No country for Black men (among others)
Virginia’s Central State Hospital’s original name (according to its Wikipedia entry) was Central Lunatic Asylum. The Petersburg facility “was the first institution in the country for ‘colored persons of unsound mind’.” On March 6, it was the site of the alleged second-degree murder by asphyxiation of shackled Irvo N. Otieno who is unavailable for comment.
The Washington Post reports:
As many as10 sheriff’s deputies and medical staff at Virginia’s Central State Hospital can be seen piling on top of a shackled Irvo N. Otieno for approximately 11 minutes until he stops moving, according to new video showing the encounter that led to the 28-year-old Black man’s death.
The hospital surveillance video, which has no sound, shows Otieno’s final moments on March 6, from the time Henrico County sheriff’s deputies drag him into a hospital admissions room in handcuffs and leg irons, to the 11 minutes in which they restrain Otieno on the ground, to the moment when they release Otieno’s limp body around 4:40 p.m.
Most of those visible in the video appear Black themselves.
A Virginia prosecutor has charged seven Henrico County sheriff’s deputies and three staff members at the hospital with second-degree murder in Otieno’s death, and has said she expects more arrests and charges.
The prosecutor, Ann Cabell Baskervill, said she was planning to release the video to the public on Tuesday. The Washington Post obtained it ahead of the release by clicking on Dropbox links, which Baskervill listed in a public court filing as part of her obligation to turn over relevant information to defense attorneys.
Otieno’s is by now a familiar story, yet another tragedy in a long list of Black men killed in American police custody. It matters little what color those who squeezed the life from him were. How many such tragedies had the participants witnessed in the news before making the news for perpetrating the same?
As with many like American behaviors, the infuriating truth, is how deadly Americans being slow learners is for others.
We never learn
Six people were shot overnight in Milwaukee, Wisc. and one, a 15-year-old boy, has died.
In Florida Monday, “The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office arrested a 15-year-old girl accused of making an online threat to commit a mass shooting at a high school in Alachua County.”
In Arlington, Texas, “One student is dead and another injured after a shooting outside Lamar High School in Arlington Monday morning, the school district and police said.”
A study released Monday reveals “mass and active shooters have distinct patterns of buying guns compared to other legal purchasers. The UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) research was published in the Journal of Criminal Justice.”
I have a bridge to sell you in Manhattan if you think any of that will change Americans’ behavior surrounding the availability of guns and the plague of gun violence.
Nor the media
The media, too, are slow learners, as Dan Froomkin laments in citing the 20th anniversary of “shock and awe” in Iraq. The unindicted war criminals of that effort paint in Texas, write memoirs and fly fish, and teach at Berkeley. From the ashes of the American invasion was born ISIS and destabilization. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died and thousands of Americans. And the Bush administration’s claim that ousting Saddam Hussein would lead to a flowering of democracy in the region? They sold us a bridge over the Tigris River.
Twenty years later, “the press corps has learned nothing,” Froomkin laments.
Former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan was “a robotic and iconic source of deception” in the propaganda campaign to sell the war, Froomkin writes. Yet McClellan came clean in his memoir. He confessed that “Bush and his White house were engaging in a carefully-orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage.” And the press went right along, McClellan writes:
And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. Was the president winning or losing the argument? How were Democrats responding? What were the electoral implications? What did the polls say? And the truth–about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict–would get largely left behind…
If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam Hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere–on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war.
In this case, the “liberal media” didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.
Fear was the biggest factor in the press not questioning “a plainly specious case for war,” Froomkin adds. He assembled in 2007 “lessons that should have been learned after Vietnam, and then again after Iraq.” But they weren’t, were they?
Here we go again
Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and the Trump presidency that followed, the press gave Trump what the “deeply wounded narcissist” wanted: their endless attention. The press helped normalize the toxically abnormal. January 6 was one byproduct. Hundreds injured and several dead. Democracy imperiled.
Heading into the 2024 campaign cycle, it is not clear this country has gained any wisdom from Pete Seeger either.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?