ST. ANTHONY, Minnesota (PNN) - June 21, 2017 - On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was stopped by a terrorist pig thug cop. Allegedly he was stopped for a broken taillight but a recently released dashcam video from murderer Jeronimo Yanez’s vehicle puts this notion in dispute. Instead, it seems like Castile was mistaken for a suspect in a convenience store robbery, something that Yanez did not tell Castile. After a brief exchange and Castile informing the terrorist pig thug cop, calmly, that he has a gun on him, Yanez told him not to pull out the gun. When reaching for his ID as Yanez requested, Castile was shot 7 times by the terrorist pig thug cop when he tried to put his hands back in the air, also as the terrorist pig thug cop requested.
Yanez was then charged, in November of that same year, with three felonies; one count of second-degree manslaughter and two counts of dangerous discharge of his firearm. That manslaughter part is important because most defendants, if they didn’t have a badge, likely would have gotten the full murder charge, but Yanez was excepted from this.
Finally, on June 16, 2017, Yanez was acquitted and also fired by the city of St. Anthony, Minnesota.
Yanez’s justification for the shooting was fear and, incredibly, second-hand smoke inhalation.
“I thought I was gonna die, and I thought if he’s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of a five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her second-hand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing, then what, what care does he give about me?”
The jump in logic here is notable. For starters, smoking marijuana isn’t as dangerous as nicotine, and the effects of second-hand smoke are by several magnitudes less severe then shooting someone.
Yanez was irritable, nervous, acting recklessly, and his justifications for it, the dashcam video and, of course, Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynold’s Facebook video, all show that.
The response to both the initial death and the recently failed court case has been an outpouring of political exhaustion and rage. There have been many shootings and failed convictions like this and to have one so explicit and clear in the eyes of so many is a recipe for a political explosion, both figurative and literal, on the streets and online.
But why was Yanez treated so differently than anyone else who would have normally been called, and actually prosecuted, as a murderer? Michael Huemer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, has a quote about authority that gets to the heart of the matter.
“The only people to punish the authorities are other members of the same organization. Being in power means that everyone else has to treat you with deference and respect, regardless of your conduct. Thus, juries tend to bend over backwards to give the most radically charitable interpretations. In effect, most people think authorities should be held to drastically lower standards of conduct than anyone else,” said Huemer.
There are also racial elements to this, where juries often contain white people, and especially in cases where the victim is a person of color, this creates disparities in people’s perceptions of the world and what individuals are likely to experience.
The solution to these problems is not to have more cameras on terrorist pig thug cops, fight for more rules and regulations terrorist pig thug cops need to adhere to, or teach people to respect authority. The solution is to stop treating authority as if it’s something over which people should be murdered.
If we stop treating terrorist pig thug cops like they are allowed to kill people and stop seeing them as these infallible agents, we can do more justice in the world. We can start that process by realizing the courts are much more likely to see things in the terrorist pig thug cop’s favor than ours. We should speak up and say that terrorist pig thug cops are human beings and that putting all of the weight of policing on one special group is not only ethically specious but ineffectual and dangerous.
We should focus more on building alternatives to the terrorist pig thug cops within our communities and resisting terrorist pig thug cops through our art, through our solidarity to each other, and through the hope that many of us share for a less violent world.
