You didn’t interview experts. You interviewed cops.
Newspapers shouldn't publish propaganda for police who kill people in crisis
Her name was Marianne Griffiths. She was 56. “[She] worked as a professional manicurist for several years. She enjoyed gardening, spending winters in Florida and painting figurines as well as arts and crafts,” according to her obituary.
Griffiths needed help. Instead, an Easton police officer shot her to death.
On February 5, Griffiths’ son called 911 and said his mother “told him that she had injected herself with a dangerous amount of insulin in an attempt to commit suicide,” according to a press release from the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office.
According to the release:
When Easton Police arrived at [her address], they encountered Griffiths and other family members. After a brief discussion with her, she ran downstairs and threatened that she would shoot the police and herself. The officers inside immediately evacuated the other people in the home and exited the residence. At that point Griffiths ran back upstairs, approached the front entry way to the home and pointed what appeared to be a rifle at the officers, who were now standing outside the home.
Griffiths did not have a rifle. She had a BB gun. Nevertheless, a police officer shot her in the chest “before retreating to cover,” the release says.
A press release from the Easton Police Department contains additional details:
After requesting assistance from the Metro-Lec regional response team and setting up a perimeter, the woman approached the front entry way of the home still in possession of a weapon. An Easton Officer, fearing for their safety, fired a single shot at the woman.
The female remained inside of the home while negotiators made several attempts to speak with her by phone. Members of the regional response team entered the home and located the female deceased.
After the officer shot Griffiths, the police did not immediately provide medical attention. Instead, they hid from the injured woman and called her on the phone multiple times while she bled to death. It wasn’t until after she was dead that they entered the home. This response was characterized as a “well-being check” in both press releases.
Was killing Griffiths justified? The Brockton Enterprise said it “asked some experts” this question — and it turns out that the answer is yes.
Except the so-called experts interviewed by the newspaper were literally just two retired cops.
Here’s the first “expert”:
“It may seem easy to ‘Monday Morning Quarterback’ this incident but we must understand that we were not present in the exact moment of this crisis, nor were we present to the perceived lethal dangers presented by the woman toward the police and all others present,” said David O'Laughlin, a retired Brookline police officer, director of training at the Massachusetts-based Municipal Police Institute and expert in use of force.
“We must be mindful that the actions were set in motion by the woman herself and the results are as devastating to the police, and in particular, the officer who fired, as they are to her family and friends,” he said.
The entire criminal legal system is based on the idea that people sometimes must second-guess other people’s actions, especially when those actions are violent and cause harm.
But the cops who feed people into this system will tell you that they are a special exception. You shouldn’t second-guess cops who perpetrate acts of violence. After all, they’re just as broken up about killing people as the families of the people they kill so give them a break. Sheesh!
Here’s the second “expert”:
Mitch Librett, a retired New Rochelle, New York, police lieutenant and current professor of criminal justice at Bridgewater State University, said, “of what I know of the shooting, it was justified.”
Griffiths threatened herself and police with a pump-action BB gun, which Librett said, “have a powerful charge, strong enough to penetrate the skin and severely injure someone, or worse, kill them.”
“The department, I’m sure, will do a detailed, careful, step-by-step investigation, but police officers are trained to use deadly force when they can articulate a subjective belief that their life or another person’s life is at imminent risk,” he continued.
BB guns are like super dangerous and the cops are going to investigate themselves really carefully before reaching the foregone conclusion that it was legal for them to kill this woman so don’t even worry about it!
When the Griffiths shooting first became public, there was a lot of bad reporting. The police press release, which was issued a day prior to the district attorney’s release, ambiguously said that there was “an officer-involved shooting” instead of explicitly saying that an officer shot Griffiths.
This led to headlines like “Woman dead after Easton police officer fires at her following wellness check” from the Boston Globe or “Woman Dead After Officer Opens Fire In Easton” from the Patch. Isn’t it weird that this woman died after the police officer fired at her? I wonder if there’s some connection, but the articles don’t say!
WHDH was willing to report that Griffiths “was fatally shot by an Easton police officer” (note the passive voice). But, like the other news outlets, it still fell into another trap laid by the police by reporting that Griffiths was “armed with a weapon.” The police said that Griffiths had a “weapon” without specifying that it was a BB gun.
WHDH also invented a detail, reporting that Griffiths “retreated back into the house” after the officer shot her, something not mentioned in either press release. This implied that Griffiths still posed a danger to the police after she was injured.
Journalists couldn’t just wait until they had more information — they had to get the story out as soon as they saw an obviously incomplete cop press release even though it turned out that they were misleading their readers.
That’s bad, but at least they had the excuse that they were writing about breaking news. But now that it’s more than a month after the shooting, what’s the Enterprise’s excuse for interviewing two ex-cops and regurgitating their apologia under the premise that they are “experts”? That’s not journalism. It’s propaganda. It’s preposterous.
Asking whether this shooting was “justified” isn’t even the right question. The laws of this country make it effortless for cops to get away with killing people even in some of the most egregious cases. All cops need is a somewhat plausible claim that they were scared, and they almost certainly won’t be prosecuted let alone convicted — even if they kill a woman in distress as part of a “well-being check.”
The real question is this: Is this state of affairs acceptable? You don’t need to be an expert to know that the answer is no. This country deserves a better system for addressing mental health crises than sending cops to kill the very people who need help.
We can be reasonably sure that Griffiths wasn’t planning to kill herself or anyone else with her supposed “weapon” because it was just a BB gun. So why would she have suddenly grabbed it when the police showed up at her home? Why would she have pointed it at the cops? In that moment of despair, she was probably hoping that they would kill her.
And that’s exactly what they did.
Would she have done the same thing if she had instead been met by unarmed responders who couldn’t have shot her? We’ll never know.
Here’s another quote from one of the “experts”:
During Librett’s police career, he said his department hired a social worker to look over cases police officers believed needed more attention.
“However, mental health crises are a fairly recent public concern,” he continued. “So most police departments don’t have the resources to have a mental health consultant on-call for cases like this.”
Let’s overlook the absurd comment that mental health crises are a “fairly recent public concern” and focus on the claim that police departments can’t afford mental health workers. Why is that? Police departments — probably the most well-funded institutions in state and local government — can afford cops, so why can’t they afford clinicians? Is it that they can’t afford them or that they would rather spend money on weapons, “tactical” gear, and overtime?
The Enterprise reports that the Easton Police Department hired one clinician shortly after killing Griffiths. But there’s an important caveat:
“Her primary function is to serve those dealing with mental health issues, substance use disorders or the combination of the two,” [Easton Police Chief Keith Boone] said. “As the program develops, the clinician will likely spend time riding with an officer on shift.”
“The nature of the call will determine whether the clinician will assist with a call for service in real time or conduct a follow-up,” he said.
In other words, the clinician will not act independently. She will work directly with cops, and it will be up to the cops to determine whether she can try to resolve a situation without force. The cops will still show up and shoot people if they want, and no one can tell them no.
Again: Is this acceptable?
If you missed my Sunshine Week story about secrecy on Beacon Hill, make sure you check it out here.
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