But before I get to that, I want to begin by examining portions of an article from the New Yorker magazine. It was a compilation of many interviews with Darin Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown, and his wife Barb.
Trust me it is relevant.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-cop
The Cop
Darren Wilson was not indicted for shooting Michael Brown. Many people question whether justice was done.
BY JAKE HALPERN
“In our many discussions, Wilson rarely spoke of Michael Brown. Twice, I asked him if he had reflected on what kind of person Brown was. The first time I asked, it was early May, and Brown’s parents had just filed their civil lawsuit against him. “You do realize that his parents are suing me?” he said. “So I have to think about him.” He went on, “Do I think about who he was as a person? Not really, because it doesn’t matter at this point. Do I think he had the best upbringing? No. Not at all! His tone was striking, given Wilson’s own turbulent childhood.
Six weeks later, Wilson told me that he had never really had a chance to contemplate who Brown was, because he had been preoccupied by the maelstrom that followed the shooting. I asked him if he thought Brown was truly a “bad guy,” or just a kid who had got himself into a bad situation. “I only knew him for those forty-five seconds in which he was trying to kill me, so I don’t know,” Wilson said.
Barb also said that she rarely thought about Brown. But she thought about a woman named Stephanie Edwards, whom she knew well. Edwards was the mother of Louis Head, Brown’s stepfather. Before becoming a cop, Barb had worked with Edwards at a grocery store. Barb says that they talked every day for roughly ten years, learning minute details of each other’s lives, but they didn’t keep in touch when Barb became a cop.”
In another portion of the several interviews Wilson said:
“Good values, Wilson insisted, needed to be learned at home. He spoke of a black single mother, in Ferguson, who was physically disabled and blind. She had several teen-age children, who “ran wild,” shooting guns, dealing drugs, and breaking into cars.
Wilson, who is from Texas, is the son of a woman who repeatedly broke the law. His mother, Tonya Dean, stole money, largely by writing hot checks. After completing high school, she married Wilson’s father, John, who had been her English teacher. They soon had two children to support—Darren and his younger sister, Kara—but Dean spent wildly. She left John Wilson for another man, Tyler Harris, who ran a Y.M.C.A. They had a child, Jared, and Darren and Kara lived with them. “Tonya had me in debt—almost twenty thousand dollars—that first year,” Harris told me. Dean, it seems, often repaid debts to one person by stealing money from someone else.
The family eventually moved to St. Peters, west of St. Louis. When Wilson was thirteen, he stopped trusting his mother altogether, because she stole funds that she had helped raise for his Boy Scout troop. He worried that she would steal what little money he made working summer jobs, so he opened two bank accounts. The first, which had almost no money in it, was a decoy. He put his real earnings in the second, secret account. Wilson also tried to preempt his mother’s stealing. Once, he warned a friend’s parents not to let her inside their house, because she would surely find a way to steal their identities and max out their credit cards.”
O.K. So what has this have to do with me never becoming a Navy Seal? Everything! When I joined the military right out of high school, I had to go on a special diet in order to gain weight to meet the minimum weight requirements. I was a really small kid. Anyway, most people know about the Seals but few know that it really is an acronym for Sea, Air, and Land Teams. My problem was my size, but beginning with the fact that not only could I not swim, I was apparently too small to carry the weight required to be a SEAL.
My point is, all the discussion about the need for better police training shows a lack of understanding of the problem. Police don’t kill people because of the lack of training. Police kill people because so many should not be cops in the first place. Like I couldn’t have, shouldn’t have, been a Navy SEAL, Darin Wilson should not have been a cop. Period!!! The Navy could have taught me to swim, could have lightened my pack, and helped me overcome other disqualifying issues. But, at what cost? Perhaps the lives of my team members! In this case it cost the life of unarmed Michael Brown.
Wilson said: “I only knew him for those forty-five seconds in which he was trying to kill me, so I don’t know,”
So his intent was to kill you?
Really? We hear that a lot!
