No Second Take For Aiyana

It would have been bad enough, no, horrible enough, had this just been another utterly needless tragedy of over-armed cops using all their toys to protect themselves first, to accomplish with excess force what they could have easily accomplished safely, that ended in the death of 7-year-old Aiyana Jones in Detroit.

But no, that failed to explain what really happened.  Via CBS Detroit:

Jurors in the trial of a Detroit police officer charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of a 7-year-old girl watched a video Tuesday of the police raid that led to the fatal shooting.

The shot that killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones in 2010 could be heard on the video, which was recorded by a crew from “The First 48,” a reality TV show on A&E Networks. Officer Joseph Weekley’s gun fired and struck the girl in the head while she slept on a couch.

It wasn't just for the testosterone rush that Weekley carried a submachine gun into the house, but for the cameras.  So you could watch some cool show about the heroic work of law enforcement.  Here's what you could have seen:



And this is the face of the young human being on the other end of that gunshot.



The family photo is not just one of a lovely little girl, but of an irony that can't be manufactured. Notice the faces in the background, the Disney characters of beautiful fantasy females that young girls adore? If any one of them had been shot in the head in her sleep during a nighttime police raid, you would be bombarded with news about it. How many have heard of Aiyana? It happened over three years ago, but a dead 7-year-old in Detroit doesn't get the airplay of a Jodi Arias.  At best, it's worth A&E, not the networks. Cable has too much time to fill with cheap content.

A witness, Sgt. Robert Malone, explained the process.  Note in particular the language, the heroic police jargon that captures hearts and minds on cable TV shows and makes police officers feel brave, valued and manly.

“Generally when we do entries, there is a lot of yelling. You generally hear a lot of ‘Police, police, police. Get down, get down. Police, police,” but it was a little more frantic than normal. I heard a lot of screaming that wasn’t typical of a normal entry,” he said.

Weekley was the first officer through the door — “the tip of the spear” — assistant prosecutor Rob Moran said in his opening statement to the jury.

“The flash grenade goes off: Boom!” Moran said. “He stands there. This is called the fatal funnel. You never stand in a doorway. Three seconds after the flash grenade detonates, his gun goes off and that’s when the fatal shot is fired.”

The idea behind all this is to disorient the occupants of the house, to cause momentary confusion so they can't process what's happening until the police have overwhelmed them with shock and awesomeness.  It looks great on TV, reminding viewer what a spectacular job the police are doing protecting them from the vicious criminals, even if they turn out to be 7-year-old girls, and that they better not screw with the cops or their home could be the next one on camera.

Yet, this scenario ends up with an unanticipated outtake. You see, it was meant to show greatness, and nobody planned on its showing the killing of a child. "Cut," the director would yell, but there was no stopping reality TV. A dead child was as real as it gets.

Homicide investigator LaTonya Brooks testified that detectives didn’t want the TV crew at the scene. Fishman said police department officials never asked officers if they wanted cameras following them with people asking “dumb questions.”

“That’s additional pressure to doing a pressure-filled, difficult job, wouldn’t you agree?” Fishman said.

“I agree,” Brooks said.

Cameras. Pressure. Dumb questions.

Malone, like Brooks, testified he would have preferred not being “miked up” and having cameras tagging along taping their every move.

“I just know that, again, it’s distracting and it was a serious event that we were getting ready to undertake. So, I disagreed with it 100 percent tactically. I don’t think that we needed distractions,” he said.

When it goes clean, meaning they use all the toys but only kill a dog or two, and not a child, however, they get to play hero on the telly. Gather the family, gather the team, let's watch ourselves be awesome cops on cable.

Except whether they are "miked up" or not, they are still holding guns in their hands, and those guns have real bullets in them, and they are aimed at real human beings. The type who can die when struck by real bullets from their real guns.  The people holding those guns can't blame the TV cameras for pulling the trigger. Being on camera doesn't mean you're excused for killing people.

The idea that Weekley, who vomited right after realizing that he had just shot a child, was horrified by what he did reflects that the shooting was accidental. He didn't mean to pull the trigger. Nobody wanted to kill anyone that night. But the problem remains that when you carry a submachine gun on a raid, people sometimes get killed. Sometimes, the person will be a little girl.

While there is plenty of blame for this killing to spread around, from the people who conceived this particular raid to the people who decided that cops need special weapons and tactics so they can rush in with grenades rather than wait out a person under safe and nonviolent conditions, it's hard to lay blame for Aiyana's death on the cameras or mikes.

But what the TV crew can be blamed for is their reflection in our sickness at wanting to watch the police do things like this to people, creating a television-worthy show of force.  What remains a question is whether the reality show, had the cameras captured the actual shooting of this beautiful child, would have aired it.

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