Opinion: Poverty related? I think you’re omitting a few things…

After the Escobedo shooting: The window circled in blue is my apartment’s bedroom.
The smaller window on the right and bigger picture window were Escobedo’s bathroom
and bedroom windows.  The larger broken window was his living room.

“Local business owner” Larry Lee wrote an op-ed piece for the Journal Gazette recently, “Police overreactions, public underreaction are equally disturbing.”  I’d like to point out correct some things in it.

He writes about the Rudy Escobedo police-action shooting:

[…] Escobedo’s death offers the bitterest of ironies. A depressed, paranoid young man at home with a gun and contemplating suicide reached out via a 911 call for help with the specific plea, “Do not send the police because I am afraid they will hurt me.”

The police response was an incredibly massive show of force. Escobedo was shot dead in the sanctity of his own apartment.

Not exactly, Larry.  First, he did call the police, but his initial call was asking why police officers were outside his door.  The dispatcher responded that there were no officers at his location.  When police did arrive, Escobedo refused to answer the door.  Lee also mentions nothing about the extremely high levels of cocaine found in Escobedo’s blood.  As far as being, “shot dead in the sanctity of his own apartment,” true, but again, after the police tried tear gas, non-lethal ammunition and countless requests to give up the gun he was holding and ultimately pointed at police – twice.  I say twice because the first time was when they opened the door to the closet he was hiding in and the second time when he picked up the gun he’d dropped after being shot with non-lethal ammunition and again pointed it at police.

Before we go any further, for those of you who don’t know, Escobedo’s apartment is on the other side of my bedroom wall, in fact, the closet where the police ultimately shot and killed him only inches away from where my bed sat.  There was a lot of tear gas involved.  I know this because after the action was over, I left my apartment and stumbled down seven flights of stairs through it.  It was not a pleasant experience and I kept thinking, why would anyone want to stay in this type of atmosphere?

And yes, you read that correctly.  I was in my apartment the entire time this was going on.  In fact, I’d been sleeping and only woke up about 20 minutes before police entered his apartment.  If you want to be enraged about something, how about that fact, plus the fact that most of us on that floor were in our apartments the entire time and not evacuated.  We were, in many senses, the true victims of that day.  For the next 9 months to a year, I jumped every time I heard my neighbor slam his door or a loud noise and woke up many times out of a peaceful sleep suddenly after hearing a jarring noise.  That was not pleasant.

Lee then goes on to talk about the Jose Lemus-Rodriquez police-action shooting death.

[…] None of the four responding officers appeared in danger of being hit by Lemus-Rodriguez’s car; the only danger was being caught in the crossfire. The police whitewashing and cover-up is as disturbing as the shooting. An internal department investigation found the shooting justifiable, and an independent investigator found it “objectively reasonable.” Yet the city of Fort Wayne settled the lawsuit filed by Lemus-Rodriguez’s estate for $335,000. If this case had gone to trial, a jury would have viewed the same tapes I saw and awarded at minimum $335,000.

I haven’t seen the tape – no one will see the tape and yes, that is something to be upset about.  However, my experience with watching video tapes of incidents are that often they don’t give the full story.  You don’t get the true spatial perspective of actually being there.  They are often emotionless and don’t capture what was going through the participant’s minds.  Sometimes, you don’t fully grasp the distances involved and therefore really can’t determine the “danger” in a situation.  That said, it’s easy for us to look at the tape and draw conclusions.  To truly make an objective decision about a situation, you need all the facts.  The measurements, the statements made about the facts leading up to and shortly after the shootings.  He says he’s had this, but to have left out some key pieces of information leads one to question his “authority”.  The large number of bullets fired along would be enough to be enraged over.

I’d also point out that if the family of Lemus-Rodriguez felt so strongly about their case, why did they settle for the minimal $335k?  If their case was all that, it would seem they would have pushed on and gone for the largest amount possible.

I’m not going to comment on the Euelio Vergara shooting, because I don’t know a lot about it.

What bothers me about Lee’s letter most is trying to make this into something it so obviously is not – poverty.

