Ampersand is furious:
There’s no way a white person would have been shot the way James Perez (or Kendra James before him, or Jose Poot before her) was shot. And if by some miracle a white person was shot on a pretext pull-over, there’s no way the Portland DA’s office would cheat the grand jury system to make sure that the cops were spared the discomfort of a trial. And if that did happen, the mainstream papers would at least report it.
Mike Schrunk and his boss John Bradley looked at the color of the victim’s skin and said, “screw it! Blacks aren’t human; the shooting of an unarmed black person doesn’t require a trial, because black lives aren’t worth that much.” A hundred years ago Schrunk and Bradley would have gotten their rocks off participating in lynch mobs, but since they can’t have that pleasure nowadays, they have to settle for gaming the justice system to make it legal for cops to shoot blacks.
It drives me up a wall that Schrunk and Bradley are still being treated with respect. Why aren’t they spit on by every decent person, everywhere they go? Why aren’t they turned away from restaurants and stores? Why aren’t their houses and cars vandalized every day? Why isn’t the mayor – or any of the folks running for mayor – calling for them to resign or be thrown out of office?