Mohammad Noor Verdict

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Last week there was a conviction in a Hennepin County court room. Former Minneapolis police officer Mohammed Noor was convicted of murder and manslaughter after shooting an unarmed citizen two years ago.

I have been following this case fairly closely through the good offices of the Powerline blog. For those who don’t read the blog, you are missing out on some of the best work in the blogosphere.

Leading up to the verdict, I heard a lot of rumbling in social media about the case. After the verdict I was contacted by someone who wanted my opinion as a former officer about what had happened.

Let me set the stage for you before I get to the meat of this post. I hate to see anyone killed in error by an officer of the law. It’s a tragedy for everyone involved. It lessens the public’s faith in their servants, it causes trauma for the officers involved, and it destroys the life of an innocent.

I would also point out that someone dying at the hands of law enforcement is very rare. Far more people are killed by family, gangs in their midst, and auto crashes than die at the hands of police. Further, most police killings are justified. Not all of the people who die have a weapon in their hand at the moment, but speaking as a big lug, I don’t particularly need a weapon to be a deadly threat – same goes for cops.

Finally, there are just straight up accidents where police kill someone when attempting to employ a less-than-lethal level of force. These are very rare, and include people who die in police custody in transport accidents, or a medical emergency that is not discovered until too late.

Having set the stage, let me tell you what I think. After talking to more than one law-enforcement officer who knew Noor’s background in training, I am not surprised that he was unprepared for the streets. I was informed by these sources that he was a “special project” who was ushered through training so that he would be the first Somali officer in Minneapolis. It was a political decision, and according to sources a bad one.

Secondly, the “Blue wall of silence” we always hear about was extremely quiet. More than anything, they just didn’t say a word about anything, versus mounting a defense of Noor in the time since the death of Justine Damond. I took that as the silence of people waiting to see if justice was served, and afraid of the implications if he either got railroaded, or got a pass.

Lastly, I was afraid of the possibility of Noor not getting a fair shake given the anti-police mentality in Minneapolis’ higher government echelons.

Now, for a detour before how I think it went. Here are the list of acceptable/predicted outcomes according to the legal scholars I’ve observed on social media:

Noor will get a pass because he’s a member of a fascist force that keeps the people down.

No cop will ever be convicted, the whole system is designed to suppress the people.

He’s black, and the man will railroad him.

Only on trial because he shot a white woman. It’s Emmet Till all over again.

Noor can’t be convicted, he was on duty and all cops make mistakes – you cannot imprison a man who was trying to do the correct thing.

She deserved to be shot, she snuck up on the squad car and frightened the cops.

I’ll spare you the more racially ridiculous ones, on both sides. Let’s just say his skin color trumped his uniform color for an awful lot of people with strong opinions. Some more than willing to leave their usual position on law enforcement based on ancestry.

My conclusion: it sounded like the best outcome Noor could hope for in the case. I don’t believe that there was criminal intent to go out and kill someone that summer night. I do believe that he probably recklessly fired that weapon and killed an innocent woman, which is the very definition of manslaughter.

The news reports I read (multiple sources) made it clear that the prosecution presented an excellent (but not perfect) case against Noor. His defense, and testimony, was weak at best, and rang false. Jurors interviewed after the verdict made it clear that the expert witness testimony held a lot of sway. The biggest part of that last point is that you need to bring your best guns to the courtroom, not an “expert” who will testify to anything based on the needs of the client. You can’t take the facts that say “X” and make them say “Y” because that’s what your team needs in this circumstance.

Noor will likely be placed in a facility where he is isolated from the general population. He will be a convicted felon, with all the baggage that brings with it, for the rest of his life. He is doomed to have a miserable life unless he lifts himself above the mess he’s in, and aspires to improve his life after his release.

Was it the right verdict? I think so. But I’d much rather have a chance to meet Justine Damond, and hope that Noor get the experience and training he needed to become a good cop. Neither will ever happen, and that’s unfortunate for all involved.

NEW BOOK IS OUT!

My second novel, Nicholas of Haiti, is now available. Go fetch your credit card for the Kindle, print, and audio book versions. This is not a sequel to Assault on Saint Agnes, but a unique book in the speculative Christian fiction world.

Audio book cover on the left, Kindle cover on the right.

