There’s a warning among African-Americans about visiting the Texas capital city. “Come to Austin on vacation,” some peeps say, “leave on probation.” Or don’t leave at all because you’ve been shot by the damn pigs.
Or leave in the sheriff’s van headed to state prison which is also a highly-likely outcome for people of color in the World Capital of Live Music. Statistics just released by the Department of Criminal Justice show Travis County—of which our bucolic city is the progressive county seat. Travis County leads Texas’ major urban areas in percentage of the minority population sent to prison even though the capital city’s relative black and Latino population is lower than in Houston, Dallas, Ft. Worth or San Antonio. For such a progressive place with such a high-minded view of itself, justice outcomes here are an embarrassment. A lot of fingers have been pointed recently to explain these law & order discrepancies: at prosecutors, at the courts and at a predatory probation office. But nowhere more than at the police—the pigs, colloquially—alleged officers of the law.
The actual dynamics of policing a racist police force were just explored in some detail in a Travis County courtroom as two SWAT guys faced charges of excessive force in what is said to have been the first civil rights trial of a police officer in Hill Country history. From the start there wasn’t much doubt about the verdict but as a black man my feeling was sort of like sitting down to watch a much-anticipated new movie—or turning up the volume on a long hoped-for album. This should be good.
There’s an old photograph in my memory of the civil rights era, which you may have seen as well—of a backwoods Southern sheriff, back in the day—on trial for the deaths of Freedom Riders. That was apparently the background to the picture. A Jewish guy and a black guy were the vics, a famous case of the FBI's “Mississippi Burning” era: A cracker sheriff grinning and chewing tobacco, like he was having a good time at his own trial, because he knew he would be acquitted. For me seeing the Mississippi photo always brought on indignation—until suddenly, in the 299th Travis County District Court, Honorable Karen Sage presiding—the enjoyable prospect of a civil rights trial became clear, even if you knew from the beginning what the verdict would be. Chewing tobacco is not my thing. Instead, for a couple of days in early December my enjoyment was the discomfort of two white police officers not to be mean-spirited or anything.
The original plan was to sit in the front row, stretch my feet out to watch a spectacle. Only popcorn would be missing because you can’t eat in court, you know? So, like, the details of the charges against these two SWAT idiots were not extraordinary by any means. Basically the case involved two white officers. A black suspect. Unnecessary use of a Taser. Faked documentation, stop me if you’ve heard this before. “Overtime” was probably the single most spoken word in the courtroom because it’s probably the most common expression in the local public safety vocabulary—in this city at least—where paying firefighters and feeding the pigs is like a quarter of the budget, the highest-paid police force in Texas, literally.
So, like, the two SWAT idiots on trial were working overtime and allegedly on regular patrol, on the night in question, early last year, when they stunned a black guy who had already submitted to their command to kneel. So. Like, stop me if you’ve heard that before. The defendants were Officers Pfaff and Petraitis—"P&P” as they were called by prosecutors outside the courtroom—or Peepee which was my own preference. One P was a little guy with a shaved head and the other one was beefy with a red face. At least one of the P's had capped a suspect or two as a sniper employed by the City of Austin, in the past. To the degree that Peepee's defense was that they were being singled out and did nothing that any other cop in town has not done, or was not doing, on that mild morning in December as the trial began—you could feel a certain sympathy for them because it was probably true. This is what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Peepee just drew the short straw and got arrested by the D.A. They were caught when prosecutors were actually watching. The new D.A. said the old days are over.
The trial audience was, hmmm, pretty much what you would expect. The testosterone level was near-toxic. Although prosecutors have denied the existence of a blue wall, as it has been called elsewhere—in Chicago for example—of silence and oppression on the police force, the audience for Peepee’s trial was made up almost exclusively off-duty cops whose whole demeanor spelled pig, not to be mean-spirited again. Almost exclusively white males who looked like they had spent, growing up, too much time in the gym and not enough in the library. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, because the jury was pretty fucking suspect too. From the concerned black male perspective: A sprinkling of minorities but, critically, three or four young white guys with beards, like the faces you see so frequently on our city streets today. Originally from Portland or Seattle or some other high tech locale probably on the West Coast and who in an earlier generation might have been long-haired liberals but today are just as likely to side with the cops. Not that there's anything wrong with that, either. Tech bros. The kind of guys who served in Iraq or play the game online.
There was also a white chick in the front row of the jury box, blond with pearl earrings—you know the type, kind of hot, actually, in a milfy way. Not to be racist or sexist or anything but she looked like she did good deeds. And she was paying close attention too, which is a good thing. She did not appear to be particularly Negro-friendly, you never know, again, the outcome of the trial was assured regardless of this chick’s membership in Junior League. It only takes one vote to walk and Peepee had that from the beginning. With the verdict a foregone conclusion, that did not mean the trial was a wasted endeavor on the part of District Attorney Moore. The new D.A.’s new approach has been complemented by smart work at City Hall. In the new Police Association contract the pigs were given more money in exchange for greater scrutiny. The carrot and the stick, you could say, and in Judge Sage’s court it was the stick being applied. In the Mississippi Burning photo the sheriff looked oversized and arrogant but Peepee looked small and frightened.
