An Indictment is a Good Start

It's still a long haul to render justice for Andre Hill.

Housekeeping:

• There will be no Rooster on Monday, February 8th. I treat Super Bowl Sunday as like the federal holiday it should be and I will ingest 20,000 calories and drink way too much Tito’s to cobble together sentences for your entertainment.

• Today’s Rooster is free as I accidentally locked yesterday’s.

• I have opened the comments section, feel free to sound off with any opinion (that doesn’t correct my own) if that’s your sort of thing.

A grand jury indicted former Columbus police officer Adam Coy this week for one count of murder, one count of felonious assault and two counts of dereliction of duty. Coy was arrested at his house in Union County, because heaven forbid this freak actually lived within the community he policed.

This is a day I never thought I would see, and I credit it to two forces: The summer protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder that effectively shuttered downtown for nearly two weeks and Franklin County voters finally throwing the odious Ron O’Brien, the former Franklin County prosecutor who loved to lick the boots of cops, to the curb.

I do wonder where the charges are for the other cops that stood around while Hill bled to death on the floor of his friend’s garage. Same with Robert Roenker, the old-ass nosey neighbor who called the cops over a black man starting his car a couple of times on a public street. But like the demotion of former Police Chief Thomas Quinlan (as opposed to the outright firing), I have to take the little victories wherever I can in this godforsaken city when it comes to our corrupt, racist police department.

An indictment, however, won’t bring back Andre Hill to his friends and family. It’s also a long way from making sure Coy dies in prison, which is a fate he more than deserves for executing a man within 12 seconds of arriving on the scene of a non-emergency call. Despite the murder being caught on tape, a conviction of a cop on murder charges is no surefire thing.

From Farnoush Amiri and Andrew Welsh-Huggin of apnews.org:

Of the 96 cases completed to date, 44 resulted in convictions and 52 in acquittals, [Bowling Green criminal justice professor Philip] Stinson’s data shows. Of the 44 convictions, 19 officers pleaded guilty and 25 were convicted by a jury.

Only seven officers were convicted of murder, with others convicted of lesser charges such as involuntary manslaughter or reckless homicide, Stinson’s data shows.

In total, only 46% of cases of on-duty police shootings where murder or manslaughter charges were brought over the last 16 years ended up in convictions.

The overall rate for murder convictions among the general population is about 70%, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data.

Given those odds, it’s almost as likely that Coy will be acquitted and reinstated to the police force. And even if he’s not outright acquitted, it only takes one secretly racist or cop-sympathizing juror to result in a hung jury.

The city’s response to Hill’s murder has been to pass Andre’s Law, which allocated a whopping $4.5 million to upgrade the body cameras that a lot of police won’t wear in the first place. That money could have gone to our schools, parks or infrastructure but now it’s being bandied about as actual police reform.

That doesn’t include the other million we had to pay to the family of Donna Castleberry, who was murdered by former Vice officer Andrew Mitchell, an absolute monster of a man that somehow worked for nearly three decades in a department sworn to protect and serve the citizens of Columbus.

From 10tv.com:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Columbus City Council reached a settlement Monday night in a wrongful death lawsuit involving former vice officer Andrew Mitchell.

The council unanimously approved a settlement of $1,025,000 in the death of Donna Castleberry, who Mitchell allegedly shot and killed in 2018. Mitchell picked up Castleberry during an alleged prostitution sting.

Following Castleberry's death, Columbus police said Mitchell shot her after Castleberry pulled out a knife and cut Mitchell during an argument.

The suit was filed against the city of Columbus by Castleberry's family.

Hill’s murder will almost assuredly result in another bag of money being dispensed to the surviving members of a man murdered by police. Given that this heinous crime was caught on tape, I assume it will be north of $1,025,000.

It’s unfair that this money comes out of our general fund at the expense of everyday citizens and not, say, the pension fund of the union that kept Coy on the job despite a long record of violence and other lack of emotional control.

Keep in mind Coy already cost the city $45,000 when he caught on film slamming a suspected drunk driver’s head into the hood of his car. That he operated like that when he thought the cameras weren’t rolling showed a clear sign that he saw himself as being able to operate with impunity. That was 2012.

Instead he was allowed to keep his job, his benefits and his pension. And now we’re here. Coy’s indictment is a start but I’m not foolish enough to spike the football before he’s convicted and sentenced to prison.

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