by BJW Nashe
The acquittal on Monday, January 13 of two Fullerton police officers on trial for killing a schizophrenic man named Kelly Thomas is perhaps more than a mere confidence-booster for law-and-order fanatics in Southern California. The verdict might also be seen as Orange County’s first step toward a bold new solution for the problem of homelessness: BEAT THEM TO DEATH.
The death of Kelly Thomas was not a complicated or mysterious event. It may as well have been pulled directly from some generic storm-trooper manual. It was a straight-up police beat-down, pure and simple. It had no more gray shaded areas or delicate nuances than the Rodney King beating in 1991. Kelly Thomas was a disenfranchised, mentally ill homeless man. A couple of cops didn’t like his attitude, so they beat him senseless. Then he died in the hospital. One cop was charged with second degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. A second cop was charged with involuntary manslaughter and use of excessive force. After a three-week trial, both officers were found not guilty. Many people are now justifiably pissed off. In Fullerton, there are protesters in the streets.
How are we supposed to interpret this verdict? Shameful? Yes. Disgusting? Sure. But I think it is a mistake to view the acquittal as a referendum on police brutality in general. If the victim here had been a well-heeled business owner or bright young college student from an affluent family, we would be discussing a far different outcome. At some point in this trial, the focus shifted from the police brutality to the character of the victim. The main question then posed to the jury was re-framed as: did the victim deserve the treatment he received? Their answer was yes. Thus, we can reasonably conclude that the verdict sends a clear message to homeless and disenfranchised people: You are a problem; the problem must be solved; one clear solution is to beat you to death.
A Conservative Stronghold
Orange County has long been a bastion of ass-backward, cartoon-quality conservatism. This is the place that gave us the tough talk and loose morals of John Wayne and Richard Nixon, before finally settling on the ultimate right-wing fantasy-land ideal — “Reagan country.” Ronnie was worshiped as a deity in Orange County, and his reactionary “revolution” was taken up with a religious zeal seldom seen since the Reformation. For years, Proposition 13 was a sacred shibboleth, guaranteed to make you all sorts of new friends, from Anaheim to Newport Beach. Labor unions, affirmative action programs, and welfare were seen as the work of Satan. Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge served as both a political mantra and a rite of passage for anyone going into local government. Bill Clinton was the Antichrist. De-regulation was spoken of in quasi-mystical tones of wonder and admiration.
The Civil Rights movement never happened in Orange County, but Disneyland was a huge success, and held up as some sort of vague cultural triumph. The Sixties was something people watched at home on TV, while shaking their heads in disgust over all the bad news. Consciousness-raising? Forget about it. Money 
is all that matters in Reagan country. If you don’t have any money, just shut up and do as you’re told. In Orange County, the Crystal Cathedral built by televangelist Robert Schuller was viewed as a cosmic reminder of everything right and true about the new “prosperity Gospel.” U.S. Representative Robert K. Dornan — known as “B-1 Bob” for his passionate advocacy of anything related to military spending — served Orange County for years in Congress, relying solely on his unwavering conviction that his constituents had never met a war they didn’t like. And new enemies were always right around the corner.
While public education in Orange County has at best been allowed to barely limp along, private religious schools are all the rage. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your point of view. Growing up in Orange County back in the Sixties and Seventies, I attended a Lutheran elementary school, where I recall one teacher who would address anyone speaking out of turn by saying, “We didn’t ask to hear from the colored section.” Instead of decent sex education, we may have had one or two embarrassing lectures about sperm and eggs, following by readings from the Bible. The theory of evolution was never mentioned. U.S. history was a collection of fables. Religion was a daily class, right before math. The church associated with the school, St. John’s Lutheran, had several pastors — one of whom was a World War Two veteran. He fought on the German side. I was too young to have the nerve to ask him what he thought about the holocaust. In any case, all of the pastors seemed more concerned with fundraising than with political or spiritual matters.
A Tale of Two Communities
Orange County’s history is marked by the struggle of one group of people to assert political and economic domination over another group of people. Reagan Republicanism was the crowning achievement of that struggle. It was all about winning the class war. Law enforcement often was used as a way to kick the losers in the teeth, and keep them in submission.
Orange County, like so much of the U.S., has always been divided along race and class lines. The embrace of right-wing politics simply served to keep those divisions more firmly locked in place than in other more flexible parts of the country. In Orange County, you never had any doubt what kind of neighborhood you were in. There were the estates and gated communities of the upper class, the track homes of the middle class, and the hard-scrabble low income areas. Minorities rarely, if ever, made it into the upper class neighborhoods. They typically lived in their own segregated neighborhoods within the poorer sections of town.
The conservative ideology was advanced to serve the interests of the upper class. Reagan country was all about protecting the wealth of the “haves” from the “have-nots,” which were portrayed as a horde of needy “special interest groups.” Advocating strict law and order was essential to maintaining the status quo. In Orange County, institutional race and class bias did not seep into the system; it was cultivated like a rich, well-tended garden of poisonous flowers. The presence of minorities and poor people in Orange County were powerful reminders of the big city evils lurking elsewhere in California — in particular the Sodom and Gomorrah of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The under-class was needed for cheap, menial labor. But they had to be kept in their place. Thus, Orange County has always been steadfastly committed to dealing with the problems associated with the “have-nots” swiftly and severely. Law-and-order is not merely a set of policies in Orange County — it is a philosophy of life. A film such as Robocop is a kind of aphrodisiac to many of the property-owners down there, seething inside their western ranch-style homes, Spanish villas, and beach houses.
