by Catherine Newhouse | Jun 6, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
SWIFT INJUSTICE?: Former U.S. Marine Jose Guerena was shot down in his own home by police.
The morning of May 5 must have been a nightmare for the Guerena family. After a SWAT team shot 71 bullets at 26-year-old Jose Guerena in his home, his wife Vanessa Guerena dialed 911, begging for an ambulance. It was about 9:30 a.m. in Tucson, Ariz., and Jose Guerena, a former U.S. Marine and Iraq War veteran, had just confronted the SWAT team with a rifle.
Paramedics arrived at the scene and waited an hour and 14 minutes for the clear to go in, but deputies never allowed them to treat or examine Guerena. At 10:59 a.m., Jose Guerena was pronounced dead. Of the 71 bullets, 22 had hit and killed him.
Vanessa Guerena later told the media that she and her husband thought the raid was a home invasion. She had seen a man with a gun through a window and had awoken Jose Guerena, who had been sleeping after working a night shift, according to news reports. Vanessa Guerena said her husband told her and their 4-year-old son Joel to hide in the closet and then went to face the intruders.
Moments later, the SWAT team opened fire on Jose Guerena. Some police officers later explained they thought they saw a muzzle flash, but they later learned that Jose Guerena hadn’t even taken his gun off safety.
As Jose Guerena bled to death, the 911 operator asked Vanessa Guerena questions to determine if she was calling from one of the houses a SWAT team had been sent to. The recording of the phone conversation has been released and can be heard on the Arizona Daily Star website.
“Please send me an ambulance and you can ask more questions later, please!” Vanessa Guerena said over the phone.
The video of the shooting taken from an officer’s helmet camera has been released and published by KGUN 9 news. (Note: The video is not graphic. You can see and hear the SWAT team shooting, but Jose Guerena’s body is not visible.)
Facing pressure to come clean with the details, the sheriff said last week that the raid was part of a 20-month drug and homicide investigation. But in the end, police didn’t find any drugs in the Guerena home. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has reluctantly been releasing more information over the past month, including the above video, a transcript of their interrogation of Vanessa Guerena (part one and part two), and the transcript of the debriefing after the shooting.
On Thursday, the Sheriff’s Department finally released the search warrant, along with affidavits and property sheets. The new information gives us an idea why they suspected Jose Guerena of being connected to their drug and homicide investigation, but lacks any evidence that would have warranted an arrest.
But now, not even the most condemning evidence could diminish the tragedy that occurred. Perhaps one of the reasons this particular tragedy strikes deeply is because history carries many such stories of police aggression against minorities—revealing a prejudice that hasn’t disappeared.
In the instant an officer’s finger rests on the trigger, the shade of the suspect’s skin can influence their decision to fire. University of Chicago assistant professor Joshua Correll and other researchers ran a study in which police officers had to decide whether or not to shoot a suspect in a video simulation. The study found that officers made the decision to shoot armed black suspects more quickly than armed white suspects, according to “Race as a Trigger” in The Chicago Reporter.
When such a racial bias exists, the death of Jose Guerena is yet another incident that is widening the rift between law enforcement and minority communities.
Even if the SWAT team was convinced Jose Guerena was ready to shoot them, was it necessary to fire 71 bullets at him, and then leave him to bleed to death? And even if Jose Guerena was a criminal (and there’s no proof that he was), does that mean he deserved to die? Without a trial, and under the gaze of his wife and son, no less?
In this instance, one can’t help but think authorities treated the Guerena family worse than criminals, rather than treating them like people—a dying father, a wife mourning the loss of her husband, and a son traumatized by his own father’s death. Which should make you think: where’s the line between righteously enforcing the law to protect society and enforcing it so aggressively that you forget your suspects are fellow human beings?
How are we as Christians called to respond when that line is crossed? Should we demand justice for Jose Guerena’s death, extend forgiveness to the officers who perhaps realize now that they made a terrible mistake, or both? And how can we heal the rift that’s grown between law enforcement and minority communities?
In the end, it’s kids who ask the toughest questions. Reyna Ortiz, a relative looking after Vanessa Guerena and her children, told ABC News that Jose Guerena’s 4-year-old son Joel is asking, “Why did the police kill my daddy?”
by Christine A. Scheller | Jun 2, 2011 | Entertainment, Feature |
The “Godfather of Rap,” musician and spoken-word poet Gil Scott-Heron, died May 27 at the age of 62. Although no cause of death was reported, Scott-Heron struggled with drug addiction and had contracted HIV.