Please follow me on Twitter, and “Like” the Facebook author page.

Don’t forget to subscribe (the box is on the right side of the page) to be eligible for free e-books and other benefits! Oh yeah – grab a copy of Assault on Saint Agnes if you’re of a mind.

Free Stuff For The Homeless.

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Good husbands are hard to find. Just ask my wife. She’s on the fence today. I think our marriage is strong enough to survive this one, but you never know.

The story is epic – in the best sense of that word.

My beautiful wife has been a very conscientious observer of her health for the last two years. As a result, she’s lost a lot of weight, and looks fantastic. This has resulted in the need to buy new clothing, and discard the old clothing. Find me a husband that doesn’t inwardly scream at spending money on clothing and I’ll show you a robot, or someone who needs to turn in his man card. Seriously. My annual expenditure on clothing (excluding Santa Garb) might run into the three figures if you count running shoes I wear out. The very low three figures.

About a month ago, she did a spring cleaning in her room, and stacked a huge pile of stuff in the hallway upstairs, on the dead-end portion that goes out to our deck. It’s Minnesota in April, so nobody is using the deck.

We have traditionally stuck things there that are going to be donated. If they are to go to the attic, she marks them after they’ve been stuffed in a trashbag to keep insects out.

This pile sat for 3 weeks. In the fourth week, I figured it wasn’t going to vanish, it wasn’t bagged, and I’d best make it go away.

Very early on Saturday morning, I bagged it up, hauled it out to my vehicle, and set it out at the Good Neighbor Meal so when the guests showed up they could pick through it. Never have I seen anything left on the stage when the day is over – they need the clothing.

As I laid it out, I grumbled about how much money was up here, but was also glad she’d done so well in getting into better shape. I finished my work, turned out the lights, and went on to my next three stops of the day. I resolved not to complain about all that money wasted on clothes she hardly wore.

Late that afternoon, my wife came home from her rounds for the day and we sat outside in the thin sunshine and compared notes. She asked me if I’d taken all the stuff in the hallway to the church to give it away.

As a good boy, who did what he was supposed to do without any prompting (Yes, it took 3 weeks, but that’s pretty good by my book), I immediately took credit.

The look on her face was sadness. “All of my winter pants were in the pile. They were supposed to go to the attic.”

I couldn’t even muster an apology. The rules very clearly state… well, usually that means…

I guess I’ll be helping her replace the wardrobe come fall.

On the bright side, the hallway looks pretty empty now, and I did score a pair of used blue-tooth headphones when we kept the cleaning binge up this weekend. You can now see the top of the filing cabinet, the desktop, and the hall carpet again. Last known sighting of any was during the Clinton presidency.

Gentlemen, I beseech you: ask before you donate. It’ll will save you a lot of cash down the road.

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NEW BOOK IS OUT!

My second novel, Nicholas of Haiti, is now available. Go fetch your credit card for the Kindle, print, and audio book versions. This is not a sequel to Assault on Saint Agnes, but a unique book in the speculative Christian fiction world.

Audio book cover on the left, Kindle cover on the right.

Please follow me on Twitter, and “Like” the Facebook author page.

Don’t forget to subscribe (the box is on the right side of the page) to be eligible for free e-books and other benefits! Oh yeah – grab a copy of Assault on Saint Agnes if you’re of a mind.

Those Poor Puppies.

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If you were to Google “Murdered Puppies” you would get 8,140,000 results. The same search, substituting the word “infants” yields 3,150,000. Repeat the search with “babies” and you get 26,300,000 results.

The word “abortion” is not seen in that last search until about 3/4 of the way down the page on page 2 of the search.

Recently, I’ve seen people expressing great anger over the mistreatment of animals. Both domestic and wild. Yet when a post appears on a blog, or Facebook, or Twitter, discussing abortion, or infanticide (really late term abortion if you’re a Clinton Democrat) you don’t get the “that’s horrible” response from many people, but a long – and rather screechy – litany of reasons why it is probably okay to kill viable human beings. The lists always include some stupid things, like it would be inconvenient, or the mother is poor, or it (the child) came about through rape. You never see that when the puppies are discussed.

This leads me to believe that puppies are more important than humans to many people.

Perhaps, I think, it’s not the puppies. Perhaps, it is that we have now raised two generations of people who think pulling children apart in the womb and putting them “in the bin” is perfectly legal, which makes it morally acceptable.