[…] All three instances of police overkill involved victims who were the picture of poverty. Escobedo’s apartment was in a low-rent district. Lemus-Rodriguez was shabbily dressed and driving an old junker in a tough neighborhood. Vergara was a wrinkled, weathered gent who had “hard-scrabble life” written all over him, and his home was small and modest as well.

Excuse me, a low-rent district?  While my rent is not “high” it is moderate and the phrase, “low-rent district” infers some sort of housing project – which this building is not.  This is one block over from St. Joe Hospital and Henry’s.  There is a good mix of people living in this building, including at times local government workers, seniors, singles, families – most of whom work hard for their money and I think would be offended at being labeled as the picture of poverty (myself included).  Phrases like, “shabbily dressed”, “old junker”, “tough neighborhood”, “hard-scrabble life” and “small and modest” are judgements on Lee’s part.  If you’ve ever run into me on the street, I’m not always the sharpest dressed guy.  My dress does not make me the picture of poverty – nor does the vehicle one drives, or a small and modest house.  Perhaps Vergara prefers a small and modest home?

[…] If Escobedo had called 911 for help from a Sycamore Hills address, if Lemus-Rodriguez had been nattily attired and driving an expensive new car erratically through Pine Valley, if Vergara had been “hoopin’ and a-hollerin’ ” outside his $500,000 home on Forest Park Boulevard, police intervention would have been dramatically different. In each case it would have been less aggressive, more patient, more compassionate.

How exactly do you know this?  That’s a pretty strong, inflammatory statement to make.  You talk to any police officer and they will tell you their training is the same – to approach each situation, regardless of the location or circumstances the same way with the same degree of readiness and alertness.

[…] I am disturbed by what the public silence says about the sense of social justice and of community in my hometown. There was one candlelight vigil for Escobedo and a few letters to the editor questioning why the Lemus-Rodriguez video was sealed.

Perhaps the public is silent because of conflicting emotions in the Escobedo and Lemus-Rodriguez cases.  Both of these shootings could have been avoided if only both men had only followed the requests of the police.  If you’re not going to follow the instructions of a police officer, it’s not going to bode well for you – regardless of where you live, your poverty level or location.

The reason I say conflicting emotions is that once again, you have one high on cocaine who calls 9-1-1 and then hangs up, refuses to come out of his apartment – even after tear gas is introduced into the theater and then points a gun at officers.  You have another who refuses to stop a vehicle and reportedly puts it into reverse in further attempts to disobey officers.  And I might add, Lemus-Rodriguez was an illegal immigrant meaning he shouldn’t have been in our country to begin with.  That might seem harsh, but it’s the truth.  If my memory is accurate, he’d been drinking as well.  If he had stopped, it would have ended without the loss of his life.  That’s the reason for the silence, Larry.

I myself vacillated back and forth between rage and praise for the police department over the handling of the Escobedo shooting.  I’ve since come to the conclusion that there was one person in control of how it was going to end. If he had put the gun down and given himself up, it would have had a completely different outcome.  He did not and he forced the police action that day.  You can say that he was irrational because of the drugs and therefore the police should have protected him.  You can say the police response was massive.  But don’t I, as a purely innocent bystander, have the right to be protected?  Isn’t that their job, to protect us against the dangerous and irrational people and circumstances that occur?  We can’t have it both ways.

For Lee to try to whip up public outrage citing only part of the facts to support a questionable thesis is a disservice and insult to the fine men and women who protect and serve us and put their lives on the line daily for the protection of us all.  It’s easy to pass judgement without ever having been in the position of having a gun pointed at you and having to make the split-second decision of who’s going to walk away and who is not.  It’s also easy to forget the impact these situations have on the officers involved.  They don’t want to put someone down, but if push comes to shove, that’s what is going to happen.  They are the ones that have to carry it for the rest of their lives.  We all should know this and be ready for the consequences if we chose not to comply, because those consequences don’t just affect the dead or injured, they do affect our entire community.

[…] An injustice against any one of us is an injustice against all of us.

And a public appeal based solely on only enough of the facts to whip up emotion and people’s sympathies is an injustice in itself, Larry.

After the Escobedo shooting. That is not blood, but rather tear gas residue

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