CHICAGO, IL- Law Enforcement Today has learned that special prosecutors in Illinois late this week have dropped all charges against a man accused of killing a Chicago police officer nearly 40 years ago.
NBC-5 Chicago reported that Jackie Wilson saw his charges dismissed near the end of his third trial relative to the 1982 killing of Officer Richard O’Brien. A second Chicago officer, William Fahey, was also killed.
Cook County prosecutors dropped the charges after a current Cook County assistant state’s attorney testified during the defense portion of the case.
Nicholas Trutenko testified that he was a long-time friend with a man named William Coleman, who was a central witness in Wilson’s 1989 trial. Apparently, Wilson had been deemed a conman by Wilson’s attorneys, who also painted him as a well-known fraudster.
Neither the defense, nor the special prosecutors who were trying Wilson knew whether Coleman was, in fact alive or dead.
Under testimony, Trutenko said that he had been in touch with Coleman the week before, and also admitted that he was the godfather to one of Coleman’s daughters going back several years.
When asked if he had ever admitted the friendship with Coleman to the prosecutor’s office, Trutenko said he didn’t believe he was obliged to do so.
Wilson had previously said during prior hearings that he was tortured into admitting participation in the killings by a former Chicago police commander named Jon Burge. Despite those allegations, Wilson was once again being tried for the 1982 murder of O’Brien.
Wilson was convicted during his second trial in 1989, however his conviction was tossed out in 2018 by Judge William Hooks relative to allegations that Wilson had indeed been tortured by Burge, who has since passed away, forcing him to admit a role in the shooting. At the time, Hooks was hearing evidence in Wilson’s third trial.
Wilson’s defense attorney, Flint Taylor praised the decision to dismiss the case by the special prosecutor.
The Washington Times reported Taylor said:
“It should have been dismissed and never gone to trial. But it did and it was a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money.”
Wilson was initially convicted of the murders however his conviction was overturned by an appellate court, NBC-5 said. He was retried in 1989 and was convicted of the murder of O’Brien, but exonerated in the murder of Fahey.
Burge was never placed under arrest for the abuse charges against Wilson, however he was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993 relative to the 1982 beating and burning of a man named Andrew Wilson, who died in prison in 2007 after being tried and convicted twice in the deaths of Officers O’Brien and Fahey.
Last month, we reported on a Cleveland police detective who was murdered in his police vehicle. For more on that, we invite you to:
DIG DEEPER
On September 3rd at approximately 10:00 p.m., 53-year-old Cleveland Police Detective James Skernivitz was shot dead in Cleveland’s Stockyards neighborhood.
Yet, not even 8 hours after that detective’s murder, Cleveland.com published an editorial about how police officers are racist murderers.
The editorial in question was titled “For years, I accepted the explanations when police killed Black people. Until this year” and the narrative provided explains the sudden change in the position of Dave Lange when it relates to when an officer-involved shooting includes a black suspect.
Quite frankly, the op-ed penned by Lange is utter nonsense because he notes how he sided with police on certain high-profile cases in recent years involving black suspects shot by police and then suddenly did a complete 180 after the death of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake.
First Lange cited the 2012 shooting of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, which was a highly controversial case at the time. Lange said his rationale during the height of the controversy was that it seemed like “ineptitude” at worst by officers involved:
“I recognized it as a reckless case of ineptitude. Even so, I gave police the benefit of the doubt on their contention that it was self-defense against an attempt to run them over.”
Here’s Lange saying how he agreed with officers Steven Davis and Nicholas Kline after they were cleared in the 2013 fatal shooting of Kevin Bailey in Solon, Ohio:
“When two police officers killed a 22-year-old Black man in a gunfight on a Solon road the next year, I called them heroes. They are.”
Then Lange notes that Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson was justified in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown back in 2014:
“When the killing of Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, fired up the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, I pointed out that it appeared to be an act of self-defense, which later was corroborated by forensic evidence.”
After that, Lange then mentioned the shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland – another controversial case – and said that it seemed like a case of horrible circumstances:
“When Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy, was shot and killed by Cleveland police for waving a pellet gun on a playground three months later, I knew it was reckless and inept. But I gave police the benefit of the doubt. I conceded that the gun looked real and that irresponsible adults made it that way.”
So, after mentioning all these cases which many of them gained national attention and Lange conceded that there was nuance in each instance, Lange suddenly now thinks police kill black people just because they’re black suspects.
Lange wrote that “now the evidence is clear to me,” because of the deaths of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake. He went so far as to make reference to some black sailors that were smashing glasses and bottles in a bar when he was in the Navy in 1971 as evidence that police are racist killers.
In 1971 in Cannes, Lange was an NCO shore patrolman and said that because he didn’t even have to use his “billy club” to end the incident – instead using a chair to pin one of the sailors against a wall – that this is evidence that police don’t need to sometimes use lethal force:
“I know that George Floyd didn’t need to die and that Jacob Blake didn’t need to be paralyzed from the waist down. I know that because of the chair that two expeditiously trained shore patrolmen grabbed instead of our billy clubs so long ago in Cannes, France.”
