Some deaths are more politically useful than others.
Twenty years ago this week, the Clinton administration ordered a tank assault on the Mount Carmel community, killing 39 racial minorities, 26 of them black. The Clintons and the media suppressed the racial data so rigorously that I doubt even Al Sharpton knows about the black dead at Waco.
A year ago Feb. 26, neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., and within a month every sentient person on the planet knew “Trayvon” by name.
What they did not know was Martin’s background. Sanford Police Department (SPD) investigator Chris Serino, for instance, said publicly of Martin, “This child has no criminal record whatsoever.” He called Martin “a good kid, a mild-mannered kid.” The media almost universally sustained this tragically false narrative.
Martin had the seeming good fortune of attending school in the Miami-Dade School District, the fourth-largest district in the country and one of the few with its own police department.
For a variety of reasons, none of them good, elements within the SPD and the Miami-Dade School District Police Department, or M-DSPD, conspired to keep Martin’s criminal history buried.
As part of its mission the M-DSPD was allegedly trying to divert offending students, especially black males, from the criminal justice system. As the Martin death would prove, the M-DSPD diverted offending students to nothing beyond its own statistical glory.
The exposure of M-DSPD practices began inadvertently on March 26, 2012, when the Miami Herald, the one mainstream outlet to do real reporting on the case, ran a story on Martin’s background.
The Herald’s headline, “Multiple suspensions paint complicated portrait of Trayvon Martin,” should have caused the other media to seek the truth about the very nearly sanctified Martin.
It did not. What it did do was to cause M-DSPD Police Chief Charles Hurley to launch a major Internal Affairs (IA) investigation into the possible leak of this information to the Herald.
At the end of the day, Hurley rather wished he had not. The detectives questioned told the truth about Martin and about the policies that kept him out of the justice system. Hurley would be demoted and forced out of the department within a year.
We now know what the detectives revealed thanks to a recently fulfilled Freedom of Information Act request filed by the dogged researchers at a blogging collective known as The Conservative Treehouse. The “Treepers” have literally done more good work on the Martin case than all the newsrooms in America combined.
On Feb. 15, 2012, 11 days before Martin’s death, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools put out a press release boasting of a 60 percent decline in school-based arrests, the largest decline by far in the state.
“While our work is not completed, we are making tremendous progress in moving toward a pure prevention model,” Hurley told the Tampa Bay Times, “with enforcement as a last resort and an emphasis on education.”
Hurley’s detectives, all of them veterans with excellent records, told a different story under oath when questioned by Internal Affairs. They knew the shell game was about to be exposed upon first learning that Martin was one of their students and outside agencies would be requesting his records.
“Oh, God, oh, my God, oh, God,” one major reportedly said when first looking at Martin’s data. He realized that Martin had been suspended twice already that school year for offenses that should have gotten him arrested – once for getting caught with a burglary tool and a dozen items of female jewelry, the second time for getting caught with marijuana and a marijuana pipe.
In each case, the case file on Martin was fudged to make the crime less serious than it was. As one detective told IA, the arrest statistics coming out of Martin’s school, Michael Krop Senior, had been “quite high,” and the detectives “needed to find some way to lower the stats.” This directive allegedly came from Hurley.
