After Killing Unarmed Shopper John Crawford, White Cops Berated Aggrieved Girlfriend

"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/bad-black-people-why-bill-oreilly-is.html

By Radley Balko December 17, 2014

In August I posted about John Crawford, an Ohio man gunned down by police in a Wal-Mart as he held an air gun that he had picked up in the store. Surveillance video appears to contradict the police account of the incident, and it definitely contradicts the account given by one witness who called 911. That witness, who initially claimed Crawford was pointing the gun at children, later changed his story after viewing the video. A grand jury later declined to indict the officers on any criminal charges.

Over the weekend, the Guardian posted some disturbing video of the police interrogation of Crawford’s girlfriend, Tasha Thomas. As Thomas sobs, Detective Rodney Curd berates her, accuses her of lying and suggests she might be high on drugs.

“You lie to me and you might be on your way to jail,” detective Rodney Curd told Thomas, as she wept and repeatedly offered to take a lie-detector test. After more than an hour and a half of questioning and statement-taking, Curd finally told Thomas that Crawford, 22, had died.

“As a result of his actions, he is gone,” said the detective, as she slumped in her chair and cried . . .

Curd promptly asked Thomas whether she and Crawford had criminal records. Already tearful and breathless, Thomas explained that she may have had some traffic offences and had been arrested for petty theft as a juvenile.

The detective then became increasingly aggressive and banged on the table between them with his hand. “Tell me where he got the gun from,” Curd repeated. Thomas insisted Crawford had been carrying only a white plastic grocery bag when they arrived at Walmart to buy the ingredients to make s’mores at a family cook-out.

Asked one of several times whether Crawford owned a gun, Thomas said: “Not that I know.”

Curd told her: “Don’t tell me ‘not that you know’, because that’s the first thing I realise somebody’s not telling me the truth”.

He later repeated: “You need to tell me the truth” and “You need to be truthful.” . . .

Curd also pushed Thomas on whether she was intoxicated, asking her: “Have you been drinking? Drugs? Your eyes are kind of messed-up looking”. After she told him that Crawford had smelled of marijuana, Curd took down notes. He went on to ask whether Crawford had been suicidal.

He also tried to get her to say that Crawford had brought the gun to Wal-Mart to kill his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his two children. (She was at home at the time, and he in fact was on the phone with her at the time of the shooting.)

We, of course, now know that Crawford got the gun from the Wal-Mart store itself and that he wasn’t threatening anyone with it. But even if he had brought the gun with him into the store, doing so would probably have been legal under Ohio law. His death has sparked protests by open-carry advocates, as well as debate over whether such laws could ever realistically apply to black people.

Radley Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces."