Strange Days in Oakland

MINOR SPOILER WARNING: If you haven't seen Strange Days and want to keep completely in the dark - skip this post and go rent the movie already!

I dunno if you all have been following this one, but a young man in Oakland, Oscar Grant, was shot in the back by a transit officer after being pulled off a train on New Years Eve. Captured on film, Grant was laying on his stomach and pinned by another transit officer when the shooter fires a single round into his back. This homicide has recently lead to rioting in Oakland, already an unsettled community, where relations with the black community have reached a boil.

Reading the details about this tragic and easily avoidable murder, I was immediately transported to the film Strange Days - in my opinion one of the most overlooked and best science fiction films of the 90's - which deals with an amazing similiar situation: the murder of a black man, during an arrest, on New Years Eve, in California, by white cops, which leads to race riots.

The Grant Shooting:

Compare the eyewitness description from CNN:

Burris said that the young men had been celebrating the new year at a popular waterfront tourist spot, The Embarcadero. They were heading home when police pulled them from the train car about 2 a.m.

Witness videos show Grant and two other men sitting against a wall in the Fruitvale station after being pulled off the train. BART reported that they had received a report of an altercation on the train.

Police are seen putting Grant face-down on the ground. Grant appears to struggle. One of the officers kneels on Grant as another officer stands, tugs at his gun, unholsters it and fires a shot into Grant's back.

There have been unconfirmed reports that Mehserle may have mistook his gun for a Taser, but Burris is not swayed.

Then there's a further analysis from the San Francisco Chronicle, which discusses the video and audio from that night:

The videos begin with a chaotic scene: BART officers questioning and restraining several people as a crowd of onlookers - many wielding cameras - shout in protest from a nearby train. Several videos capture, from different angles, Mehserle and another officer speaking with and eventually moving to restrain Grant.

The trainers said the scene as shown in the video moments before the shooting would be as important to understanding what happened as the shooting itself.

"The four officers have to be operating under a high level of stress given the relatively confined setting and the people on the BART train who are expressing, in a very loud vocal fashion, their displeasure with the officers' actions," said Frank Borelli, a use-of-force expert in Maryland. "Those officers, should things go bad for them, are vastly outnumbered by a group of people who have already voiced their unhappiness with the police."

Seconds before the shooting, Mehserle and another officer apparently placed Grant on his stomach to be searched or handcuffed.

"Two officers appear to be struggling with Grant prior to the shot being fired," Borelli said. "This would indicate that, at best, Grant was being uncooperative, or at worst aggressively resisting arrest. I have to emphasize that no one except those two officers knows what happened in that struggle and how the officers perceived it."

But in an indication of how the videos might move the investigation, Bedard reached a different conclusion after viewing the shooting from a different angle.

"Looking at it, I hate to say this, it looks like an execution to me," he said. "It really looks bad for the officer. ... We have to get inside his head and figure out what he was thinking when he fired the shot."

The Strange Days Script

What follows is the sequence of the Jeriko-One shooting from Strange Days:

POV SEQUENCE: We are Iris. Riding in a car. Fixing our
makeup in a mirror on the passenger side sun visor. Iris
flips the sun visor back up, revealing the moving street.
It is night.

We look down, and recognize the dress Iris was wearing
when we first saw her, two nights ago. She puts her
lipstick into a purse which is belted to her waist. Iris
turns her head and we see the driver.

It is JERIKO ONE. He is laughing, talking to someone in
the back seat. Iris looks and we see REPLAY, Jeriko's
sideman, and another woman, DIAMANDA. They are amorously
entwined. Then they are all laughing and passing around a
bottle of Jim Beam. The car stereo is thumping loudly.

Iris' POV swings around and looks down, seeing Jeriko's
hand caressing her thigh. She puts her hand on his chest
and leans close to him. Jeriko grins, then looks up and
swears at a wash of red/blue cop flash.

JERIKO
Shit. Fuckin' Five-O

Our POV swings to the rear-view mirror and we see an LAPD
car behind us, with the gumball machine on. A spotlight
hits us and we hear a single whoop on the siren. Jeriko
pulls over, but they are on an overpass... no shoulder.

COP VOICE
(on bullhorn)
Go to the bottom of the ramp.

Jeriko and Replay are both swearing. He pulls the car
down the ramp, stopping on a deserted street in a
warehouse district. Our POV looks around nervously.
Black shadows and concrete pillars. No-one around. Cars
whoosh by on the bridge above but they might as well be on
Mars. The car is stopped next to a train yard. We hear
the rumble of diesels nearby, the clank of freightcars.

We see the outlines of TWO COPS advancing through the beam
of the spotlight, their guns drawn.

JERIKO
(jumping out of the
car)
Goddamn, now what you pull me over
for? If I was going any slower I'd
be parked--

COP VOICE 1
Get down on your knees and put your
hands on your head. Now!

COP VOICE 2
Everyone else, out of the car and
down on the ground.

Our POV comes up and out of the car. Jeriko is
righteously pissed off. He's not following orders.

COP VOICE 1
Put your hands behind your head
right now!

He goes along, madder than ever. The cops get Replay down
on his knees as well, in the wet gutter next to the curb.

The cops are closer now. We see that they are SPREG and
ENGELMAN.

ENGELMAN
(to us)
Put your hands on the hood of the
car and don't move.

We exchange a look with Diamanda. Fucking cops. But
Jeriko is winding them up. Not giving them the pleasure
of the humiliation. You can see it escalating.

JERIKO
I suppose you stopped us cause you
had suspects fitting our description
in the area, what you're gonna tell
me. What was the description? Two
black males in a car? Yeah, right,
I heard that one before...

As Engelman pulls out Jeriko's wallet, looks at his ID,
Jeriko checks name tags.