Perhaps, I think, we’re in the midst of the most monstrous mass-murder epidemic in history right here in the United States. We’ve surpassed the dead in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust since abortion was made legal. Heck, we’ve outdistanced Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, and are even well beyond the pile of corpses that Mao created.

As a matter of fact, the odds are pretty good that we’ve beat the combined score of all those murderous thugs with the number of babies killed since 1973.

But the puppies. We must worry about the puppies.

I think that makes us all sick puppies.

An Invention A Day…

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Today I’m meeting with a marketing professional to get some highly paid advice concerning a series of inventions I have, and how to get them out in the marketplace. It dawned on me, as I was contemplating this, that I’m too old to be fishing around for a new career.

That might have been true 30 years ago, when people hit 60 and started to think seriously about retiring and taking it easy. I will be able to retire with a pension in less than 16 months. I am far from taking it easy at this point.

Now, will I work a few more years and really balloon up the 401k? Will I run for the door the minute I am able to do so and try some other things? Not really sure. But what I do know is that I have some ideas and want to explore them.

Among those ideas is an advanced career in audio books. Am I one of the greats of the industry? Not yet. But if you look on Amazon and Audible, you will find quite a few titles I have done, especially for the books of Michael DiMercurio. You see, he was kind enough to invite me to do his back-list and get them out there as quickly as possible. He’s a forgiving task-master, knowing that I have the full-time day job, Santa, and writing. But my 6th book on his series is coming out in the next few weeks (someone else had done book #1 years ago), and I’m excited. Once I finish his back-list, I’d like to work on some other peoples books as well. That requires more time: the kind you get when you retire.

I’d like to expand the time I spend as Santa. I’m at the point where I can really work as much as I want, and thus the main restriction is the – you guessed it – day job. Santa makes about 8 times more per hour than Joe, so I’d like to have him work a bit more.

I’d like to get back in with my theatrical agents and work more as an actor/voice over talent. I realize that I’m new in many ways, and that I need to put in some more dues, but I’d like to work more in that field.

Writing. What can I say? I have so many books that I want to write, and that I have under wraps on the hard drive, but not enough hours in the day to do them all. Again, not working 40 a week at the day job would help with that! And, for those wondering, the sequel to Assault on Saint Agnes is in progress, to be finished this year.

Finally, as I started this thing, I have a handful of diverse inventions that are, frankly, brilliant. They are mundane things that I’ve designed that will dramatically improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in a special profession in one case, and in the other they’ll protect your laptop and your lunch coffee much better than current products do the job. Yeah, kind of vague, but if this thing goes like it should, there will be a retirement at an early date.

Then again, perhaps none of it will pan out. Perhaps the audio books die off, the inventions flop, and my agents hire better actors while reading someone else’s books. But if I don’t give it a shot, none of it will happen.

I’m going to try my best to make it work. On all counts.

Just by the way, if you’re a best-selling author who needs their audio books narrated, or a brilliant manufacturer who wants to make a serious pile of cash off of some inventions, give me a shout in the comments.

In the meantime, go buy the audio books I’ve recorded, and the books I’ve written, to help me finance these dreams.

Thanks. Oh, and say a prayer.

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NEW BOOK IS OUT!

My second novel, Nicholas of Haiti, is now available. Go fetch your credit card for the Kindle, print, and audio book versions. This is not a sequel to Assault on Saint Agnes, but a unique book in the speculative Christian fiction world.

Audio book cover on the left, Kindle cover on the right.

Please follow me on Twitter, and “Like” the Facebook author page.

Don’t forget to subscribe (the box is on the right side of the page) to be eligible for free e-books and other benefits! Oh yeah – grab a copy of Assault on Saint Agnes if you’re of a mind.

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things. (Well, That’s A Lie.)

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I’ve been walking about 12-20 miles a week, April to November, for over 2 years now. During those hours of ambling, my brain works to come up with topics that need to be dealt with and couldn’t possibly be handled while I’m hoofing it down West Seventh Street. Naturally.

So, now that I have some time on my hands, I’d like to put them down on this blog and make them your problem. I hope they are as annoying to you as they are to me.

