Patterico's Pontifications

1/18/2007

Jack Dunphy on the Devin Brown/Steven Garcia Board of Rights Decision

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 12:09 am



Jack Dunphy has an excellent piece about the Board of Rights hearing exonerating Officer Steven Garcia in the Devin Brown shooting. (So you guys can stop writing me asking me to link it already.) I especially like Jack’s comments about the L.A. Times‘s wretched coverage of the issuance of the Board’s decision:

Leading the Chorus of the Perpetually Outraged is of course the Los Angeles Times, whose writers and editors erected a veneer of objectivity in their coverage but nonetheless left their bias on vivid display.

I especially liked this bit, in which Dunphy echoes my sentiments from recent days:

When the board’s rationale was released, did the Times run the story on its front page, as they did the original story? No, they did not. The story instead ran on page B10 of Saturday’s edition. Even more incredible — and more revealing about the agenda at the newspaper — is the story they chose to run on page B1 (and which they teased on page A1). “Officer had been warned in prior case,” read the headline, and the story that followed told of Officer Garcia’s 44-day suspension that resulted from an incident in 1997.

Thus, though the Times decried the secrecy surrounding the board’s decision to clear Garcia, the rationale for that decision was deemed less newsworthy than a nine-year-old incident that, conveniently for the Times, portrays Garcia in a negative light.

That sounds a lot like what I said in this post.

Dunphy notes an interesting omission from the story:

Had the Times investigated the matter further, they would have learned that Garcia was given a bureau commendation for his actions that night, which resulted in the arrest of a man wanted for multiple felonies, including attempted murder. Perhaps there wasn’t sufficient space in the paper that day to print such trivial details.

Read it all.

P.S. A personal note: Dunphy provides a link to an interesting document that I’d never seen before: the memo by the District Attorney’s office declining to prosecute. I looked to see who wrote it and realized that I know the guy: Christian Gullon. He was in my training class and is a very bright, capable, tenacious, and hardworking D.A. He and I never talked about the case, and I have zero inside knowledge about it. But from what I know of Christian, I have little doubt that, if there had been a prosecutable case there, he would have pursued it.

One Response to “Jack Dunphy on the Devin Brown/Steven Garcia Board of Rights Decision”

  1. Hey I must say – very well done. really
    Lisa

    LisaVilask (5efa1b)


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