Tag Archives: Mohamed Noor

Guilty or Not, Mohamed Noor is Not the Most Culpable Party

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As of noon Tuesday the fate of Mohamed Noor was, to borrow a lyrical phrase favored by polite journalists, still “in the hands” of a Minneapolis jury. If I had a service revolver pointed at my head, I’d predict Noor walks, on the by now familiar grounds that he is a cop who “feared for his life” when he saw something blonde and pink raise a hand outside his police cruiser two years ago.

Among beard-stroking legal theorists, the fundamental twist in this case is whether Noor’s conduct — a plainly terrified young cop, his gun out of its holster while responding to a fairly routine call to a reasonably well-lit alley in an upscale part of town with remarkably low levels of violent crime — constitutes a criminal action on his part.

The third-degree homicide charge seems to be a stretch, given the evidence and the average jury’s inclination to give cops every possible benefit of doubt.

The second-degree manslaughter seems a better bet, but to my mind hinges on the part that requires, ” … the person’s culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.”

This issue there is who created “unreasonable risk” and the mindset that “consciously takes chances of causing death … .” Was young, inexperienced Mohamed Noor wholly responsible for that kind of thinking?

Were I juror, I’d be annoying the hell out of the other 11 by arguing that the “consciousness” that killed Justine Damond was created at least as much by Minneapolis police training/or lack thereof as Noor himself. After all, his defense has heavily emphasized how carefully and completely he followed police training … to protect himself and his partner.

While the jury deliberates, the Mayor and the police union, led by the medieval consciousness of Lt. Bob Kroll, are squabbling over the department’s shall we say, “highly problematic” training practices, specifically the hyperbolic “warrior” training that instills an amped-up combat zone mentality on recruits.

Part of the training, as we’ve learned, involves stark reminders of the ambush killing of Minneapolis cop Jerry Haaf, 27 years ago in what was then a rough section of Lake St. It was a notorious case and a tragedy. But what exactly makes it so relevant to daily police work in 2019 that it is seared into young cops as the sort of thing they must be prepared to deal with every moment they’re on duty, answering routine calls in quiet, upscale neighborhoods on warm summer nights?

Insurance companies, with all their data-driven underwriting may be a bane of modern American life, but the weird thing is that the numbers — the probabilities and risks — usually don’t lie. Which is why I have to wonder what the real world statistics are on the likelihood of another Jeffry Haaf cop ambush in Minneapolis?

Think of it this way: since Haaf’s murder in 1995 how many Minneapolis cops have answered how many calls, eaten at how many greasy spoons, rolled through how many dark (and not really so dark) alleys without being ambushed? Add all that up and what are the odds — really — that a Haaf-like ambush will happen again? Are we into winning-the-lottery odds yet? Lightning strikes twice odds? Peace breaking out in the Middle East odds? Donald Trump saying anything truthful odds?

Your average Bob Kroll will of course fly into a red-faced rage about how, “It only has to happen once! You goddam elitist pussy!” which is an echo of Dick Cheney’s famous “One Percent Solution”. That’s the one where you go to war with an adversary if there’s even a 1% chance he’ll do something nasty.

Where this leads is the obvious answer to who is most responsible for the death of Justine Damond? A young, inexperienced cop with an overactive paranoia? Or the city that selected and trained him, firing his imagination him with a war zone mentality?

Even a conviction of Noor will do little to nothing to prevent the next cop, “fearing for his life”, from gunning down some unarmed  citizen. What will have some impact though is an enormous civil verdict — $10, $15, $20 million or more — against the city for its responsibility in consenting to police recruitment and training that instills more terror than competence in the people it badges and arms to “protect and serve.”

 

Every Day, A Higher Level of Infuriation with the Justine Damond Case

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We should be able to agree that the entire police culture is on trial in Minneapolis these days, and not just Mohamed Noor. With every passing day of trial testimony the natural reaction — certainly from me — is greater and greater infuriation.

