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BALTIMORE, MD – APRIL 22: Ten-year-old Robert Dunn uses a megaphone to address hundreds of demonstrators during a protest against police brutality and the death of Freddie Gray outside the Baltimore Police Western District station April 22, 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland. Gray, 25, was arrested for possessing a switch blade knife April 12 outside the Gilmor Homes housing project on Baltimore’s west side. According to his attorney, Gray died a week later in the hospital from a severe spinal cord injury he received while in police custody. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
3 min read

Fourth officer acquitted

in the case of Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore

Clinton Yates @clintonyates

Up Next From Culture

    4:33 PMLet’s ask ourselves a question: If no one in Baltimore Police Department is responsible for Freddie Gray’s death, who is? Did a man just snap his own neck in the back of a police vehicle by himself? According to the state, apparently so.

    Today, a fourth officer was acquitted in the case of the man who died last year after sustaining injuries while he was detained. Lt. Brian Rice, 42, was the highest-ranking officer in the incident. It’s worth noting that he asked for a decision to be made by a Baltimore Circuit Court judge, not a jury. Once again, this is how the system works for itself. Officers Garrett Miller and Alicia White are still awaiting trial.

    The judge in the Gray case said an error in judgment was not enough to convict Rice of misconduct or negligence.

    Most importantly, though, is this notion of erasure through separation. There are so many layers of plausible deniability between the enforcement of law and the termination of a black life that you don’t need a master’s degree to understand why people think they don’t matter. Even when police officers kill a fellow law enforcement official, they don’t go to jail.

    The officer who shot and killed undercover detective Jacai Colson in Prince George’s County, Maryland, said he didn’t know that he was not a suspect because he was not in uniform. More plainly, he assumed that because he was shooting a gun and he was black that he was a criminal. And a grand jury agreed with him. Blue Lives Matter? Apparently not, if they’re black, too. Mind you, Colson was actually protecting a police station from an ambush. Hey, at least someone named a dog after him.

    https://twitter.com/TaliAuzenne/status/753975073241833472

    What’s also incredibly quizzical is that the city agreed to pay $6.4 million to Gray’s family over the matter, a tad more than the $6 million that the city of Cleveland paid to the family of Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by police in 2014. At the time, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, “the purpose of the civil settlement is to bring an important measure of closure to the Gray family, to the community and to the city. And to avoid years and years of protracted civil litigation.”

    What killed him was his blackness, it would seem.

    Clinton Yates is a tastemaker at Andscape. He likes rap, rock, reggae, R&B and remixes — in that order.