Public Reaction
Protesters organized several demonstrations and marches in the weeks following the shooting and during court hearings. Alice Huffman, state president of the NAACP, said there was little doubt the shooting was criminal. Many reporters and community organizers have stated that racial issues played a role both in the killing and in the community response. Grant's family claims that officers used racial slurs during the arrest. BART Police Chief Gary Gee remarked that the BART investigation had found no "nexus to race that provoked this to happen."
There was a broad public perception that BART Police were not conducting an effective investigation. Efforts by BART officers to confiscate witnesses' cellphones during the incident created controversy. The shooting stirred outrage among political leaders and legal observers; Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, Oakland City Councilmember Desley Brooks (Eastmont-Seminary), and Berkeley Copwatch labeled the shooting an execution. Local columnists criticized such language as "inflammatory" and "the exact opposite of the kind of sane leadership we need and expect from our elected officials." The fact that the jury contained no African-Americans also served as a point of tension.
Reason legal commentator Radley Balko stated that he found "simply no basis for the accusation that Mehserle intentionally executed a man in front of dozens of witnesses" and described the verdict as "appropriate" although not "popular".
San Francisco KPFA-FM host J.R. Valrey has made a film “Operation Small Axe” which focuses on the Grant shooting, and also the Lovelle Mixon case, within the larger context of police brutality in the Bay Area. Valrey is screening the movie around the country in 2010. The film was directed and produced by Adimu Madyun and won the 2010 Rise Up Award from The Patois International Rights Film Festival in New Orleans, but Varney has also stirred controversy. "The headline for a cover story in the East Bay Express called Valrey an 'Agent Provocateur' – a term generally associated with police informants assigned to cause violence," wrote Temple University associate professor Linn Washington, Jr. after a Philadelphia screening. "That article referred to Valrey as an 'advocacy journalist' who did things 'no mainstream journalist would do,' like speaking at an anti-police brutality rally. 'They tried to get the community to turn against me but I have strong support in the community,' said Valrey, who serves an editor at the San Francisco Bay View, a black owned online newspaper," Washington continued. While in Washington, DC for a screening, Valrey was accompanied by Malcolm Shabazz, grandson of Malcolm X. Shabazz spoke of "his life since being released from prison for the arson of his grandmother’s house" in a joint appearance. A blogpost which reported on the screening connected the title of the film to Bob Marley's lyric "So if you are the big tree, then we are the small axe." The post also linked to a recent annotated first-person account of the Shabazz story.
Read more about this topic: January 2009 Riots, Oakland, California
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“But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“An actor must communicate his author’s given message—comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confronted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring.”
—Eleanor Robson Belmont (1878–1979)