Walter In Denver

What Happened In Kirkwood?

In the news the past days, an irate resident of Kirkwook, MO shot several city officials during a city council meeting, killing five. Let me qualify this by saying it was a gross overreaction. But from initial reports it does appear to be a reaction against city government abuses. From a local wiki site:

It would be easy to chalk off last night's shootings as one man's beef with the Kirkwood government. Honestly, that is what I thought when I first started reading about it and watching the news. Then I saw Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton's brother speak to a channel 4 reporter. First of all, simply seeing that he was black, and realizing that the shooter was black, immediately made me suspect there was more to the issue. The words that he spoke made it very clear that my suspicions were correct. "The only way that I can put it in a context that you might understand is that my brother went to war tonight with the people that were of the government that was putting torment and strife into his life. And he had spoke on it as best he could in the courts, and they denied him all access to the rights of protection, and therefore he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue."
[...]
So what pushed him so far? It started when Charles Thornton left town for three days. Owning his own construction business, he had 7 vehicles which he parked in the area around his home. He received no complaints about the vehicles in the past, but when he returned from his three day trip, he found 21 parking tickets (one on each vehicle for each day he was gone). He felt he was being targeted for no real reason. He'd caused no harm to anyone. If his vehicles caused a problem, couldn't they have simply mentioned it to him without hundreds of dollars worth of tickets? Well, the Kirkwood Police had found an easy target to bring in some revenue, and they took advantage of the situation. Following this, the Kirkwood police found reasons to give Thornton over 150 citations, which cost him thousands in fines.
[...]
There we many ways this incident could have been prevented. Lets make a list

1. The police department could have been courteous and asked Thornton to move his vehicles rather than simply placing hundreds of dollars worth of tickets on them.
2. The police department could have restrained themselves from issuing over 130 more citations to Mr. Thornton as their own form of punishment for fighting the first tickets.
3. The City Council could have addressed Thornton's concerns about their plans and policies, as they would have any other citizen that attended their meetings.
4. The City Council could have addressed Thornton's feelings that he was being disenfranchised because of the color of his skin rather than having him arrested and banned from speaking.

If that's even close to accurate, and I have no reason to believe it's not, I can understand his anger. I found the above quoted article via Thomas Knapp, who notes:

Over the years, that attitude has become increasingly typical of local government:

We have shiny badges -- we won elections, or were appointed by those who won elections. We will tell you how to live. If you don't bow, scrape and conform (or, worse yet, if you fail to notice and genuflect before our !authorita!) we'll make you pay. If you complain, we'll make you pay more. If you protest, we'll have you arrested. If you resist, our boyos will gun you down like a dog and we'll call them heroes for it.
[...]
As I've already clearly stated -- and as some commenters will no doubt ignore -- no, I don't think for a moment that this justifies Thornton's actions.

On the other hand, nothing justified the actions of the police and the public officials of Kirkwood, either. The big difference, apart from degree, was that they thought their shiny badges endowed them with impunity and immunity ...

I think it's a credit to the peaceful nature of the American public that these incidents are not as common as they might be.

Posted by Walter at February 8, 2008 11:14 PM