It was interesting for example that the abuse Peepee was charged with perpetrating took place not far from the courthouse where they were being tried, in an open area near the old Brackenridge Hospital site that the mayor now calls the “Innovation Zone” and is designated for high-tech healthcare entrepreneurship. Allied with the University of Texas’s new Dell Medical School. The two SWAT idiots just happened to single out a black guy. That fits into a continuing black narrative, the belief that the police are only doing what City Hall wants, clearing inner city neighborhoods for newly-arrived techie whites. In that narrative the Negro who got zapped by the Taser got zapped because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, not because he didn’t kneel when he was ordered to. He was supposed to have made way already for a hypothetically-white, preferably-young female medical researcher out with her dog. As gentrification—backed by police action—police pressure let’s call it—has progressed, the mayor has spoken of a “right of return” for minorities forced from their homes, but in order to return you have to leave first. It’s something that Steve Adler the human being will likely regret in retrospect but Mayor Adler the developer's friend is promoting now. City Hall has endorsed a kind of reverse-Soweto approach here, in the Live Music Capital of the World, instead of keeping African-Americans in a defined area—a la apartheid—the city has tried to move us out. That includes clearing the Innovation Zone. The mayor and the members of the Chamber of Commerce aren’t bad people, it’s just that the easiest way they know to make money is through real estate. The economy has to keep growing. They’re greedy, in other words, just like the damn pigs.
One can only hope that Peepee's defense depleted the union’s defense fund. It’s noteworthy now that our two last police chiefs have both turned on their own officers, Chief Art Acevedo who recently decamped for Houston, after a decade in River City, was famously recorded in show-up ripping his own people a new asshole. The Chief himself was also widely believed in the Department to be responsible for a series of leaks to the daily newspaper, against his own guys and girls. “You notice,” a police lieutenant said to me just the other day, speaking of the American-Statesman’s scoops on pigs-gone-wild, “that the stories stopped when Acevedo left.” Chief Acevedo saw APD with the skeptical eye of an officer whose career was spent in internal affairs, in the California Highway Patrol. He already knew what bad cops looked like. His reaction against what he saw in Austin seemed visceral while new Chief Brian Manley’s appearance in court seemed more calculated. He agreed to testify against Peepee. However it came about it was still welcomed.
Other testimony during Peepee's trial was actually encouraging. The original patrol idiot on scene was a bicycle cop who arrived before the two SWAT idiots. He admitted under cross examination that the only reason he was testifying against his brother officers was that prosecutors told him that if he did not, he would be charged with faking reports of the incident, after he was caught (by video) lying in his written narrative. The bike officer raised what has become a legitimate question, in our digitally-obsessed world, first asked a couple of years ago by Police Association President Ken Casaday, who is not an idiot but who has only the interests of his membership at heart. The issue of what “really” happens and what video shows happening. It's an almost existential question. Casaday's idea being to allow officers to see their film before writing reports. There was one curious thing about Peepee’s trial, in my view, as a moderate black man, although it was not anything coming from the bench or at the defense table. Instead it was Peepee's audience, the gallery, the pigs themselves, colloquially-speaking. You couldn’t help but notice a violation of courtroom decorum, actually. So, like, one off-duty officer was sitting in the front row in plain sight of the bailiff and presumably the judge—during testimony—gradually peeling back the wrapper of a candy bar and chowing down. He kept on eating while also taking sips from a bottle of water. My recollection is that he even had the bottle on the rail in front of him at one point. It was hard to miss, in a supposedly non-drinking no-food courtroom, and one of the guys next to me even had a coffee cup on the bench beside him. That may not seem extraordinary behavior unless you spend any time in courtrooms, where it is. These pigs were texting and you also heard the occasional beep of an incoming message in the gallery. At least one phone rang, a subdued chime that was nonetheless noticeable in a hushed courtroom. Normally the bailiff would be moving you out the door. But the judge didn’t seem to mind and during breaks the bailiff was deferential to PD in the audience, like the court and the Police Association were all one big happy family which they are, actually.
Whereas during an ordinary trial—when this gallery is not full of cops, and there are only the unfortunates and the losers/thugs who make their way through the county criminal justice system. So, like, an average day at any other time in Judge Sage’s courtroom for example—the rules are posted on the door, aren’t they? No eating, no drinking or cellphone use. Like that. And the rules are enforced for anyone else. Usually. Except these damn pigs.
Ordinarily Her Honor would
have gone off like a bomb or the courtroom deputy would have escorted someone to the door.
But for los puercos in the courtroom it was like there were no rules. It’s like that on
the street too.
