There’s an art to staging the perfect proposal, and this man has mastered it. In April, Shenna Barkley and her boyfriend Brian Miller decided to host an art show called “Love Letters” at a local coffee shop in Griffin, Georgia. Participants were asked to come up with a letter of the alphabet that best described their love in any relationship, whether it was a significant other or anything or anyone else that made them “truly happy.” While Barkley was describing what the letter “K” meant to her — kismet, which means fate, because she and Miller had crossed paths again after growing up together — Miller was arranging the letters behind her into the words “Will You Marry Me.” “We’ve know each other since we were …

There’s an art to staging the perfect proposal, and this man has mastered it.

In April, Shenna Barkley and her boyfriend Brian Miller decided to host an art show called “Love Letters” at a local coffee shop in Griffin, Georgia. Participants were asked to come up with a letter of the alphabet that best described their love in any relationship, whether it was a significant other or anything or anyone else that made them “truly happy.”

While Barkley was describing what the letter “K” meant to her — kismet, which means fate, because she and Miller had crossed paths again after growing up together — Miller was arranging the letters behind her into the words “Will You Marry Me.”

“We’ve know each other since we were kids, and if i’m honest with you, if I’m honest with myself, I’ve loved you since then,” Miller said, as the audience loudly — that’s a warning to viewers! — cheered. Of course, Barkley said “yes.”

Now that’s some serious kismet.

H/T RightThisMinute

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This Man Couldn’t Have Picked A More Appropriate Time To Pop The Question

The National Press Foundation announced the winners of its highest journalism awards on Thursday. Among the winners is St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Gilbert Bailon for his coverage of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. Bailon will receive the Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year Award. “If ever a newspaper and its editor faced a real-time stress test it was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and editor Gilbert Bailon,” the NPF judges said. BuzzFeed News’ Kate Nocera, Gregory Johnsen and John Stanton will be awarded the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress. CNN investigative correspondent Drew Griffin will receive the same…

The National Press Foundation announced the winners of its highest journalism awards on Thursday.

Among the winners is St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Gilbert Bailon for his coverage of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. Bailon will receive the Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year Award.

“If ever a newspaper and its editor faced a real-time stress test it was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and editor Gilbert Bailon,” the NPF judges said.

BuzzFeed News’ Kate Nocera, Gregory Johnsen and John Stanton will be awarded the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress. CNN investigative correspondent Drew Griffin will receive the same recognition for his work on “Congress for Sale.”

“We’re honored that our colleagues are recognizing both the quality and the profound impact of our journalism,” Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith told The Huffington Post, “and, in particular, of the work of Greg, Kate, John and their editors — Steve Kandell, Miriam Elder, and Katherine Miller. These stories showed the best of what BuzzFeed News can do, from rigorously reported, crafted, and presented long features to creative and tenacious beat reporting that refuses to let go.”

The NPF also took a look at online and digital media, recognizing the website Re/code with the Excellence in Online Journalism Award. The sites founders, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, were honored earlier this year by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School with the i-3 award for “impact, innovation and influence.”

“Re/code’s coverage of technology is exceptional in its breadth,” the judges said. “Lots of original reviews and smart commentary inform top-notch reporting on an industry that changes constantly.”

The awards will be given at the NPF’s annual awards dinner on Feb. 18 in Washington, D.C.

For the full list of honorees, head over to the National Press Foundation.

Original article: 

Journalists From BuzzFeed, Re/code, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Honored By National Press Foundation

ST. LOUIS (AP) — The University of Missouri-St. Louis on Wednesday announced a hiring freeze in response to an unexpected enrollment drop that campus officials are linking to the fatal police shooting in nearby Ferguson. Chancellor Tom George announced the hiring freeze in a campuswide email that cited a $2 million budget shortfall created by “widespread anxiety about the region in general and North (St. Louis) County in particular.” “Misplaced though it may be, it is a perception affecting the community and UMSL,” he said. Campus spokesman Bob Samples said some new and returning students have told the university they’ve decided …

ST. LOUIS (AP) — The University of Missouri-St. Louis on Wednesday announced a hiring freeze in response to an unexpected enrollment drop that campus officials are linking to the fatal police shooting in nearby Ferguson.

