April 04, 2004
The Conscience Of The King
Today's Sunday Oregonian publishes a commentary by Robert J. King, president of the Portland Police Association. On the surface, it purports to be a glimpse at what a potentially-deadly traffic stop is like from a police officer's point of view.
But in the manner in which King puts his piece together, it is our estimation that it has a more cunning and clever objective in mind.
King tells the story of a traffic stop in which the driver is uncooperative, has an attitude, does not have his license or registration, and then closes his power window as you see his right hand move out of sight. In this story, King says you pull open the door, yelling at the driver to get out of the car, but he puts his hand into his pocket, "trying to grab something."
You've been trained for situations just like this. You know if he brings a gun out of his pocket -- and every single thing that has happened so far makes you think that's exactly what's going on -- he can swing the gun in an instant, shooting you before your finger can pull the trigger of your gun. In just a fraction of a second, you could be dead.
What do you do?
He goes on to say that most officers never find themselves in this situation. Then he says: "But on rare occasions, it happens. I know. It happened to me in 1991 at Interstate and Skidmore. I was stabbed before I could fire my weapon."
What he leaves vague, however, is whether his described situation was his own, a hypothetical (perhaps an amalgam of actual incidents), or what he's hearing from Officers Sery and Macomber about the most recent such incident. Re-reading the piece several times, it is most likely that he's relating his own experience.
Even so, without making that explicit, and by telling this particular story in such detail -- especially the bit about the "dark-tinted power window" rolling up as the driver's hand moves towards something -- King is clearly trying to leave in the readers' minds the impression that this is what occurred the night Officer Jason Sery shot and killed James Jahar Perez.
He's trying to muddle in the readers' minds the facts of last weekend's shooting with specific facts from an entirely different incident. In addition to the smear campaign against Perez based upon his criminal history and the presense of drugs, King and other participants in the knee-jerk "my officers, right or wrong" worldview now are trying to conflate distinct incidents in order to dilute the public's ability to focus on the facts at hand in this particular shooting.
Thirty-six years ago today in Memphis, the nation lost another man named King -- one of far more conscience and respect than this Robert J. It's too bad that on this day of all days, we have to read this particular King's cynical attempts at obfuscating the facts surrounding the officer-involved shooting of another African-American.
Comments (6)
myrln on 04 Apr 2004
I read Mr. King's piece. But I think being a police officer means you know you are in danger, that you accept that given, and that "protect and serve" does not mean your feeling endangered gives you the right to shoot first and ask questions or ascertain facts afterward. It's not a job I'd want, for sure; it's hard and it's dangerous. But my understanding that does not mean I accept an unarmed man being shot because an officer was frightened or nervous or uncertain. No. Crystal clear and active threat is essential before that trigger's pulled. And if those can't be ascertained, then go back to your own patrol car and call for backup and take whatever razzing you may get if it turns out to be, indeed, nothing more than a routine traffic stop. You can't have it all ways.
no one in particular on 04 Apr 2004
It was definitely a confusing piece. I'd heard that Perez's windows were tinted, so I assumed when he was mentioning the windows being rolled up that he was talking about Perez doing that. I started wondering how I'd missed that piece of information before I realized that he was just making it all up.
I'm not even convinced he's talking about his own stop here. How do you get stabbed from behind a rolled up window? I came away with the impression that he was making up a fictional story with the hopes that the reader would incorrectly assume it was based on the facts in the Perez case (like I did at first).
Either way, it's clearly aimed to mislead.
Jack Bog on 04 Apr 2004
King's just doing his police union job. But this time around, it will do no good. The fact that suddenly there's a public inquest is a pretty good signal that Vera and Derrick are going to hang Mr. Sery out to dry.
The One True b!X on 04 Apr 2004
Well, if it's King's story, he did mention that he had yanked the car door back open. Which in and of itself seems a rather spectacularly idiotic thing to do, and if this is King's story, shows how stupid of a cop he seems to have been when he was regularly out on the street.
The One True b!X on 04 Apr 2004
And, interestingly, Joe Smith (who was chosen by the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners to take over the suddenly-vacant District 43 seat in the Oregon House) at today's rally downtown, slammed King's article in a similar fashion, although he took it at face value that King was attempting to describe the Perez stop directly.
Brian Smith on 05 Apr 2004
One of the most disturbing facts I learned yesterday at the rally was that the federal minimum for police training is 22 weeks, but in Portland it's only 10 weeks.