Let’s start with secret pooping. Yes, that treat that greets you when you come downstairs, keys in hand, ready to head out the door. The one the Sheltie left on the rug because there is a serious chance the back yard has monsters before noon. If there are monsters, you can’t possibly expect her to go out and deposit waste in the yard. Consequently, secret poops on the rug. She’s lucky to have seen another year. Good thing we love her. It’s also a good thing she doesn’t do this very often.

“Who me? Are you sure Dad didn’t do that?”

People who try to kill you in the crosswalk. I know it’s hard to believe, but people get way too close all the time. I’m rather hard to miss, especially when I have a 100 liter backpack on, which is covered with reflectorized tape. But the morons who aim their cars (drive is too nice a term) through a pie-plate sized hole they scraped in the windshield, or around their cellular phone as they scream at someone on the other end, or – best of all – do their email/Facebook/LinkedIn on the laptop open next to them, seem to miss me in their peripheral vision as they hang a violent left to beat the oncoming traffic. I actually followed one of these bozos to his destination a few weeks ago, as it was downtown and I could watch where he went. I shall forever prize the look on his face as I got within shouting distance of his car. I suspect he may change his ways. Or get a restraining order.

Helicopter parents. Every Santa season I’m reminded that there are a lot of people who probably shouldn’t be raising children. Most of them are second generation helicopter parents. When the child whimpers a little as they approach Santa, the mom snatches up her soon-to-be-useless adult with the words, “I’m not going to traumatize little Ergon for a picture.” Mom, here’s a word of sage advice that I recently passed on: Your child will not die if Santa holds them for 10 seconds while the photographer takes the screaming photo. This is a golden opportunity to show that some risks have rewards: your child experiences a minor trauma and goes back into the safety of mom’s arms. Life is often not fair. What a great opportunity to learn that you don’t die when things are not perfect. I think it’s like working with certain metals:  a little heat following some minor blows will do wonders for your strength.

Office Lunch thieves. While there are lower forms of vermin, I’m hard-pressed to name them at the moment. We have one at my day job right now. An eclectic diet this weasel has created, running the range from steamed vegetables to chicken-fried steak. I keep my lunch in a cooler at my desk. But a friend has given serious thought bringing in a delicious laxative pudding that might just cure this person. I hope she puts sprinkles in it for beauty purposes.

The Christmas Shoes. I don’t really have to explain this, do I?

Now that I’m on a seasonal music rant (things change fast around here) how about Last Christmas by Wham? Truly, I’d rather be on the grinder in San Diego.

Okay, one final rant – the two worst Christmas songs I know might as well go on this list.

Madonna’s version of Santa Baby:

John Lennon So This Is Christmas

Back to the mundane. No. Never mind. I need a drink or something after that last one. Maybe one more…

Health Club Pigs. Yes, these are the entitled few who have decided that it’s perfectly fine to throw their towels on the floor for the maid (there is no maid, morons), pour water on the dry sauna (because the steam room is over four feet away, almost six), and the nitwits who pour cold water on the steam room valve cover to make “extra” steam (Let me ‘splain heat stress on metals…). Undoubtedly, these are the same miscreants who leave the scale set for their weight and never zero it out. Also, the odds are, these are the same bozos who leave the locker locked when they leave so that “their” locker will be available tomorrow when they come to work out.

I’d snap a picture of them, but for some reason I seem to be the only one observing the no-using-smartphones-in-the-locker-room rule. Not that I’m a gem, but there’s bound to be a market for pictures of naked fat guys with tattoos somewhere.

Door blockers. In Minnesota people stand in doorways. Either side, in the middle, but right in the danged door. And then they chat. The only version of this menace that’s worse is the kind on public transportation. Most loathsome is the sort, usually found in pairs, that get on the bus, and the stand in the constricted space immediately behind the driver where the front wheels prevent seating. They don’t want to go back and find a seat, so they just stand there – making the entry and exit of every passenger a major pain in the butt. They have a third tribal member, the back door blocker. That idiot scorns open seats, wears a stupid facial expression, and looks at their phone while standing in the small area designed for leaving the bus. To get past them you must dance with them. Or elbow them in the face. (Hey, accidents happen.)

I feel better. It’s always good, any time of year, to give stress rather than receive. And considering it’s April 10th, and it’s snowing like crazy outside, today is a beautiful day to share.

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