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Trayvon Martin — What Happened?

by Bruce A. Clark

I have been obsessively following this case for a few days. I don’t usually get so absorbed but the magnitude of the response to the killing, the rush to judgment and the lynch mob mentality of the movement to condemn the shooter, George Zimmerman, created a situation I couldn’t ignore. There is no way, in a short article, to address the development of the case nor address new facts as they come along. For this, I refer readers to an article I put on my web site, Trayvon Martin, Prejudice and the Rush to Judgment. I tried to address the issues there instead of writing a really long article here. In this piece, I hope to concentrate on the essence of what seems to be going on.

After a few weeks of not noticing the case, the media and people in the community got a hold of the story, and the Internet coverage of it exploded. Predictably, many in the African American community and the usual suspects of outspoken “leaders” like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton took the side of the young black man who was killed, despite the paucity of factual evidence publicly available at the time. Then many, many people in the liberal/progressive/radical parts of the population jumped on the bandwagon and joined the chorus calling for the arrest of Zimmerman. The facts to justify this were, however, lacking.

• At the time, the shooter was being described as white because of his name, Zimmerman. In fact, he is half Peruvian, and fluent in Spanish.
• Since the incident occurred in a gated community, it was presumed to be a white gated community, when in fact it us highly mixed in race, and less than half white.
• Zimmerman was the most active person in the local community watch group. He usually patrolled the community while walking his dog. However, the words chosen to describe him are consistently “over-zealous” instead of “dedicated” or “wannabe cop” instead of “concerned.” (One can’t help but notice that in any characterization of Zimmerman, the words chosen are as negative as can be, and those chosen to describe Martin are as positive as can be.) It has been noted that Zimmerman has helped the police arrest local burglars and has helped local residents avoid being victims. At least some of the burglars have been described as black males.
• Local black residents speak highly of him, and Zimmerman and his wife have been reported as being mentors of local black youth.
• Zimmerman is accused by the mob of racially profiling Martin because he was black. However, listening to the 911 tape, Zimmerman did not volunteer that fact. In response to the dispatcher’s question about the race of the “suspicious person” he was reporting, Zimmerman responded that he thought the person was black. It was already after dark.
• Moreover, Zimmerman is accused of racially profiling Martin while Martin was on his way home. In fact, Martin lived a long way away, in Miami, and he was visiting his father, who had taken him to visit his father’s girlfriend who lived in the gated community. Zimmerman correctly recognized that Martin was not a resident of the community, and that made him suspicious. Anyone who has ever heard a lecture by police on how to prevent crime in one’s community will recall that the police advise noticing people who do not belong to the community. Zimmerman did that.
• Some people claim to have heard on the 911 recording hearing Zimmerman refer to Martin as a “coon.” The recording appears on numerous web sites. The sound is garbled enough that the word is not, to ordinary ears, recognizable. On at least one site, the word was isolated, and one can listen to that part alone, over and over. The first part of the word is totally obscured, whether from static or sound-drop-out, I don’t know. To my ears, the end of the word clearly rhymes with ground. Whether it is ground, crowned, sound, round, bound, found, frowned, abound, redound, or some other rhyme, I cannot tell, but it doesn’t sound a bit like coon.

Moreover, every kind of irrelevant excuse or possibility is added to Zimmerman’s name:

• Zimmerman violated the rules of neighborhood watch by carrying a firearm: Neighborhood watch is a volunteer organization of local residents. There are no hard and fast rules. The police make recommendations as to how to do it, but that’s it. Anyone who has been involved in volunteer organizations knows that when one person volunteers, everyone else breathes a sigh of relief that they don’t have to do it. Therefore, it’s up to the volunteers to do the work as best they can. It’s true, and the Florida police will admit it, that it’s an individual’s right to decide to carry a concealed firearm for personal protection. Choosing to do so does not count against Zimmerman. He was volunteering to take a risk for the sake of the neighborhood, not knowing whom he would encounter, and wanted to carry a firearm to protect himself. End of discussion, unless positive evidence can be found of other intent.
• Zimmerman was overzealous when he chose to follow Trayvon Martin when he was “off duty” as a neighborhood watch person: Nonsense! Neighborhood watch volunteers are just neighbors who volunteer for extra activity to patrol the area. They are always “on duty” as concerned residents who might not know  who, if anyone, is “on duty” to be patrolling the area and if they have seen the person he has seen.

A neighborhood doesn’t need a formal organized group to pay attention to what’s going on. Where I live, there is an unoccupied house across the street, and often nefarious characters go into the yard to steal fixtures or to use the property as a route into other properties. Fortunately some of us started keeping watch on who is there, and politely approach nearly everyone who goes there. Most are impressed with the neighborhood that people are watching out for each other. The car thief with a long record who we got arrested after calling the local sheriff’s department was not one of them. It’s all in noticing who belongs there and who does not, race not a factor.

• Zimmerman was aggressive when he chose to disregard the comment of the 911 dispatcher that he need not follow the “suspicious person:” However, if one listens to the 911 recording, one hears the wind in his phone microphone as he is following Martin. But after a couple of sentences, the wind stops, as if Zimmerman stopped following Martin. If this is indeed the case, and he abandons the chase, there is no longer any imaginable reason why Zimmerman could be thought of as any kind of aggressor. Any attack upon him later would be by another aggressor, giving Zimmerman the full right of self defense.
• Trayvon Martin felt threatened by being followed by an armed person and it was reasonable for him to defend himself: Zimmerman had a concealed carry permit for a firearm. Part of the requirements for exercising same is that the firearm remain concealed. Unless there is evidence presented and confirmed that Zimmerman in some fashion brandished his firearm and that he somehow approached Martin in some threatening manner, then there is no reason to assume that Martin knew that he was armed. Therefore, Martin had no legally sustainable reason to attack Zimmerman (if this indeed happened, as in Zimmerman’s version of the case).
• George Zimmerman was a habitual caller of the police: What this has to do with anything, I don’t know, but it’s one accusation. The Miami Herald says “Zimmerman called police 46 times since Jan. 1, 2011 to report disturbances, break-ins, windows left open and other incidents. Nine of those times, he saw someone or something suspicious.” However, other sources dispute this. The Daily Beast says “In all, police have records of 46 calls from Zimmerman since 2004, both to 911 and a nonemergency number, sometimes for reasons as mundane as reporting a pothole blocking a road, as he did in 2005.”

The more details accumulate, the more we see that there are unknown factors in the chain of events. By the same token, the more unknown factors accumulate, the less legitimate are the accusations made against Zimmerman. The more this goes on, the less we should pay attention to anything said about the parties in this incident. Both parties have an increasing number of factors by which they could possibly be held at fault for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Taking a side before the legal investigations are complete makes less and less sense as time goes by. The more someone takes a side and demands “justice” for one side to the exclusion of the other, the more it looks like prejudice is the predominant factor in taking sides.