Chancellor Tom George announced the hiring freeze in a campuswide email that cited a $2 million budget shortfall created by “widespread anxiety about the region in general and North (St. Louis) County in particular.”

“Misplaced though it may be, it is a perception affecting the community and UMSL,” he said.

Campus spokesman Bob Samples said some new and returning students have told the university they’ve decided not to enroll because of the fallout from the Aug. 9 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

The university, with an enrollment of about 12,000, expects to have 600 fewer students in the upcoming spring semester compared with spring 2014. A projected 4 percent enrollment increase in the fall semester instead turned out to be just a 1 percent boost.

The campus is 4 miles from where Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot Brown two weeks before the start of fall classes. Looting and arsons that followed Brown’s death and the announcement of a grand jury decision to not indict Wilson were largely confined to a retail corridor along West Florissant Avenue and parts of downtown Ferguson near the police station.

Sophomore Amber Whitaker, who grew up in rural St. Clair but lives less than 2 miles from Ferguson in neighboring Kinloch, said she’s met “first-time students who were very nervous about coming here and not sure what to expect.”

She called such fears unfounded.

“I can understand for people who are not from this area to be a little cautious, but I think it’s highly ridiculous,” said Whitaker, who led a recent campus protest after the Ferguson grand jury announcement. “The media made it look a lot more dangerous than it really was.”

The campus hiring freeze, which covers both full-time and part-time workers as well as tenured professors, takes effect immediately. The hiring ban doesn’t include part-time student workers, graduate assistants and certain adjunct faculty.

George plans to further discuss the Ferguson fallout when curators for the four-campus University of Missouri System hold their regular bimonthly meeting in St. Louis on Thursday and Friday.

—

Follow Alan Scher Zagier on Twitter at http://twitter.com/azagier

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University Of Missouri-St. Louis Says Ferguson Shooting Caused Enrollment Drop

When the grand jury in Staten Island failed to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner to death, the immediate response by the public was astonishment, surprise and shock at the “failure” of the American justice system. After all, there was incontrovertible proof this time around, video footage clearly showing three white police officers approaching Eric Garner who firmly said that he had done nothing wrong and that his harassment needed to end. “I’m minding my business, officer. Please, just leave me alone,” he pleaded. “Please, don’t touch me,” he said as the cops took him down. When Pantaleo put Garner in an illegal chokehold, Garner kept pleading. When Pantaleo …

When the grand jury in Staten Island failed to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner to death, the immediate response by the public was astonishment, surprise and shock at the “failure” of the American justice system. After all, there was incontrovertible proof this time around, video footage clearly showing three white police officers approaching Eric Garner who firmly said that he had done nothing wrong and that his harassment needed to end. “I’m minding my business, officer. Please, just leave me alone,” he pleaded. “Please, don’t touch me,” he said as the cops took him down. When Pantaleo put Garner in an illegal chokehold, Garner kept pleading. When Pantaleo pressed Garner’s face into the concrete, Garner was still pleading.

We all saw Pantaleo viciously choke Garner. The prosecutor saw it. The grand jury saw it. All of us heard Garner’s dying words: “I can’t breathe.” He said it once, then twice, then seven more times. As Garner lay dying with indifferent-looking police officers around him, Officer Pantaleo waved to the camera. It was a spectacle, a public execution and we all witnessed on a small scale what happens across America every day. Few White Americans ever witness a man destroyed by state power. Now, they’ve seen it. One minute Garner was a thinking, breathing, functioning human being like you and I. The next, he was finished. “In two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.” The lines from Orwell’s A Hanging resonate as the video plays.

