Did a Houston cop set up George Floyd years before Minnesota cops killed him? How militarized policing escalated protests; 50 years of ignoring 'accumulated grievances,' and other stories

It's been a crazy few days for those of us who work on criminal-justice reform. The news right now is filled with analysis and accounts of all the protests, so I won't rehash it all. But here are a few odds and ends that merit Grits readers' attention:

George Floyd in Texas

We've been learning more about George Floyd, who died in Minnesota at the hands of police but grew up in Texas and was a victim of corrupt police here, as well. Mike Hall at Texas Monthly wrote a brilliant profile of Floyd's time in Houston. In the 2nd grade, he wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice. As a young man, he rapped on one of DJ Screw's famous mixtapes. One thing Mike didn't catch, though, was that Floyd was one of the people potentially set up for a drug conviction by corrupt Houston PD narcotics officer Gerald Goines. (The Houston Chronicle first reported this last week in an addendum to an AP story; see the letter to Floyd here.) Harris County DA Kim Ogg sent him a letter last year informing him his case was one of those where Goines' uncorroborated testimony was the basis for his conviction. It was sent to an old address in Houston, so it's unclear if Floyd ever received it.

Militarized police response needlessly escalated things

Police didn't have to respond to protests in a militarized way, and doing so escalated the situation needlessly. This article from the Marshall Project made the case. 

'An accumulation of unresolved grievances'

More than 50 years ago, the Kerner Commission report identified a dozen fundamental "grievances" underlying 1967 riots in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere and recommended changes to address them. They concluded that, "virtually every major episode of violence was foreshadowed by an accumulation of unresolved grievances and by widespread dissatisfaction among [black people] with the unwillingness or inability of local government to respond." All 12 grievances still apply today, but so does the observation that the most extreme protests stem from an "accumulation" of grievances. This is certainly the case with protests over the last week. For example, Grits has been documenting the local list of grievances here in Austin that led more than two dozen community groups to call for the firing of the police chief. Nobody listened. Maybe they'll listen now.

End qualified immunity

As people search for effective reforms in the wake of recent events, Grits keeps coming back to the issue of qualified immunity which keeps officers from being held accountable. The best thing would be for the US Supreme Court, which created it, to get rid of it. But state legislators could eliminate it in their own jurisdictions via legislation.

Bodycam footage from Midland released

The city of Midland released bodycam footage from the Tye Anders arrest, in which his 90-year old grandmother intervened to keep the 19-year old from getting shot. As mentioned last week, Grits sees parallels between the Midland episode and the Mike Ramos shooting in Austin. Both men had surrendered - Ramos with his hands in the air and Anders laying on the ground with his hands behind his head - but officers kept screaming at them to move toward them. Both men feared if they did, they would be shot, and indeed, many black men have been killed under such circumstances when officers claimed they made a "furtive movement." They were damned if they do, damned if they don't. Police and much of white America appear utterly clueless about the differences in perceptions of law enforcement among white and black folks. I feel like the Anders and Ramos incidents largely resulted from those differing perceptions: Those two unarmed men considered their situations and available options in a far different light than the officers pointing their guns at them.

Friendly fire episode recalls botched Houston narcotics raid

A Fort Bend Sheriff's deputy accidentally killed a deputy from a Fort Bend constable's office in a friendly fire incident, the Houston Chronicle reported. This episode reminds Grits that we've never seen the ballistics report from last year's botched narcotics raid based on Gerald Goines' fabricated probable cause that left a Houston couple dead and four officers wounded. I still very much want to know who shot whom in that case.

Use of force against inmates rises as TX prison pop dwindles

Even as the Texas prison population dwindles, use of force against inmates has risen inside TDCJ facilities, reported the Texas Tribune. This report was from February but I'd missed it because of my recent illness, so I wanted to record the link here.

Ranger revisionism

The San Antonio Express News ran a review of a new book on the history of the Texas Rangers by Doug Swanson which includes this remarkable passage:

“They were the violent instruments of repression,” he writes. “They burned peasant villages and slaughtered innocents. They committed war crimes. Their murders of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans made them as feared on the border as the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. They hunted runaway slaves for bounty.”

In addition, “they violated international law with impunity. They sometimes moved through Texas towns like a rampaging gang of thugs. They conspired to quash the civil rights of black citizens. They busted unions and broke strikes. They enforced racial segregation of public schools. They botched important criminal investigations.”

In sum, according to Swanson, the Texas Rangers “served the interests of the moneyed and powerful while suppressing the poor and disenfranchised. They have been the army of Texas’s ruling class. And they have consistently lied about it.”