First of all, to compare subduing likely drunken sailors to that of any non-military criminal suspect is preposterous. Furthermore, to compare dealing with those sailors at the bar to that of the Floyd or Blake encounters doesn’t even make any sense.
The copious amounts of nuance and criminal histories associated with Floyd’s case and Blake’s case isn’t even in the same league as drunken sailors breaking glasses in a bar. While there are plenty of criticisms that can be levied toward the Blake and Floyd cases, neither of those are evidence that police are just killing black Americans indiscriminately.
Those are both isolated incidents.
And so far, there’s also zero evidence in either case that suggests there was any racial-motivated component or racial animosity between the officers involved and both suspects.
Also, the complete lack of scruples in a Cleveland news outlet publishing this drivel mere hours after a Cleveland Police detective was murdered is all the more abhorrent.
But it’s op-eds like Lange’s that continue to serve the completely false narrative that police just like killing black people, using the persuasive technique of “I was once blind, but now I can see”.
And to try to deliver that narrative shortly after a police officer was murdered it just despicable.
Former Police Chief: Oh, all cops are racist killers? The real numbers prove you very wrong.
This editorial was written by a former Chief of Police and incorporates extensive data from statistics across the country.
WASHINGTON D.C. – Since last week, all we have seen and heard in the mainstream media is about the “systemic” racism in police departments, and how police officers kill African Americans at a higher rate than whites. A recent report citing data from the Washington Post disputes that notion.
Clearly, what happened in Minneapolis last week to George Floyd was an outrage.
Any right-thinking American and an overwhelming majority of police officers condemn what was done to that man. He did not deserve it.
Police officers are better than that and we should demand that they are.
Now, we have politicians on both sides of the aisle, strictly from the standpoint of trying to score cheap political points, saying that there is some kind of inherent bias against African Americans by the police.
So, Daniel Horowitz took the Washington Post’s searchable database on police shootings and did some digging. It did not take long.
Let’s look at one glaring statistic first, outside of police shootings. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, in 2019 in the city of Chicago…one city…315 African American males between the ages of 15 and 40 were victims of homicide. Let’s just get that out of the way.
Meanwhile the Washington Post database showed that in 2019, nine unarmed African Americans were shot dead by police, while 19 unarmed whites were similarly killed.
So, one does not need to be a math major to see that over twice as many unarmed whites were killed in 2019 than African Americans. If you watch the news, however you get an entirely different story.
Now, George Floyd was not shot by police. Still as Horowitz points out, if there existed a trend where police officers were hunting down African Americans for the purposes of killing them, it is not reflected in the 2019 shooting tally.
Horowitz cited a poster on Twitter who actually analyzed the nine shootings of black males in 2019, and in each case, the suspect was in the process of using potential deadly physical force against either an officer or a civilian.
There are scores of cases on record where an unarmed individual was able to overpower an officer, gain control of their duty weapon and then kill them.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1267633185720074246
The nine cases are as follows:
In the first case, a Knoxville officer shot and killed Channara Pheap after Pheap “choked him, grabbed his Taser and used it on him during a struggle at a local apartment complex. The officer, Dylan Williams, had his story corroborated by five witnesses.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1267633186776985601
The second incident involved a shooting in Los Angeles, where a Deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department shot Ryan Twyman, who was under investigation for illegal gun charges (he was not armed at the time).
Twyman attempted to back his car up into the deputy. In the interest of transparency, there is some question as to how much danger the deputy was in.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1267633187733352450
The next incident occurred in Fort Worth, Texas, where a woman was shot through the window of her home after she pointed a gun at an officer through that same window.
It is not known why this was classified as a shooting of an unarmed person. Her 8-year-old confirmed she pointed the gun at the officer.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1267633188731576321
In the fourth incident cited, Deputy Glen Sims shot Christopher Whitfield. According to Sims, he shot Whitfield “accidentally” during a scuffle.
Whitfield had broken into a convenience store. Sims claimed that Whitfield had struck his gun during the struggle, causing it to go off. Full disclosure, Sims had previously been fired for a domestic incident, however he regained his job.
He had a couple of other arrests on his record as well, so it is unclear how he was able to still serve as an officer. This one is questionable.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1267633189629169667
The fifth incident involved in incident in Edmond, Oklahoma, where Isaiah Lewis was shot to death. He was running naked and charged at an officer, beating him unconscious. A second officer shot and killed him.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1267633191080394752
The next case involved a career criminal who was shot and killed near Boerne, Texas by a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper on I-10. That followed a physical altercation between the trooper and the suspect, Marcus McVae.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1267633192066076673
The seventh shooting was in Blythevile, Arkansas, where officers were dispatched to a store where an employee was attacked.
The suspect, Marzues Scott was tracked down to a hotel parking lot. A female officer became involved in a physical altercation, where Scott knocked her to the ground, striking her several times in the head.