JERIKO
Well you stopped the wrong black
male tonight officer... what is it?
Spreg. Officer Spreg. Cause I'm
the 800 pound gorilla in your mist,
fucker. I make more in a day than
you make in a year, and my lawyers
love to spend my money dragging
sorry-ass Aryan robocops like you
into court. Get a man down on the
ground with no probable cause. Fuck
you!

SPREG
Shut the fuck up!

He kicks Jeriko down on his face. Jeriko hits the ground
hard.

DIAMANDA
(yelling)
Leave the fuck off of us, we weren't
doing anything...

SPREG
Shut up! Don't make me walk over
there.

Engelman shows the ID to Spreg, saying something we can't
hear.

SPREG
You're that rap puke? Jeriko One?
You're the one getting all the
gangbangers to form citizens groups
and go downtown... trying to rake
the LAPD over a cheese grater?

JERIKO
That's right. And you're gonna be
in my next song, motherfucker, it's
called Robo-Spreg.

Replay starts laughing. Diamanda stifles a giggle. Spreg
is white-lipped with rage. Years of frustration coming to
a head. Too many disciplinary actions, too many
suspensions, too little appreciation of the tough job they
do.

JERIKO
It's a song about a cop who meets
his worst nightmare, a nigger with
enough political juice to crush his
ass like a stink bug. You're gonna
be famous.

Spreg looks around the empty street. Looks at Engelman.
Down at Jeriko, proned out on the pavement. Replay's
laughter in his ears.

SPREG
I don't think so.

And shoots him BLAM! BLAM! Twice in the back of the
head. Just like that.

Spooky. Hopefully, like the film, justice is done in the end for Grant and his family.

The Search for an Excuse

To all those who insist on referring to Obama by his first name, I refer to you this website.

To those asking if he is an Arab, let me remind you - that is racism. How, exactly, is this relevant to you as a voter? Does it change the content of his character? Or is it an excuse to not vote based on your prejudice.

It is tremendously disappointing to see the McCain campaign complicit in this sort of behavior. They may not be directly condoning it, and McCain may pay lip service, there is no doubt they seek to tap a vein of populist fear and complete their journey to the Dark Side of Bush and Cheney's political terror tactics. The comparison by Georgia's governor of this campaigns actions with those of George Wallace are indeed walking in a mine field, but they are also fair in a sense - drumming up senseless, racially-based fear is not only reprehensible, it is decidedly un-American (one of the very few things I would label as such), for it undermines and ignores the very core of our nation's principles - excellence, diversity, and a belief in equality.

That's the America I believe in. I think that America could be in danger.

Never Forget: There's Still Work to be Done.

For those who think Brown vs. Board of Education is less relevant today than it was in the 20th century, take the case of "justice" in Jena, Louisiana. There's something very wrong, very unresolved here when white boys hanging nooses in a tree where black students sit get 3 day suspensions and when those same black boys get in a fight over being called racial epithets are faced with attempted murder charges. It's sick and wrong and utterly typical on so many levels.

We've fooled ourselves on thinking that because we see people of color on television, in political positions, in relationships with white people, that we've reached true racial equality. But there's work still to be done. Racism is not like a cold, but a disease - an infection with long-lasting side effects that must be systematically chased down and aggressively eliminated at many levels in order to be eradicated. Our nation's policies towards people of color have changed, but our nation's attitudes have not -- at least, not at the same rate. Things are better, sure, but the racism of today's America is much harder to nail down because there's no clear institution against which one can blame, rail or litigate against. The racism of today is against the unspoken things, the "soft" factors such as attitudes, pre/misconceptions, societal structures, and so on. They are the most insidious parts of racism, those that can and will undo all the work of 5 decades if we leave them unattended. If we're lucky, if we're committed to really stamping out this horrible disease...maybe in 5 more decades posts like this won't be necessary.

Late to the Party, But the Bar's Still Open

I've been talking a lot offline about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and sexism and racism in America's effect on their campaigns. Many of my friends and fellow liberals feel Hillary is a known quantity, already a polarizing force as Bill Clinton's most important advisor, but most think that Obama has a tougher road thanks to his black heritage...or more accurately, his black AND white heritage.

This bullshit of "is he black enough" from both the liberal and, particularly, the conservative camps drives me absolutely batty. That's why I was so impressed and sympathetic with Obama's responses to 60 minutes (particularly the video "Black Enough?" there at the bottom left, where he says he still gets passed up by cabs and no one ever asks him if he's black when he's playing basketball). He and I are of a same mind on this - America is at the point where race, while sticky at times, is really being blown up by black and white intellectuals who assume it's a bigger issue with the prolitariat, who obviously must be bigoted morons, than it is. The astounding thing about all these interviews is the subtle yet racially-pointed questions asked by the interviewer in the first place - questions 1, 2, and 3 are on his race, his name and his admitted drug experiementation, THEN we get to his experience, which in my mind is his biggest obstacle.

The question of Obama's race is significant if someone is polling the entire country, but honestly we'll probably see most red states stay red and blue states stay blue. We all learned in 2001 that you only have to win 50.01% of the vote to be President, and it can happen again. So if race is the determining factor (and I don't think it will be - I think sexism, being unaddressed in the same way as race as been, would be more devisive) I don't think it will decide the presidency.

The ultimate concern for me is whether the Dems will pass the nomination to Clinton, who fits the predicatable safe path and middle of the road canidacy, rather than take a swing at the first candidate with genuine political charisma and common sense to get the nod in decades. Obama is obviously bright, well-spoken, grounded, and a powerful personality in a time where personalities rule. He's a REAL PERSON. He speaks to the next great generation of Americans. He is not afraid. I can only hope Democrats recognize this for how amazing valuable it is and have the balls to back him.