Let
me offer my two cents on the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George
Zimmerman. My one special qualification is that I've taken part in a watch in a
neighborhood far more crime-ridden than Zimmerman's Twin Lakes. They had seven
or eight break-ins among 260 units? Not so bad.
I lived four years in a Third World
country, in a fenced neighborhood under siege, where steel bars guarded
windows, where I had reinforced the doors of our house and took several parts
of our car inside at night to prevent its being stolen. Despite the many precautions,
the house was burgled once, and another time I picked broken glass off my
little daughter, who went on sleeping after a thrown rock shattered the window
by her bed.
As break-ins became more frequent, we
chipped in and hired night guards to walk along the chain-link fence that
surrounded the neighborhood. We took shifts with the patrols just in case they
had friends on the other side.
We were not vigilantes. If we saw
trouble, we alerted the neighbors and called the police. Never did we follow
anyone, even though we often saw real threats. If we had followed, there would
have been trouble and possibly deaths. We dialogued with people in the nearby settlement
where most of the would-be burglars appeared to live. We did not carry guns. Our
efforts did not eliminate crime, but did reduce it.
The watch group in Mr. Zimmerman's
neighborhood has similar policies, but he was on his own that night. Acting on instinct
he decided that Trayvon Martin was looking around too much and walking the
wrong path. Whether or not race played a part, there is something very wrong in his assertion to a
police dispatcher, made with reference to Martin, "These a**holes they always
get away."
With no good reason Zimmerman was convinced, wrongly and tragically as it turns out, that Martin was a criminal and only George Zimmerman could head off trouble.
Florida's Stand Your Ground Law by The Eyes Of New York
The enemy is vigilantism, the spread of the idea that Americans should take unilateral and violent action in protecting themselves and their families. Crime is down, few Americans will ever experience terrorism, but more citizens are going out armed every year. Laws are encouraging the trend by passing stand-your-ground laws. Zimmerman believed he could do the job of protecting better than the police.
Despite what Zimmerman's backers
claim, Florida's law has everything to do with his going free. Zimmerman's side
argued self-defense, but without SYG, self-defense absolves the threatened
person only if he or she had no opportunity to retreat. Zimmerman did the
opposite.
SYG
laws are extensions of castle laws, only now any armed person takes a portable castle
with them. In Florida they can take risks and enjoy the same legal protection
that police have. While police have to pursue suspects, the George Zimmermans of
this world do not. The police have training, the George Zimmermans of this
world do not.
African-Americans should not be out
in the streets over the Zimmerman verdict, everyone should be, not out of
solidarity, but to protest laws that reinforce the miasma of hate and fear
spreading across America.
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