Police officers involved in shootings of unarmed individuals make claims that are either refuted by witnesses or a autopsy report

Aiyana S. Jones

Joseph Weekley

A flash bang grenade, a gun shot and within moments 7 year old Aiyana Standley's Jones lifeless bloody corpse lay on a sofa where she had been asleep. For police officer Joseph Weekley the lies and excuses for firing the fatal shot begin before the child's body can turn cold. 

Weekley gave three different accounts of his version of events which led to Aiyana's death. He first created the mythic lie of blaming the victim's grandmother for brushing up against his weapon causing it to go off. That lie was dispelled when the grandmother testified she was nowhere near Weekley when the shot was fired. She called him a," dirty lying cop ", on the stand in the first trial which resulted in a hung jury. 

It's typical of cops involved in shootings of unarmed individuals to play, "blame the victim", for contributing to their own death. Every shooting victim is flawed, defamed and eventually forgotten. The subsequent investigations are inherently a myriad of excuses or coverups by police. Their answers are rehearsed, the details are reconstructed or summarily dismissed. The truth becomes hidden. Human tragedy is neatly packaged as a, 'clean kill' and given as pity to a grieving family and a apathetic public. The explanations to justify the use of deadly force are highly subjective while individual police officer motives go unexamined. Their perceptions are protected by that familiar innocuous line, "I feared for my life." 

Skewed by their own racial bias these trigger happy killers are inebriated with power and authority. Their recollections become vague and personal accounts are often contradicted by eye witnesses or refined for the most favorable circumstances to justify a quick seamless exoneration and vindication of their crimes. Police spokesperson's often repeat the same morass of police-speak in words and phrases like: victims failures, mistakes, critical errors, mishandled weapons, dimly lit areas, cell phones, shinny objects, sudden lurching motions, fidgeting in car, hands in pockets, reaching in a waistband, holding keys, or a wallet and not seeing the victims hands. In the sanitized world of police theory and practice victims always initiate provocation even when no direct threat is present to an officer or the public's safety. 

More recently police are claiming victims are suicidal defying the laws physics and shooting themselves in the head while handcuffed in the back seat of police cars. As the incidents of shooting unarmed people increases the more irrational the explanations given by police. This is the war and the innocent deaths of unarmed people will either appall us to protest or push us deeper into our own private desensitized narcissistic reality.