This has been a long year already regarding the phenomenon of how police come to kill the people they are sworn to serve. The places are established and iconic—Ferguson, Baltimore, the first bad scene in Charleston. On Tuesday, the family of Eric Garner, who was choked to death for the crime of selling loose cigarettes, came to a settlement with the city of New York. In all of these cases, of course, race acted as what the arson-squad people call an accelerant to the largely justified outrage that followed the killings. But the problem of cops killing citizens is more vast than that, as an outbreak of actual journalism down in Atlanta has proven.

Working with a local television station, Brad Schrade of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution examines the extremely aromatic five-year old case of Caroline Small, a 35-year-old mother of two who was shot and killed by two police officers in Glynn County, a warren of small towns along the Georgia coast. It is a perfect case study of the problems with police culture in this country—most notably, the near impossibility of getting the justice system to deal with police who kill people. It is a true American horror story.

"If she moves the car, I'm going to shoot her," an officer yelled. Small pulled forward. Eight bullets tore through the windshield, striking her in the head and the face. The shooting was captured on police dash cam video. So was what the two Glynn County officers said afterward. They compared their marksmanship. One told a witness how he saw Small's head explode. Their words were as callous as Small's death unnecessary. "This is the worst one I've ever investigated," said Mike McDaniel, a retired GBI agent who supervised the 2010 criminal investigation into the officers' actions. "I don't think it's a good shoot. I don't think it's justified."

The story has it all. A really bad shoot. Cops refusing to call EMTs after the shooting despite the fact that their victim was still alive and would live for another week. Cops making up a bullshit story to cover their own asses. Cops tampering with the crime scene evidence, also to cover their own asses. An ambitious local prosecutor so far in the tank to the police department that she won't dry off until 2024. Attempts by outside law-enforcement to bring justice in the case that run into a stonewall so thick and high that open bureaucratic warfare breaks out between Glynn County law-enforcement and the detectives from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation tasked to look into the shooting. A grand-jury proceeding that is an embarrassment to 500 years of jurisprudence, so thoroughly rigged to no-bill the tewo officers that one of its members openly expresses his remorse for having been so completely hoodwinked. And, ultimately, no charges against the two officers and a quick-and-dirty dismissal of a civil suit brought by Caroline Small's family. The temptation just to block-quote the whole story is strong, but here is one sample of how things went so badly wrong in this case.

[Riding DA Jackie] Johnson waited a year to present the Small case to a grand jury. In the interim, she asked a mentor to review the evidence. Rick Currie, the DA in neighboring Waycross, had worked with Johnson when she was fresh out of law school. Currie told Johnson he thought the officers should be charged with felony murder, Currie told the AJC and Channel 2. Instead, Johnson undertook a highly unusual set of maneuvers. She cut a deal with the two officers, asking them to waive their right to a 15-day advance notice of any indictment. In return, she agreed not to offer an indictment for grand jurors to consider — unless they asked for one. Almost unheard of in grand jury proceedings, Johnson also shared the state's case and evidence with the officers' attorneys two months before the grand jury met, according to court records.

Jack McCoy wept.

We have two big problems in this country and this story brings them both into sharp relief. First, we have developed at almost every level a police culture that is thoroughly militarized both in its equipment and in the mentality it instills in too many of its officers. And, second, the institutions of civil justice are either completely incapable, or resolutely unwilling, to cope with the first problem. These problems are not exclusive to big cities or, as this story illustrates, to small towns. Caroline Small was the victim of a crime when she was alive, and the victim of several other crimes after she was dead. Like the kidz say, read the whole thing. When the president talks about criminal-justice reform, he should talk about this, too.

(H/T to columnist Jarvis DeBerry of the New Orleans Times-Picayune for hipping us to this story.)

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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