But the grand jury did not indict Pantaleo, despite the well-known fact in legal circles that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich,” in the infamous words of New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler. Indeed, in 2010, only in 11 cases out of the 162,000 U.S. attorneys prosecuted that year did grand juries not return indictments. When cops were involved, however, the situation was markedly different. The cozy relationship between prosecutors and police means that the latter are rarely indicted, never-mind convicted.

The disquieting truth is that there was never to be an indictment in this case, which on simple legal grounds should have moved to trial, because the US justice system knows no justice when it comes to African-Americans. To call this a failure would be a misnomer; it is a system that was designed to exclude, ignore and trivialize the concerns of Blacks while targeting, shooting, caging and killing them. A mega industry of institutionalized racial violence propagated by prosecutors, penalties, and prisons ensures that the system resists reform. By definition this system cannot betray the poor and minorities. It just does its job. In this manner, the justice system worked in Staten Island and Ferguson, as it was designed to.

As the name “justice system” suggests, the problems are, well, systemic. Nice liberals and centrists often fail to fully appreciate just how embedded racism is in a system that has 5.3 million people within its walls. From police officers to prosecutors to prison guards, the entire system is rigged against minorities, the poor and Blacks. This is why 80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent and cannot hire a lawyer. It is why 70 percent of exonerations by DNA testing are of people of color. It is also why there are such widespread racial disparities in sentencing. Just as the system worked in the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, it has also succeeded for many of the 1 million African-Americans who are imprisoned at a rate of six times that of whites. It is a system that works very well for the government, which at the federal level boasts a 93 percent conviction rate, 97 percent of which are won through plea bargains where prosecutors have all the leverage and power while the defendant has almost none.

Equality and justice for some should be plastered on every courtroom.

Despite these truths, after every incident of a white cop shooting an unarmed Black man, the usual paeans to nonviolence and the inherent fairness of the justice system come rolling off the tongues of political leaders and establishment journalists. This myth of an otherwise just system failing in one-off incidents was propagated and reproduced after Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times in 1999 by white cops who thought he was pulling out a gun when he reached for his wallet; after Patrick Dorismond was shot dead by an undercover officer in 2000; after 17-year-old Timothy Stansbury Jr. was killed by a cop in 2004; after Sean Bell was shot 50 times.

Accompanying the elegies to the Great American Justice System are the racist stereotypes from polite liberals and ignorant conservatives. After Garner was killed, The New York Times opened with a description of Garner as “The 350-pound man,” who was “arguing with police,” just in case Times readers were curious about Garner’s weight, a throwback to the stereotypes of beastly Black men. The paper of record reminded us that Michael Brown “was no angel.” Darren Wilson referred to Michael Brown as a “demon” and “Hulk Hogan.” The ghoulish-looking, venom-spitting Representative Peter King got in the action as well, taking a break from harassing American Muslims, to blame Garner’s obesity for his death. Unfortunately there is no scumbag quota in the modern Republican Party.

In reality, Michael Brown and Eric Garner had no chance, and we should not pretend like they did. They were caught up in a system that has done to thousands before them what it will do to thousands after them. Despite having just 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has a quarter of its prisoners. The weight of this punishment falls disproportionately on African-Americans. While state authorities previously used slavery and segregation and Jim Crow to subject and control the Black population, the excuses for racialized control eventually ran out. It became unpopular to be a racist, and so a separate artifice was constructed to sequester and subdue African-Americans. In the political sphere, this was Richard Nixon’s victory with his racist electoral strategy. As H.R. Haldeman blushed about his boss, President Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

In the judicial sphere, there is plenty of blame to go around, but saint Ronald Reagan is chiefly culpable. With the onset of the War on Drugs, the U.S. prison population grew from 350,000 to 2.3 million people. Slavery and Jim Crow in the past, the “legitimate” way to harass and attack Blacks was to sweep them up from the streets for low-level crimes and lock them up. It even had a nice cover-up title known as “law and order.” As Michelle Alexander recounts in her magisterial book, The New Jim Crow:

President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.

