Regarding "Two juries" (Friday Editorial), I was surprised at this generally ill-wrought editorial regarding the alleged favoritism provided to police officers in the grand jury process compared to that afforded to average citizens. It was provocative, big on declarative statements, light on facts, and clearly intended to generate more heat than light, as the cliché goes.
Where to start? First, is the curious claim that in Texas "a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict anything, even a ham sandwich — unless the case involves a police officer." If the author really feels that this is true, why would they insist that anybody be subject to such a biased system? More to the point, they provide not a single instance of a Houston officer who escaped justice because of prosecutorial favoritism. Doesn't seem like it would be that hard to find, was it so rampant.
Second was the single statistic cited to prove "empathy" for cops by prosecutors: "Between 2008 and 2012, Houston police officers shot 121 civilians, a quarter of whom were unarmed, and yet no officer faced indictment." Is the author seriously arguing that for a given number of police shootings, that a certain percentage of cops must be guilty of something? Here is an accusation crying out for an example, and yet again, the author provides none. More about that later.
Third is the curious citation of the Ferguson, MO grand jury as an example of a prosecutor that skewed the process in favor of an accused officer, in this case officer Darren Wilson, who was no-billed for the shooting death of Michael Brown. It's 800 miles one way from Houston to Ferguson. That's a long way to travel for evidence of favoritism in Houston's criminal justice community.
It's also clear that the writer hadn't bothered to read the numerous articles in the pages of the Chronicle and other sources these past months that show the Missouri prosecutor taking testimony from hundreds of witnesses, and presenting an exhaustive, compelling and irrefutable forensic case that officer Wilson was innocent. This includes, by the way, an article in today's Chronicle - "Ferguson grand jury papers full of inconsistencies" - on page A4. The "inconsistencies" it refers to was the questionable testimony of scores of people that had to be weeded out, virtually all of whom accused officer Wilson of things that were provably false.
The author also misrepresents the Houston data cited, which is actually very reassuring. While the reference to 121 police shootings from 2008 to 2012 says nothing about the thousands of times officers encountered armed or unarmed citizens between 2008 and 2012 and managed not to riddle them with bullets, they do tell us what happened when cops did shoot: 1) The large majority of police shootings involved people with guns, and 2) Over four years, Houston cops shot around 30 unarmed citizens. Is eight shootings of unarmed citizens per year evidence of police officers run amok? The author clearly thinks so, but readily available statistics tell otherwise. Of the fifty largest cities in America, Houston ranks in the bottom quartile in per capita police shootings of citizens, and even in sheer numbers, there is a score of smaller cities that have more.
If the folks so interested in seeing a certain number of policeman do the Perp Walk were committed to the truth, they might just consider that one of the reasons grand juries involving alleged cop crimes need to be different is exactly because of the experience in Ferguson, where notorious lies were not only told by numerous suspect persons, but given instant credibility by a compliant media, eager to push the Rogue Cop narrative. They might also consider that cops are not on the streets with the intention to do wrong, as is the case with the vast majority of the victims of police shootings. The failure to make this distinction in explaining the different outcomes of grand juries does much to discredit this editorial.
In conclusion, there does indeed seem to be a double standard, but rather than being that of a grand jury system that favors cops, it's the critics who insist that the system can't possibly be "fair" until cops start getting charged with crimes, as criminals are.
Pete Smith
Houston, TX
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