History Repeats in Chesapeake
Radley Balko | February 5, 2008, 9:36am
WAVY TV has an interview with James Broccoletti, the attorney for Ryan Frederick. The video also contains excerpts from the station's jailhouse interview with Frederick himself. Even those short clips are pretty wrenching. The state supreme court is also apparently appointing a special judge for the trial.
Another local news station notes that Frederick's case bears some resemblance to a case some 36 years ago, in which a police officer was killed after mistakenly breaking into an elderly couple's home. At least in that case, prosecutors had the good sense to not bring charges. At the time, way back in 1972, the Virginian-Pilot ran an editorial that included the following passage:
Faulty information is one thing, a faulty approach is another. Policeman storming into a house of sleeping occupants, who being legally armed is a matter of record, would seem to be an act of desperation. Surely the ordinary householder in an average neighborhood would not expect to be the target of such tactics, whether they meet the law's standards or not. And if storming has been the doctrine for narcotics raids, perhaps subtlety now should be explored.
Other Matt | February 5, 2008, 12:11pm | #
First, you say the Atlanta case wasn't covered. I say it was and only because it was a minority and an old woman.
John-I'd agree that it's the "old woman" more than a minority that brought it to national exposure. having an "old woman" story gives it more of a circus sideshow aspect. Having a minority being messed up by the police, that's just another day at the office per joe and his ilk. Had it been just a minority, that would have brought it locally, unless Sharpton et al picked it up. Had it been a white victim, it would have been just another beer swilling redneck and joe would call your objections "silly".
You're failing to realize that joe's position is fluid depending upon what he wants to try to justify at the moment, which is why I was referring to him as a fuckwitted moron as he's terrible at it generally. Well, no actually, no, to be precise, that was because when he's presented with insurmountable facts, he goes off calling one slanderous names and dismissing factual evidence as 'silly'. I object to people calling me a racist with no foundation but for their own contrivance, so I guess that's why I refer to him as a fuckwitted moron.
Anyway, I agree that there is a strong anti gun bias in the media which they use to color these stories as "used a gun equals bad". However, I also respectfully differ with you in that I do believe on a national level, they want to view themselves as being supportive of both police and the "drug war", and therefore this causes them to have a predisposition to not cover these stories nationally. Why they do this, I don't know, perhaps the corporate money is driving it, or perhaps the perception is that one cannot be averse to heavy handedness by police and at the same time pro "America", or perhaps the associate this with the crowd that is the Sept 11 X files conspiracy types.
I can't explain it, I believe I see it there, as I see the anti gun bias you reference. An example of the latter from a local paper was a story that kept referring to a kid "touching" a gun causing it to go off. This isn't possible mechanically, the kid pulled the trigger, and the only possible reason I could think of to cause them to write it as they did was so the gun was bad and the kid did nothing out of the ordinary. Of course, they didn't focus near so much on the idiot who put the gun in the kid's range of grasp, the multiple domestic violence protection orders he had, previous convictions for violence, etc, they just made the gun be bad, kid be innocent.
Anyway, I just believe what you have in Atlanta is the freak show factor of the old woman outweighing it.