Changing Demographics
In recent years we have seen evidence that the politics might be changing in Orange County. Due to an increasingly diverse population, the area seems to be headed in a more moderate direction. Anyone visiting Orange County these days will be struck by a far more heterogenous cultural mix than ever before. Whites currently make up no more than 45 percent of the population, which is now teeming with Hispanics, as well as Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese families. Such diversity can have a clear impact on elections. In the 2008 election, for instance, Barack Obama won 48% of the vote when he ran against Republican candidate John McCain. This would have been unheard of 20-30 years ago.
But Orange County still has significant numbers of white Republicans with plenty of cash at their disposal. Money will always buy a certain amount of political clout. The rich conservatives are still running the show down there, even though their heyday may be slowly drawing to a close. When it comes to law-and-order on the streets — a matter especially dear to their hearts — they are used to getting their way. And the racial diversity of the county has not necessarily translated into a greater awareness of income inequality and class disparity. In fact, many of the minority families are willing to buy into certain aspects of the conservative platform, such as the emphasis on family values and the need to be tough-on-crime. The ultimate impact of racial diversity on institutional class bias in Orange County remains an open-ended question. Based on the Kelly Thomas case, we can see that Orange County is not the place you want to be if you are mentally ill, poor, or homeless — no matter what your racial heritage. Not unless you want to run the risk of being beaten to death.
A Shameful Verdict
Perhaps it’s no surprise that even now, more than 20 years after Rodney King, a police brutality trial in Orange County involving the death of a homeless man should result in a “good German” verdict. The key is selecting the right kind of people for the jury. And there are still plenty of those to choose from in good old OC. It’s not all that hard to weed out the riff raff and find a dozen good Christians and/or Fox News addicts willing to spend three weeks of their lives ignoring video footage of a savage and deadly beating in order to focus instead on hours of mind-numbing testimony about the brave efforts of loyal peace officers working tirelessly to keep the community safe from the dangerous drug casualties squatting all over our public parks and sidewalks and bus terminals.
Let’s quickly review what the jurors spent nearly a month engrossed in, and yet still somehow managed to get so wrong.
On July 5, 2011, 37-year-old Kelly Thomas was involved in a violent encounter with police near a crowded bus terminal in Fullerton. Police were supposedly responding to a reported vehicle break-in when they encountered Thomas. Thomas, who lived on the streets and suffered from schizophrenia, was reportedly uncooperative and belligerent when approached by police. The officers ended up using tasers on him multiple times and severely beating him both with batons and with the blunt side of a taser. Thomas was taken to the hospital unconscious. He then fell into a coma, and was removed from life support five days later. A coroner’s report stated that chest compression and blunt force trauma to the head resulted in Thomas‘s death. There was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in his system at the time of his hospitalization.
Fullerton Police Officer Manuel Ramos, 39, was charged with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. Officer Jay Cicinelli, 41, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and use of excessive force. Both men pled not guilty to all charges.
Key evidence for the prosecution consisted of surveillance video footage (from the nearby bus terminal cameras) that captured much of the physical confrontation between Thomas and police. Thomas is shirtless and disheveled. The footage shows the cops repeatedly striking Thomas with batons and knocking him down to the ground. Instead of subduing him and taking him into custody in order to get him help, the cops persist in beating him far longer than any reasonable person would consider necessary to make an arrest. Thomas is recorded calling for his father’s help several times, as well as telling police he cannot breathe before he eventually loses the ability to speak. A particularly damning section of the video shows Officer Ramos slipping on latex gloves prior to administering the beating. Ramos can be seen gesturing at Thomas with his gloved hands as he tells the man, who has been ordered to sit on the ground, “Now you see my fists? They’re getting ready to fuck you up.” Photos of the victim in the hospital show a man who has been beaten beyond recognition.
In light of so much damaging evidence, how did the defense attorneys manage to convince the jury that the two officers were innocent? Simple, really. They mounted an old-fashioned, conservative Orange County defense. They focused on dehumanizing the victim. They convinced the jury that Kelly Thomas was the problem, not the cops. Surely the decent people selected for the jury could relate to this, right? Look at these fine, upstanding police officers dedicated to serving the public good. Compared to them, Kelly Thomas was just a crazy bum, a loser, a troublemaker. He had a history of drug use. He was filthy and unwashed. He smelled bad. He was violent. Police were just doing their job when they got tough on him. It was their duty to get this dangerous person off the streets in order to protect the fine people of Orange County.
The most repulsive feature of this defense strategy is the shameless arrogance involved in asserting that “the cops were just doing exactly what they are trained to do.” Because in fact the statement is so horribly accurate. The cops were doing exactly what they were trained to do. For decades, police officers in Orange County have been targeting poor people, people of color, and mentally ill homeless people — often beating them and hauling them off to jail. Kelly Thomas was not some isolated event. He just happened to get treated with such brutality that he ended up dead. He had the misfortune of being confronted by a couple of wannabe Robocop cowboys wearing badges. And he wouldn’t shut up and do as he was told.
The conservative stronghold of Orange County has been maintained over the years, at least in part, through police brutality and targeted arrests of disenfranchised individuals. The question now remains: with changing demographics, and a large number of people out in the streets to protest this controversial verdict, will we start to see the Orange curtain come down? Is this trial one of the last gasps of the law and order fanatics in Orange County?
Or does the verdict simply mean that Orange County has found its own special solution to the homeless problem?