By Artur Davis, who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives for Alabama's 7th congressional district from 2003 to 2011.
Judges instruct juries that the allegations contained in an indictment or complaint have to be proved beyond any reasonable doubt, and so it will be with State of Alabama v. Aaron "AC" Smith. That reality does not take the emotional rawness out of the official conclusion of the Montgomery County District Attorney--that a police officer in Montgomery just murdered a 58 year old black grocer with a graduate degree, right on the edge of his own home.
Whether the charge that AC Smith murdered Gregory Gunn stands up will take months to determine. But this needs to be said: If there has been a rush in some quarters to condemn, the pace has been matched by a counter effort to airbrush hard facts in the name of "letting the legal process play out."
Montgomery deserves better.
Remarkably, if the mayor's account is accurate, his police leadership refused to view any film from the officer's body camera, choosing to send physical evidence unexamined to state investigators. That instinct was exactly the wrong one: an ongoing legal probe should never preclude a police force from its own scrutiny of possible wrongdoing by its personnel.
Artur Davis. (Jim Stinson/jstinson@al.com)
In the same vein, the frantic behind the scenes outreach to black ministers that several legislators have described to me was the wrong focus: empathy instead of damage control would have put the Mayor immediately in the neighborhood where the shooting happened.
His press conference Monday should not have been his first encounter with the family.
In the wake of Gunn's death, the city's leadership has announced that it will step up the pattern of outreach in the city's poor black areas. Fair enough, but a round of meetings is no substitute for tough self-examination about the internal workings of the police department.
Montgomery needs clarity on how a four year police officer, hardy a rookie, could end up with such a miserably tragic outcome to a routine night patrol. The police department should be looking hard at the precision of its rules on deadly force. The department ought to re-evaluate how the words in a handbook are translated into practice: if the culture amounts to "if you touch a police officer, all bets are off'', it is an invitation to a quick trigger.
If it condones deadly force for anything other than an imminent deadly threat, it is not even constitutional. And just what are Montgomery's policies on "stop and frisk," a subject that the city rarely addresses?
A question raised by Smith's lawyer deserves an answer: if Mobile Heights is a high crime zone, why was an officer on duty with no partner at 3 AM? Montgomery's police force is about sixty percent of Birmingham's size when their populations are actually comparable. The perception is strong among rank and file cops that shifts are short-handed.
Montgomery's black leadership faces a test too. An activist said to me that many black politicians come to Mobile Heights only to collect rent checks or speak at Black History programs.
It was an unkind jab, but rings true, especially in non-election years. More substantively, one politician has called for restricting police presence in black neighborhoods to black cops: excusing white officers from the responsibility of engaging people who don't look like them is the last thing Montgomery ought to be doing.
The network of community organizers who have rightly claimed Greg Gunn as a cause must also extend their movement to the drug dealers and street gangs in Montgomery that in the last several years have taken about ten to fifteen times the black lives that AC Smith has, and saying that does not make one a condescending right-winger.
Montgomery has been on edge that black West Montgomery, where the shooting happened, would explode over the Gunn shooting. But anger in that section of the city didn't begin with Greg Gunn.
The inconvenient truth is that while Montgomery's walls are not made of segregationist barbed wire, they still exist. The black sections of Montgomery remain neglected, depressed, and too often jobless. Montgomery's politics are non-partisan but racially polarized: Todd Strange just won reelection with roughly 85 percent of the white vote, and no more than a quarter of the vote in the black boxes. Montgomery's elite business leadership remains monolithically white.
There is no other predominately African American city Montgomery's size with as meager a base of high wage black professionals. Really, Montgomery was hardly at riot's edge, but the fact that serious people feared unrest ought to trouble them to wonder just where the alienation starts.
Thanks to the DA, Greg Gunn's death will be resolved in a public fashion and not swept aside. The strains it exposes require their own reckoning.