01-22-2011, 04:23 AM
For more than six hours Thursday I was on a largely unsuccessful scavenger hunt.
It started not far from a pool of blood near the intersection of Northwest Seventh Avenue and 62nd Street in Miami and ended outside the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
In both places and at several stops in between I found grieving, shocked police officers, their friends, and perhaps some family.
They were all reeling over the news that shortly after 11 a.m. Thursday, while several officers were attempting to arrest a murder suspect at that bloody intersection, the suspect opened fire. After a brief gun battle, Miami-Dade Police Officer Roger Castillo was dead. Miami-Dade Officer Amanda Haworth was mortally wounded and died a couple of hours later in surgery at Ryder. And the suspect, Johnny Simms, 22, was dead.
Those are the basic facts, as reported by police.
So I wasn't hunting for the figurative smoking gun. That, sadly, was found pretty early in the investigative process.
No, I was looking for something that on Thursday was elusive, but otherwise has become routine at every other police-involved shooting in Miami: a collection of activists, or clergy, or both, calling for an investigation.
That scene has played itself out six times over the past seven months in Miami, the usual implication by the camera-friendly activists and clergy being that the cops must have done wrong in the shootings of six young men.
Simms was No. 7, though unlike the others, he was not killed by City of Miami police officers.
But like at least one of the other "victims,'' Simms was a convicted felon who'd recently served prison time for armed robbery and selling cocaine. In other words, he had no business being in possession of a gun.
It is not at all unfair to reason that if Simms hadn't been armed Thursday, he'd be alive and so would Officers Castillo and Haworth. That seems like such an obvious and logical conclusion. So if shootings perceived to be unfair are what gets clergy and activists riled up in Miami these days, where were the clergy, the activists, and the all-purpose fist-shakers Thursday when two cops were gunned down? That's about as unfair as shootings get.
I found one. Not two, not three, not a gaggle, not a handful. One preacher-activist among a dozen called and visited between the crime scene and the hospital, who was willing to say on the record that the shooting of Castillo and Haworth was heinous and preventable.
``The problem with some of my peers,'' said the Rev. Jerome Starling, a pastor at Jordan Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Liberty City, ``is that they are not willing to call a spade a spade.
``Law enforcement is tasked with protecting us. They do that with the occasional exception,'' Starling said. ``And yet we demonstrate no respect for them. We berate them. And we express sympathy and concern when some people are killed. But we can't be bothered to to be bothered when police officers are killed. And that's a shame.''
Starling is used to being called a blowhard, an opportunist. Call him what you want. But again, he was the only preacher-activist I could find on Thursday who took the opportunity to roundly condemn the killing of two cops.
``You know what it is?'' he asked. ``It's that this isn't just a job to me, like it is for some people. My niece was shot and killed by a young man who had no business with a gun. You kill kids and you kill cops, it's all the same to me. It's personal, because in both cases -- child or police officer in the line of duty -- you're talking about the innocent.''
Starling's solution for curbing rampant street violence in Miami is the automatic death penalty for people convicted of fatally shooting children or cops who are on the job. But he knows that's a political and religious hot potato that he'll never sell to peers or pols.
``So for now, I'd be happy with equal outrage,'' he said. ``If I could get people -- preachers and parishioners -- to just acknowledge and own up to the fact that police are not our biggest problem, but rather criminals are, that would be a good start. 'Cause as long as we can call the cops out over shootings involving people who have harmed our neighborhoods but stay silent when the police themselves are taken down, we're in denial.''
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/20/2 ... z1Bja1ZeWL (http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/20/2026235/lone-voice-calls-for-outrage-in.html#ixzz1Bja1ZeWL)
It started not far from a pool of blood near the intersection of Northwest Seventh Avenue and 62nd Street in Miami and ended outside the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
In both places and at several stops in between I found grieving, shocked police officers, their friends, and perhaps some family.
They were all reeling over the news that shortly after 11 a.m. Thursday, while several officers were attempting to arrest a murder suspect at that bloody intersection, the suspect opened fire. After a brief gun battle, Miami-Dade Police Officer Roger Castillo was dead. Miami-Dade Officer Amanda Haworth was mortally wounded and died a couple of hours later in surgery at Ryder. And the suspect, Johnny Simms, 22, was dead.
Those are the basic facts, as reported by police.
So I wasn't hunting for the figurative smoking gun. That, sadly, was found pretty early in the investigative process.
No, I was looking for something that on Thursday was elusive, but otherwise has become routine at every other police-involved shooting in Miami: a collection of activists, or clergy, or both, calling for an investigation.
That scene has played itself out six times over the past seven months in Miami, the usual implication by the camera-friendly activists and clergy being that the cops must have done wrong in the shootings of six young men.
Simms was No. 7, though unlike the others, he was not killed by City of Miami police officers.
But like at least one of the other "victims,'' Simms was a convicted felon who'd recently served prison time for armed robbery and selling cocaine. In other words, he had no business being in possession of a gun.
It is not at all unfair to reason that if Simms hadn't been armed Thursday, he'd be alive and so would Officers Castillo and Haworth. That seems like such an obvious and logical conclusion. So if shootings perceived to be unfair are what gets clergy and activists riled up in Miami these days, where were the clergy, the activists, and the all-purpose fist-shakers Thursday when two cops were gunned down? That's about as unfair as shootings get.
I found one. Not two, not three, not a gaggle, not a handful. One preacher-activist among a dozen called and visited between the crime scene and the hospital, who was willing to say on the record that the shooting of Castillo and Haworth was heinous and preventable.
``The problem with some of my peers,'' said the Rev. Jerome Starling, a pastor at Jordan Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Liberty City, ``is that they are not willing to call a spade a spade.
``Law enforcement is tasked with protecting us. They do that with the occasional exception,'' Starling said. ``And yet we demonstrate no respect for them. We berate them. And we express sympathy and concern when some people are killed. But we can't be bothered to to be bothered when police officers are killed. And that's a shame.''
Starling is used to being called a blowhard, an opportunist. Call him what you want. But again, he was the only preacher-activist I could find on Thursday who took the opportunity to roundly condemn the killing of two cops.
``You know what it is?'' he asked. ``It's that this isn't just a job to me, like it is for some people. My niece was shot and killed by a young man who had no business with a gun. You kill kids and you kill cops, it's all the same to me. It's personal, because in both cases -- child or police officer in the line of duty -- you're talking about the innocent.''
Starling's solution for curbing rampant street violence in Miami is the automatic death penalty for people convicted of fatally shooting children or cops who are on the job. But he knows that's a political and religious hot potato that he'll never sell to peers or pols.
``So for now, I'd be happy with equal outrage,'' he said. ``If I could get people -- preachers and parishioners -- to just acknowledge and own up to the fact that police are not our biggest problem, but rather criminals are, that would be a good start. 'Cause as long as we can call the cops out over shootings involving people who have harmed our neighborhoods but stay silent when the police themselves are taken down, we're in denial.''
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/20/2 ... z1Bja1ZeWL (http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/20/2026235/lone-voice-calls-for-outrage-in.html#ixzz1Bja1ZeWL)