied.

Is all that true? I don't know, but it makes things a little murkier, doesn't it?

And since the issue of race has been brought up, let's discuss that, shall we? First of all, in spite of his name, Zimmerman is Latino. Not exactly a case of white on black violence. Out here in Southern California, we have a lot of instances with Latino and black gangs shooting each other. This little Hatfield-McCoy situation carries over into California's prisons, where the mutual attacks continue on a regular basis.

In addition, we had a notorious case here in LA a couple of years back when a black high school football star was shot for no reason by a Latino gang member, who had just been released from jail with no notification to ICE even though he was also an illegal alien. Citizens of all colors expressed their outrage at that and gave moral support to the victim's family. I wrote about it here on this blog.

Similarly, when James Byrd was murdered in a horrible fashion by three white punks in 1998, the whole Jasper, Texas community rose up as one and joined together. When Jesse Jackson came smokin' into town, he was told by blacks in Jasper that his "services" were not needed.

As Larry Elder so eloquently points out, murders of blacks by whites now are quite rare. What is not rare is murders of blacks by other blacks. Where is the outrage over that? That is the real problem that plagues black communities. We (whites) are not the enemy, notwithstanding the past history of discrimination and the horrors that used to take place in the old South. Yet, when a Hispanic attacks a black or vice-versa, people want to talk about "white racism". (Latinos are, according to some classifications, considered white, for whatever it's worth.)

But back to the Trayvon Martin case. I agree that the case should be examined by a grand jury. What needs to come out is what actually happened once Zimmerman confronted Martin, and under what circumstances did he draw his gun and fire it? There very well may be criminal liability in Zimmerman's actions. However, before we have a national outcry demanding that anyone be prosecuted for murder, let's find out the exact facts.