January 15, 2009

Oscar Grant

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OSCAR GRANT….I’ve been following this story but haven’t posted about it, so here’s the latest:

A former transit police officer seen on video shooting an unarmed man in the back has been charged with murder and could face up to life in prison in a racially tinged case that has sparked outrage and street protests in Oakland.

….The shooting occurred two weeks ago, early on New Year’s morning. Grant and his friends were heading home to the East Bay aboard a BART train after celebrating New Year’s Eve in San Francisco when a fight broke out between two groups of riders. BART police met the train at Oakland’s Fruitvale station and demanded that passengers disembark.

In videos that have been broadcast on television and viewed hundreds of thousands of times on the Internet, a uniformed officer later identified as Mehserle stands over a prostrate Grant, pulls his gun and fires point-blank into Grant’s back.

If you watch the video, it looks for all the world as if transit officer Johannes Mehserle, who quit the force shortly after the incident, does indeed simply pull out his gun and shoot Grant in the back while he’s prostrate on the floor and being held down by three officers (at about the 0:30 mark in the video above). It’s just stunning.

What’s equally stunning is that, as near as I can tell from watching several videos of the shooting, the other officers don’t really appear to be all that taken aback by what happened. They don’t grab Mehserle or yell at him (in the videos with sound) or anything like that. They seem to treat it like a fairly routine thing.

On another note, the LA Times tells us that “There has been some speculation that Mehserle meant to stun Grant with a Taser, not shoot him with his gun — a confusion that has occurred before.” If that’s really true, that’s as good a reason for banning Tasers as I’ve ever heard.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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