January 15, 2009

Oscar Grant

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OSCAR GRANT….I’ve been following this story but haven’t posted about it, so here’s the latest:

A former transit police officer seen on video shooting an unarmed man in the back has been charged with murder and could face up to life in prison in a racially tinged case that has sparked outrage and street protests in Oakland.

….The shooting occurred two weeks ago, early on New Year’s morning. Grant and his friends were heading home to the East Bay aboard a BART train after celebrating New Year’s Eve in San Francisco when a fight broke out between two groups of riders. BART police met the train at Oakland’s Fruitvale station and demanded that passengers disembark.

In videos that have been broadcast on television and viewed hundreds of thousands of times on the Internet, a uniformed officer later identified as Mehserle stands over a prostrate Grant, pulls his gun and fires point-blank into Grant’s back.

If you watch the video, it looks for all the world as if transit officer Johannes Mehserle, who quit the force shortly after the incident, does indeed simply pull out his gun and shoot Grant in the back while he’s prostrate on the floor and being held down by three officers (at about the 0:30 mark in the video above). It’s just stunning.

What’s equally stunning is that, as near as I can tell from watching several videos of the shooting, the other officers don’t really appear to be all that taken aback by what happened. They don’t grab Mehserle or yell at him (in the videos with sound) or anything like that. They seem to treat it like a fairly routine thing.

On another note, the LA Times tells us that “There has been some speculation that Mehserle meant to stun Grant with a Taser, not shoot him with his gun — a confusion that has occurred before.” If that’s really true, that’s as good a reason for banning Tasers as I’ve ever heard.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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