She fired her service weapon, striking Scott, who continued being aggressive toward her while she lay on the ground. She fired another shot, killing him. The prosecutor ruled the shooting justified.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1267633192921677826
Incident number eight occurred in Baltimore where Kevin Bruce Mason was killed after a standoff with officers. He had a previous history of shooting at police in a similar standoff.
He was warned not to approach and refused to comply with orders. Officers fired several shots. He was found later in the house and had succumbed to his injuries. It does not appear any officers were ever reprimanded in this incident.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1267633193831841793
Number nine involved Officer Jovanny Crespo of the Newark (NJ) police department, where he shot and killed Gregory Griffin after a pursuit.
An officer involved said that one of the two men in the car pointed a gun at him several times during the chase. In a previous traffic stop, which he also fled, the officer said he saw a gun in the car.
A second man in the car, Andrew Dixon was also shot in the face during the same incident. Dixon was later charged with possessing a gun loaded with hollow point bullets.
Somehow a grand jury indicted Crespo for aggravated manslaughter. That particular case appears to still be pending.
The poster from Twitter who examined the nine cases did offer a couple of caveats. The database did not include all police related deaths, only shootings. Also, he wanted to make it clear that police are not always justified in shooting people who are armed.
So, what does this all mean? Let’s say that maybe out of the nine cases three or four are questionable. That still means that at least where it concerns deadly force situations, this is not exactly open season on African Americans by the police.
Horowitz notes that according to the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, police have contacts with approximately 53 million people each year, often having multiple encounters with the same people.
Last year, researchers from both the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland said:
“We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime.”
The said that based on the study conducted of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings published in August 2019, it was found that “officers are less likely to fatally shoot Black civilians for fear of public and legal reprisals” and therefore “all else equal, this would increase the likelihood that a person fatally shot was White vs. Black.”
They concluded that “per capita racial disparity in fatal shootings is explained by non-White people’s greater exposure to police through crime.”
Clearly, police are “gun-shy” (no pun intended) when it comes to using force against African Americans by and large.
Monday night, five police officers were shot, and one is in critical condition, while a police officer was run down by a car in New York City and a group of officers was mowed down in Buffalo, New York.
Last year, 49 police officers were killed, with 30 percent of the suspects being African American, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.
Thus far in 2020, the number of police officers killed year to year is more than last year, which is stunning considering that the country has been virtually shut down for nearly three months up until we got the “riot exception” to the lockdowns.
Is race an issue the cause of these police killings? No. It is a personal responsibility issue.
While people are protesting the death of Mr. Floyd (and peaceful protests are deserved), where are the protests for the 82 people shot this past weekend, 22 fatally? Oh, and that was only in Chicago.
Statistically, African Americans are killed by homicide at a rate of eight times that of whites.
Yet what have we seen since the pandemic took hold? Progressive officials have released tens of thousands of known criminals back onto the streets, some of them violent felons.
I found this stat from Bureau of Justice statistics, US. Their handling of racial violence is clearly botched up and inefficient. Their media portrays one picture while the reality is something else. Numbers speak for themselves @Divya0094 pic.twitter.com/o6ywsWrxmN
— Son_of_Shashanka (@GaudaVanshaj) May 31, 2020
In New York, the NYPD’s crime data for 2018 showed that of the 209 homicide suspects that year where the race was known, 149, or 71 percent were either black or “black Hispanic.” Forty, or 19 percent were “white Hispanic,” while just 14 (6.6 percent) were white. So, 93.4 of homicides in New York where the race was known were committed by “minorities.”
Now for victims. Out of 289 homicide victims in 2018, where the race was documented, only 26 or 9 percent were white. Blacks or “black Hispanics” comprised 196, or 68 percent of victims while 54, or 19 percent were “white Hispanic.”
In a tale of two cities, over the years, at least up until Bill de Blasio became mayor, New York had taken a more aggressive law enforcement tone.
The city used to have something on the order of 2,000 murders annually. Aggressive crime-fighting approaches by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and continued by Michael Bloomberg drove those numbers way down, which saved countless African American lives.
Contrast that with Baltimore. That city in 2015 took a “hands-off” approach to policing that has kicked off several years of record murders, which have victimized primarily African Americans.
The fact of the matter is that while the death of George Floyd was a senseless, appalling act, the fact remains that by and large police officers across the nation should not be punished for the sins of one officer.
Clearly something needs to be done to weed out the bad actors among the ranks of our law enforcement officers.
But when you look at where people are complaining about their voices not being heard, about systemic injustices in the criminal justice system in their communities, there is a common thread. Look at who has been running these cities for decades. If nothing is changing, you need to look at the people in charge.
What was the definition of insanity again? Doing the same thing over and over yet expecting different results. Nothing will change until the mindset of the people who run these cities changes. Instead of treating people as victims constantly, give them the tools that they need to succeed. That will make a huge difference. Hopefully, it isn’t too late.
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