When it comes to covering the issue of police brutality, there’s nobody on TV who comes even remotely close to Lawrence O’Donnell. I first became aware of the qualitative difference in Mr. O’Donnell’s coverage of this issue after the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Unlike other media-types, time and time again LO would visibly struggle to contain his emotions as he spoke about the child whose life was brutally snuffed out by Timothy Loehmann. Lawrence was also the only one who didn’t immediately parrot the PD’s version of the murder of Michael Brown. With each of these unconscionable murders, he has consistently gone deeper and broader than everybody else.
Lawrence O’Donnell is the only anchor on white MSM who will, without equivocation, acknowledge that there is a problem with policing in this country. The only one whose first instinct is to search for the voice of the victim rather than that of the perpetrator. The only one. He’s uncompromising in his principles, irreverent in his regard to the prevailing system and unapologetic in his delivery.
On Monday night (7/2/18), two weeks after Michael Rosfeld coolly, calmly, and calculatedly shot the fleeing 17-year-old Antwon Rose in the back, and when everybody else had moved on to the next clickbait story, Lawrence chose to revisit the teenager’s killing. But he didn’t just give an update consisting of the official version and the subsequent protest as others would have done; no, he gave historical context to the murder, and the way he spoke about Michelle Kelley's son would leave absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind as to which side he’s on.
Here then is Lawrence O’Donnell giving many lessons on police brutality and how to respond to it:
O’DONNELL: Two days after Antwon Rose Jr. was buried last week, something truly extraordinary happened. It was sadly not extraordinary that he was shot in the back by a police officer while he was unarmed and running away posing no threat to anyone. Unarmed black men have been getting shot in the back by American police officers for as long as the police have had
guns.The extraordinary thing is that the police officer who killed Antwon Rose Jr. in east Pittsburgh was actually charged with criminal homicide last week. Criminal prosecution is the rarest possible outcome for police officers who kill unarmed black men who pose no threat to anyone. I have been studying this tragic subject for decades. The very first article I ever publicized was an op-ed piece in the “New York Times” in 1979 about police use of deadly force. And that was the first time that “The New York Times” ever printed anything indicating that there was a problem with police use of deadly force.
The first killing of an unarmed black man by police that I read about and then investigated myself was the 1975 killing of James Bowden by two Boston police officer. James Bowden was a 25-year-old husband and father of a 4-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son. He had no criminal record. James Bowden had a steady job as a maintenance worker at Boston City hospital.
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Over 40 years after James Bowden was shot in the back by Boston police officers when he was unarmed and posed no threat to them, Antown Rose was shot in the back when he was unarmed and posed no threat to a police officer. Two years ago, Antown Rose wrote a poem in his sophomore honors English course in high school. His friends read the poem at his funeral.
The poem is about mothers and sons. Mothers like James Bowden’s mother and Antwon Rose’s mother who lost their sons over 40 years apart to the same thing, police bullets in the back.Rose Jr. was 17 years old.
Antwon’s Poem:
I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK!
I am confused and afraid
I wonder what path I will take
I hear that there’s only two ways out
I see mothers bury their sons
I want my mom to never feel that pain
I am confused and afraidI pretend all is fine
I feel like I’m suffocating
I touch nothing so I believe all is fine
I worry that it isn’t, though
I cry no more
I am confused and afraidI understand people believe I’m just a statistic
I say to them I’m different
I dream of life getting easier
I try my best to make my dream true
I hope that it does
I am confused and afraid
About James Bowden
Fact-based story about a 1975 cover-up of a shooting by two white members of the Boston Tactical Unit. While on stakeout on a suspected getaway car used in a armed robbery, the two gunned down a black man who entered the car. The two claimed the man had a gun and they shot in self-defense. Police investigation decided it was a rightful shooting. The man’s widow knew her husband would not be carrying a weapon and became determined to prove her husband’s innocence. She hired a former cop who had become a lawyer to prove her case. Working with his four sons, the lawyer team takes on the police force in what eventually proved to be a landmark legal decision.
The lawyer who represented Mrs. Bowden was Lawrence O’Donnell Sr. His son told the story about James Bowden's wife’s fight for justice in his book, Deadly Force: A Police Shooting and My Family’s Search for the Truth.
From the host of MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell comes the riveting story of a 1975 police shooting of an unarmed black man in Boston—one of the first to draw national headlines—and the dramatic investigation and court case that followed.
On a rainy winter night, James Bowden, Jr., left his mother’s house in Boston after a visit. As he guided his Buick out of his parking spot, an unmarked police car suddenly blocked his path. Two undercover officers sprang out, running toward his car. Shots were fired, and Bowden slumped over the wheel. Moments later, he was pronounced dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. The police argued that they had fired in self-defense, claiming that Bowden was an armed robbery suspect and that after they had ordered him to stop, he had fired a shot at one of them. And multiple internal investigations by the Boston Police Department exonerated the officers involved.
But Patricia Bowden, James’s widow, knew better. “The truth will come out,” she said at her husband’s funeral. She sought a lawyer willing to take on the Boston Police Department and finally found one in Lawrence F. O’Donnell, the author’s father, a man whose past, unbeknownst to Patricia Bowden, made him the only man in town who could not refuse her case. O’Donnell embarked on a highly contentious three-year battle with the Boston Police Department to win justice for James Bowden.
Thank you, sir.
RIP, Antwon. #JusticeForAntwon