Oakland Police Massacre Casts Ugly Glare on Ex-Felon Desperation

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


A general consensus is that it was a deadly mix of panic, rage, and frustration that caused Lovelle Mixon to snap. His shocking murderous rampage left 4 Oakland police officers dead and a city and police agencies in deep soul search abut what went so terribly wrong. Though Mixon’s killing spree is a horrible aberration, his plight as an unemployed, ex-felon isn’t. There are tens of thousands like him on America’s streets.

In 2007, the National Institute of Justice found that 60 percent of ex-felon offenders remain unemployed a year after their release. Other studies have shown that upwards of thirty percent of felon releases live in homeless shelters because of their inability to find housing; and those are the lucky ones. Many camp out on the streets.

A significant number of them suffer from drug, alcohol and mental health challenges, and lack education or any marketable skills. More than seventy percent of all U.S. prisoners are literate at only the two lowest grade levels. Nearly 60 % of violent felons are repeat offenders. They are menace to themselves and as the nation saw with Mixon, to others. In some cases, they can be set off by any real or perceived slight, insult, or simply lash out from bitter rage. Mixon was one and he made four Oakland police officers victims and left a terrible trail of grieving and distraught families and a shell-shocked city and police department.

The answer to the Mixons’ isn’t easy and simple. The need is strike a fine and delicate balance between public safety and ex-felon rehabilitation. A big obstacle to making ex-felons law abiding, productive citizens is still the inability of many ex-felons to find jobs. City officials in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago, New York, and Atlanta have been repeatedly challenged to take action to end employer discrimination against ex-felons. The demand has been to restrict what employers can and can’t ask on job applications.

In a revealing study in 2003 and duplicated again several years later Northwestern University professor Devah Pager hired groups of African American and white young men with identical resumes and experience to pose as job applicants. Some were told to say they had a drug felony. The study found that a check when they checked the felony conviction box on applications it reduced the white applicants' chance of an interview by 50 %. For black applicants' their chance of landing the job was reduced by two-thirds.

To counter employer discrimination against ex-felons, nearly a dozen states and counties and cities have enacted laws in recent years to sharply limit what employers can ask applicants about criminal records. But that reform effort has stirred fierce resistance from employer groups. Washington D.C. is a near textbook example of that. Nearly 3,000 former prisoners are released and return to the District each year. Most fit the standard ex-felon profile. They are poor, with limited or education, and job skills, and come from broken or dysfunctional homes. Researchers again found that the single biggest thing that pushed them back to the streets, crime, violence and inevitably repeat incarceration was their failure to find work.

In 2007, the D.C. city council passed a measure that would have banned discrimination in employment as well as housing and education against ex-felons. It was vetoed by then Mayor Anthony A. Williams. The heat on Williams came from business groups who claimed that they’d be sued by rejected applicants.

Similar legislation has been kicking around in Congress since 2005. It hasn’t fared much better. The bill called the Second Chance Act is a relatively mild measure to pump about $100 million to local and state agencies for education, job and skills training, counseling, and family unification programs to stem the high rate of recidivism among ex-felons.

President Obama has often spoken of the need to unhinge the revolving door of felon release and reincarceration. He backs the Second Chance legislation. But with the economy and the financial crisis dominating the White House and Congressional agendas the likelihood that ex-felon aid will get immediate attention is slim.

In the meantime, the ranks of the felon underclass will continue to balloon. At last count, there were an estimated 12 million people in the U.S. with felony convictions. That’s nearly 10 percent of working-age population. And with jails bulging and states desperately trying to figure out how to cut jail costs and increasingly resorting to early release, more ex-felons will be on the streets. The current estimate is that more than 600,000 offenders are now being released from prisons yearly.

Mixon unfortunately was one of them. And others like him are ticking time bombs that endanger themselves and others. Oakland tragically showed that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard in Los Angeles on KTYM 1460 AM and nationally on blogtalkradio.com

Towering Obstacles in Prosecuting the Oscar Grant Killing

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

There’s a good chance that former Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle will be charged in the videotaped New Years day killing of Oscar Grant, a young African-American. But charging Mehserle with the fatal shooting of Grant and getting a conviction is a far different matter.
On the surface the case seems to be about as close to a slam dunk for a successful prosecution as any case involving apparent police misconduct could be. There are at least two compelling videos that appear to show an unarmed and handcuffed Grant face down on the BART platform. Grant does not appear to be resisting the officers. Witnesses testified that Grant posed no threat to the officers. BART officials have offered the weak explanation that Mehserle might have mistakenly thought that he was reaching for his taser gun. But expectations, witness testimony, videos, and an implausible explanation by BART for the deadly shooting may not be enough to nail Mehserle.
The first obstacle to convicting cops charged with deadly force is the use of videos. Defense attorneys who represent cops charged in questionable fatal shootings have honed the discrediting of videotaped evidence to a fine art. In a number of highly charged cases in cities across the country where the videos of police abuse have been widely televised to shocked millions, skilled defense attorneys have still won acquittals. They tell jurors that the videos are grainy and fuzzy, the sound and quality are poor, the tapes have missing pieces, and they omit events that show what provoked the officer to use force. They pound home that videos can be interpreted in many different ways.

Their spin to jurors is that videos give a distorted, clouded and therefore invalid picture of why an officer used deadly force. Defense attorneys don’t stop there. They also question the honesty, motives, and background of the videographers. In the Grant killing the two videos that were widely shown were shot by two young persons with cell phone cameras. One of whom refused to give his name.
The next obstacle is the investigation. Police officials and prosecutors move at a deliberate glacial pace in compiling evidence, witness testimony, and officer statements. The time delay works to the officer’s advantage. It insures that their version of why officers used force is in total sync with the version given by other officers present. Mehserle’s quick resignation after the Grant shooting further blurs things. He evaded an internal investigation and giving possible damning statements.
The rare times that a prosecutor brings charges against an officer for overuse of deadly force the defense attorney are top line and have had much experience defending police officers accused of misconduct. Police unions pay them and they spare no expense in their defense. The cops almost never serve any pre-trial jail time, and are promptly released on ridiculously low bail.
Then there’s the jury. Police defense attorneys seek to get as many middle-class whites on the panel as possible. The presumption is that they are much more likely to believe the testimony of police and prosecution witnesses than black or young witnesses, defendants, or even the victims. That’s no small point. In the great majority of deadly force killings the victims, as was Grant, are young African-Americans or Latinos. The witnesses generally are young or minority. That’s the case in the Grant killing.

Prosecutors have a daunting job trying to overcome pro-police attitudes and the negative racial stereotypes. Two Penn State University studies on racial perceptions and stereotypes, one in 2003 and a follow-up study in 2008, found that many whites are likely to associate pictures of blacks with violent crimes, and in some cases where crimes were not committed by blacks they misidentified the perpetrator as an African American. Defense attorneys always play hard on any prior misconduct, bad behavior, or any criminal conduct by the victim. The Grant case would likely be the same. Early press reports repeatedly talked about Grant’s alleged criminal record. This feeds into the stereotype of bad behaving blacks, and that the victim somehow is responsible for the officer using deadly force.
The biggest obstacle of all is the blurred standard of what is or isn't acceptable use of force. It often comes down to a judgment call by the officer. In the Rodney King beating case in 1992 and the Sean Bell killing in New York City in 2007 defense attorneys turned the tables and painted King as the aggressor and claimed that the level of force used against him was justified. In the Bell case, they claimed that Bell and his companions were trying to run them down and they feared for their lives.
Convicting the cop who killed Grant, or any cops who wantonly kill, is a colossal task for even the most diligent prosecutor. The Grant case will be no different.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).