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On Tuesday, Pasquotank County District Attorney Andrew Womble used the power of his prosecutorial office to justify the police murder of Andrew Brown Jr., who was killed by a gunshot to the back of his head, when several officers in Elizabeth City, North Carolina opened fire on him—as he drove away from them.
American prosecutors, like Womble, are just, if not more, criminally corrupt as the killer-cops of Black people, whose crimes they coverup.
In front of a slew of journalists and media cameras, Womble engaged in obfuscations, half-truths, bald face lies, and evaded important questions while he assassinated the character of Brown to justify his murder. In essence, Womble acted as a judge, jury, and defender of these murderous officers.
His message to white America (not Black people) was: Brown was a worthless nobody drug-dealing criminal.
Womble made sure to start off by doing what police and prosecutors often do: he detailed a litany of largely irrelevant information about Brown’s alleged drug crimes. This is a standard tactic to criminalize the Black victim so white people can argue that the police were “justified” in what they did.
But even assuming that Womble’s claims are true, about Brown’s alleged drug-dealing activities, what does that have to do with whether police had the right to fire multiple shots into the car of this unarmed Black man?
Womble’s biggest lie was the claim that Brown tried to use his car as a weapon against these officers. How was Brown doing that driving away from them? Of course, Womble told this lie so he could argue that Brown represented a danger to the lives of police.
It is police who represent a continuing danger to Black lives.
Womble’s biased performance presentation, in defense of his police buddies, is yet another example of the deeply entrenched systemic institutional racism that protects cops who brutalize and murder Black people from facing accountability for their crimes.
From the very beginning, the authorities in North Carolina have cover-up the fact that Brown was basically used as target practice by these officers, as has always been done, historically. Killing Black Americans has always been a favorite pastime of white Americans. What better way to do this than to become a police officer, especially a “Ghost Skin” cop?
Why are these North Carolina officials still continuing to conceal most of the police video footage related to Brown’s death?
The police, and these cravenly corrupt prosecutors who they work with, are telling us transparency means nothing when the truth is just too inconvenient for them. Here we have the suppression of police body-camera videos because they know it shows police murdering Brown in a cold callous manner. The excuse they have given for withholding this evidence, about it jeopardizing the ongoing investigation, is nonsense.
If the videos exonerated these officers, we would have seen them from day one. How many times have police released information, or lied, including on official documents, during the initial phase of some killing of a Black person with zero care about “protecting the integrity of the investigation?”
What we are witnessing is the shamefully coverup of murder in North Carolina because the killers are white cops, and the victim was a Black man.
During his presentation, Womble claimed the officers perceived a “threat” and that is why they opened fire on Brown. Again, what kind of “threat” could Brown really be since he was driving away—and not toward police?
In another example of Womble’s deep dishonesty, he took a swipe at a white female neighbor who said police continued to fire into Brown car after he had crashed it. Why would this white woman lie? Everyone lies except the police is that it?
The reality is this: all breathing Black people are seen as threats to white cops—particularly, if we Blacks refuse to obey and bow down to these vile racists with badges who think their humanity is somehow superior. Even the limited footage we have been shown makes this clear: these officers fired on Brown because he had the gall not to do what they “commanded.” It was as simple as that.
Have we not seen this by America’s police many times before? Here are two examples.
Did we not see this when officer Michael Slager gunned Walter Scott down as he was running away? Did we not see it when Laquan McDonald was cold-bloodedly murdered by officer Jason Van Dyke in a hail of 16 shots as he was walked away?
Why were these Black men, like Brown, shot while they were all moving away from officers?
The answer is the same: they were murdered because, in the eyes of white police officers, disobedience by Black people is in of itself an intolerable de facto criminal act, which can be upgraded to a capital offense—subject to immediate on-the-spot execution by a police firing squad.
This was Andrew Brown’s real crime in the eyes of these North Carolina “peace officers.”
The “threat” that amoral prosecutors, like Womble, are talking about is when Black people refuse to act like inferior humans when white people give them orders. Andrew Brown is dead because he violated this sacred white American rule.
Andrew Brown’s family is now asking the Department of Justice to step in and bring some semblance of justice to this case.
Family attorneys — Ben Crump, Bakari Sellers, Harry M. Daniels and Chantel Cherry-Lassiter — released a statement saying Andrew Womble’s decision refusing to charge the officers in the shooting “is both an insult and slap in the face to Andrew’s family” and they requested “that the Federal Department of Justice intervene immediately.”
American policing writ large needs to be investigated to root out the systemic racism that targets Black Americans, Latinos and other non-white people.
In the final analysis, we must continue to fight and change this genocidal American policing institution that is filled with those who continue to kill and murder Black people, like Andrew Brown.