The influential artist rejected the “godfather” label, according to an Associated Press report. Instead, “He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was simply ‘black music or black American music,'” the report said.
His signature composition, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” appeared on his debut album, A New Black Poet: Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, which was recorded live at a Harlem nightclub at that address. In 2010, he released I’m New Here. There were many albums in between.
Atlantic editor Ta-Nehisi Coates grew up listening to Scott-Heron and lamented the fact that “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” overshadows Scott-Heron’s other work.
At The Grio, Earl Ofari Hutchinson downplayed the importance of the song and Scott-Heron’s influence on rap.
“Neither of these do justice to Heron,” Hutchinson wrote.
“In fact, by the time ‘Revolution’ hit the airwaves in the early 1970s, black singers, jazz musicians, and spoken word poets had been pouring out incendiary black radical lyrics, sounds, and poetry for several years. The rap cadences were pronounced in many of their works. In the decades before the 1960s, legions of black jazz, bee bop, and blues singers ‘rapped,’ scatted, and hooped in their songs,” he explained.
Hutchinson prefers Scott-Heron’s Winter in America album, which he described as “a grim, bitter look at racial and political oppression in America and optimistic call for the forces of hope and change to renew the struggle against it,” and From South Africa to South Carolina, which he said “forcefully and brilliantly linked the struggles of Africans and African-Americans.”
“To Heron, the struggles were one and the same,” he wrote.
Scott Heron was no fan of the rap music he was given credit for. He criticized some artists’ “resort to shock, demeaning, and degrading lyrics” and their “lust for the bling and opulence, at the expense of socially grounded and edgy lyrics that blasted oppression and injustice,” Hutchinson wrote.
Greg Tate published an eloquent obituary for The Village Voice that begins with a deconstruction of the “Godfather of Rap” identifier.
“You know why Gil never had much love for that ill-conceived Godfather of Rap tag. If you’re already your own genre, you don’t need the weak currency offered by another. If you’re a one-off, why would you want to bask in the reflected glory of knock-offs? If you’re already Odin, being proclaimed the decrepit sire of Thor and Loki just ain’t gonna rock your world. Gil knew he wasn’t bigger than hip-hop—he knew he was just better,” Tate wrote.
He had much to say about Scott-Heron’s social activism, but this part provides speculative context for the evolution of the man and his work.
“Many cats of Gil’s generation became burnt-out anachronisms from trying to wage ’60s battles on ’70s battlegrounds; some are still at it today. Gil knew The Struggle was a work-in-progress—a scorecard event of win-some-lose-some, lick your wounds, live to fight another day. Keep your eyes on the prize—a more Democratic union—but also on the ever-changing same. Keep it progressive but keep it moving too. Not so difficult if you’re the type of self-medicating brother who gets lonely if he doesn’t hear the yap of hellhounds on his trail,” Tate wrote.
At The Root, Martin Johnson shared this interesting tidbit.
“In the summer of 1991, when I interviewed him between sets at the Blue Note in New York City, Scott-Heron’s complexity was apparent. He surprised me twice, once by defending Clarence Thomas on the grounds that ‘self-determination means that everyone gets to choose who they want to be rather than be who other people want them to be.’ He also noted that he was no fan of rap music. He shrugged it off as a generational thing. ‘My parents didn’t like my music, even though I felt it was in the tradition of what they listened to. I feel the same way about rap.’ During the interview, he chain-smoked marijuana,” Johnson wrote.
In his redemptive conclusion, Johnson reminds us that Scott Heron’s work transcended his human frailty.
“There have been scores of artists whose careers were marred by drug abuse, but no one who could write poetry and songs with so much social awareness and political bite as Scott-Heron. And no one could sing them with such depth and passion. His artistic legacy is far too great for the sordid details of his final decades to ruin,” he wrote.
What none of the reports I read mentioned is Scott-Heron’s religious upbringing or identity. With a body of work as large as it, one assumes his faith or lack thereof is there to be found, but I don’t know Scott-Heron’s work well enough to assess the roots of his activism. Perhaps you do. If so, please share your thoughts.
