Austin @ Large: System Failure
Sophia King and Jessie Owens did not commit suicide. Eastside neighbors deserve answers.
By Mike Clark-Madison, Fri., Feb. 20, 2004
There are those in this community, on both sides of the current racial debate and divide, who will never accept that I, and people like me, actually live in Central East Austin or that as white people our experience as citizens and neighbors counts for anything. Admittedly, we are the minority, and within the context of Austin neighborhood politics, we sometimes get treated as minorities get treated: without respect, by people who should know better. Typically, Austin neighborhood politics are fairly anodyne and safe and trivial. But not when people are being shot and killed, by the police, on the streets of my neighborhood. I and my neighbors – black, brown, and white – in Central East Austin, the city's most integrated neighborhood, deserve an explanation, even more than does the city at large, of why the system failed on our streets. Because it did fail.
Whether what each officer involved did was a firing offense, or a criminal offense, is a separate issue. In a town where police advocates insist that every traffic fatality is avoidable, certainly fatalities at the hands of the police are, or should be, avoidable – even if not avoidable by a particular officer at the critical moment of a particular incident. In the King case, the system failed spectacularly long before the police ever arrived at her door, and little has been done since June 2002 to fix those failures. I still feel that Eastside activists have shown tunnel vision in converting the King case into a simplistic white-cop-shoots-black-woman story, have gone out of their way to deny that the officers involved may likewise feel her case is a tragedy, and have yet to sincerely and effectively lobby for community mental health care on the Eastside that could have saved Sophia King's life, which is also a civil rights issue.
But in that last sin of omission, they are hardly alone.
Making It Go Away
I caught some flak from our friend the city manager last week for using the word "cowardly" to describe the actions of City Hall and APD brass. (She found it "incomprehensible," she wrote.) I would be more apologetic now, except for the actions of APD since then – letting Scott Glasgow keep his job to bring closure, as they say, to the Owens case, then suddenly (after a year and a half) giving itself permission to release the King file and tell the community, including me and my neighbors, what actually happened that day down the street at the Rosewood Courts. It may not be the whole truth, but it's a damn sight better than the hearsay that fed a year of outrage and made the lives of active citizens of integrated East Austin more difficult.
All for reasons that seem pretty lame in retrospect. The still-secret report of the independent probe initiated by the Office of the Police Monitor has been a handy stick to beat the police union, but now it seems a whole lot less relevant. The information made public this week (see p.24) is what people want to know, and with its release, we can focus our energies to ensure Sophia King is the last woman to die in my neighborhood for being mentally ill.
We have yet to get nearly as far in the Owens case. I disagree – strongly – with the Austin Police Association's melodramatic position on the (in its view, unduly harsh) discipline handed down to Scott Glasgow, but I can appreciate its sensing a flaw in the police chief's apparent logic. Either Scott Glasgow is responsible for Owens' death, in which case he should be fired if not prosecuted, or he is not, in which case he should be left alone, and APD should instead make clear where it thinks the system did fail. There is no intermediate terrain, yet that is where Stan Knee tried to drop this hot potato. Obviously, this case is not over; the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating, and I think we can all just plan now for a hefty financial settlement for the Owens family in a future wrongful-death suit. (I have no idea if they plan to file such a suit; it's the settlement offer that I assume is a lead-pipe cinch.) But neither of those exactly makes me feel safer in my neighborhood.
No More Band-Aids
That's the point, after all: I feel less safe in my neighborhood in the wake of the Owens shooting, because I have less confidence in a police department that apparently does not know how to either avoid or prevent such incidents, or respond to them after the fact. When I read Knee's disciplinary memo – which gives the fullest accounting so far of the events at 17th and Tillery and which must be based almost exclusively on Glasgow's own testimony – I am just as "befuddled" as the Owens family at Knee's ultimate conclusion. Jessie Owens may have done some stupid things that night – we'll never know – but he did not commit suicide, and the only life Glasgow saved was his own, put at risk by his own actions; despite the APA rhetoric, nobody was being "robbed, or raped, or killed" or would have been had Owens managed to flee. That was not the worst-case scenario. What actually happened was.
The Knee memo does – barely – answer my question, posed last summer in this space, of how Glasgow could avoid a manslaughter charge; I agree he shouldn't be prosecuted, if only because I don't think Ronnie Earle's office can convince a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, to convict a cop for an on-duty shooting. But if Glasgow is not to be fired, then somebody else should be. I've suggested that it should be Knee, but I've been told that this is rather rash. Whatever. But until APD can find a way to admit that the death of an unarmed man, stopped on tentative suspicion of a relatively minor crime, represents a system failure of incredible magnitude, one serious enough for heads to roll, the Owens case will never be resolved. (If it happened because of race, then so be it. Let's talk about race. But even if not, it is still a failure.) Training and task forces and Taser guns are an appropriate response to the issues facing APD, citywide, in the abstract. To me and thousands of other Eastsiders, this is not abstract. I don't really care if the cops patrolling Oak Hill are equipped with Tasers. People are not being shot dead in the street on Convict Hill Road.
The only reason I can believe that the leaders at APD and City Hall, and the many APD officers whose work in Central East Austin I appreciate and respect, are not totally insensitive is because I've had the chance – given my line of work and my years as a neighborhood politico – to know them personally. As institutions, I think the city and its police department need to do far, far more to address even the concerns I feel as an Eastside neighbor, let alone those felt by my neighbors of color. It is already late in the day, and around the corner is a long, hot summer. 
Got something to say? The Chronicle welcomes opinion pieces on any topic from the community. Submit yours now at austinchronicle.com/opinion.