Few incidents put “the blue wall of silence” and the truly horrifying inadequacy of police hiring and training in starker relief than the killing of Justine Damond and the “professional response” by Minneapolis police in the minutes and months afterward.

As we’ve learned through the first weeks, the two cops immediately involved, Matthew Harrity and Noor, ignored police procedure about body cameras, as did virtually every other cop who arrived on the scene, turning them on and off as they saw fit. Likewise, we’ve learned that contrary to the original, long-standing police version of the event, the alley in which Damond was killed wasn’t pitch dark, but so well illuminated by street lighting that the next wave of arriving cops could plainly see her lying dead on the ground as well as the surrounding area.

Then there’s the “startling” slam on the police car that so terrified Noor he fired at the first shape he saw outside Harrity’s window. We now learn that the slam on the car was something that only churned up into the story days after the event, by which time the whole case was pretty much in lockdown by “the blue wall”, with Noor refusing to explain himself and other officers forced to give testimony by a grand jury.

The credibility of police in a civilized society is a pretty damned important matter, and here in Minneapolis, and all over the USA, that credibility continues to take a ferocious beating. Why? Because tech advances and social media are more and more able to transmit real-time evidence of actual police behavior. The taxpaying public can now see — fully, as in the case of Philando Castile, and intermittently in the Damond case — how more or less average cops go about their daily business. And, frankly, it’s terrifying.

When the Noor trial started it was estimated at a straight-up 50-50 call on his guilt. I doubt that has changed. Noor’s Somali ethnicity may play a role in this case that the Hispanic ethnicity of officer Jeronimo Yanez didn’t in the Castile case. But it’s likely that typical jury respect for anything with a badge will again be a powerful counter-balance to the appalling behavior of Harrity, Noor and so many other cops on the scene in quiet, leafy southwest Minneapolis that fateful night.

I mean, FFS, what goes through a trained cop’s mind when they can’t bring themselves to tell the arriving EMT crew what actually happened?

Clearly, a lot of rethinking of the basic cop code has to be done to relieve public concerns that too many of these people are poorly vetted, ill-trained, demonstrably terrified individuals playing out a bizarre kind of military adventure on city streets, with themselves as executioners routinely exempt from punishment.

What to do?

1:  Offer significantly better compensation to attract a much higher quality of police candidates. Give communities a true choice in the quality of people they’re (arming) and putting on the streets, rather than forcing cities to pretty much take (and keep) whoever walks in the door.

2: Vet out the most militaristic “Bulletproof Warrior” crowd, the people itching for the authority a badge and a gun gives them. Don’t try to adapt them to police procedure, simply red-line them at the get-go.

3: Never, ever, allow two newbie cops in the same car on the same beat. Neither Harrity or Noor had the emotional stability or experience to deal with Damond situation, and that’s with the reminder that they supposedly “feared for an ambush” in southwest [bleeping] Minneapolis, a neighborhood with one of the lowest violent crime rates in the country.

4: Multi-projectile police revolvers. Service weapons with two separate loads of ammunition. The default position being either rubber bullets or chemical darts. If cops are responding to a Hollywood-style shoot-out they can switch their weapons over to the real thing. (Harrity and Noor had a military-style rifle in their car.) In the meantime, given the horrifying tally of citizens executed by inexperienced cops “fearing for their lives”, a rubber bullet fired in terror at a nice lady in her pajamas would have a much different ending than … her being dead on the spot.

5: A fresh re-writing of the city’s police standards and legal consequences. As in:

a:  fail to turn your body camera on when responding to a possible crime — you’re fired.

b:  fail to fully describe the events of a shooting to arriving back-up, EMT and supervisors — you’re fired.

c: “decline” to give any statement or testimony to police or state investigators after a police-involved shooting — you’re fired. Likewise, counsel an officer involved in a shooting incident not to speak to investigators — you’re fired.

In a fair world, where as Randy Newman said, “It’s money that matters”, a massive, eight-figure pay-out to the Damond family for the actions of Noor and the Minneapolis police might get the gears turning on some of these reforms.

Not that I’m betting on it.