That’s right, crack cocaine became an issue after, not before, the Drug War started. Like all drug wars, including the Canadian one, it was a racialized affair.

The number of African-Americans in the prison-industrial complex quadrupled in the three years after the War on Drugs began. Despite the fact that 5 times as many whites use drugs than African-Americans, the latter are imprisoned for drug crimes at a rate of 10 times that of Whites. The Rockefeller drug laws upheld a sentencing disparity of 100:1 for crack use, primarily used in African-American neighborhoods. These were reformed only four years ago to the milder but equally disreputable ratio of 18:1.

Democrats, eager to win votes, caught on to the trendy law-and-order campaign as well. Then-Governor Bill Clinton, running for president and worried that he would be deemed soft on crime, flew home to Arkansas to execute a mentally impaired Black man named Ricky Ray Rector. (“I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime,” Clinton said afterward.) From the Clinton administration cutting funding for public housing by $17 billion while boosting corrections funding by $19 billion, to President Obama repeatedly scolding Black America on its ills, the Democrats are also complicit in failing Black America. When President Obama lectured Black fathers to engage with their kids, someone should have asked him how millions of imprisoned Black men could play with their children. Ironically, in another world, the racist and exclusionary justice system might have conspired against a young pot-smoking Barack Obama the way it conspires against millions of young Black men, most of whom do not end up at Harvard Law School.

From dealing with cops on the street – authorities of the state given immense discretionary power – to dealing with state lawyers in the courtroom, the system works to imprison and ultimately to destroy.

And, it has within its gears the mechanisms to thwart charges of discrimination. This runs from street level police right up to the venerated and robed politicians on the Supreme Court. As the legal scholar David Cole has written:

The tactic of burying race discrimination claims before they can be made is not limited to selective prosecution…the Court has imposed nearly insurmountable barriers to persons challenging race discrimination at all stages of the criminal justice system.

Simply put: there is nothing extraordinary about the outcomes in Ferguson and Staten Island. They are what we should expect by a legal system in a society where the majority still harbor prejudices against African-Americans. A full sixty percent of Staten Island residents continue to live in a mythical land where police treat both races the same.

Condemning racism, however, is simple. The racist could condemn racism. Accepting how far and wide racism’s tentacles reach, from the hearts of millions of Americans through the institutions of American democracy is much harder. “They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand,” James Baldwin wrote to his nephew, referring to White America, “they cannot be released from it.” It takes a brute to brutalize, and American power has been nothing but brutish towards its Black minority. When any group of people are dehumanized, assaulted, harassed, deprived of their rights, ghettoized and told they should accept this as “just,” eventually, they will retaliate. Across the country, Black Americans and their allies are telling the country and the world: Enough is enough. We want to breathe.

We should commend them for doing so.

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The System Didn’t Fail Eric Garner. It Worked How a Racist System Is Supposed to

As in the Arab Spring, young people like the Dream Defenders and Millennial Activists United, protesting police practices in the black community, have created a “free space” in the national political continuum. What will fill that space when the protests inevitably end? In a way, it is the same question faced by the organizers of the student sit-ins for civil rights a half-century ago. Those young people were persuaded to go “mainstream” — register people to vote, get black politicians elected, get civil rights laws passed. All well and good, but somehow the broad base of the black population — those facing the police almost daily in our time — got left behind. In all…

As in the Arab Spring, young people like the Dream Defenders and Millennial Activists United, protesting police practices in the black community, have created a “free space” in the national political continuum. What will fill that space when the protests inevitably end? In a way, it is the same question faced by the organizers of the student sit-ins for civil rights a half-century ago.

Those young people were persuaded to go “mainstream” — register people to vote, get black politicians elected, get civil rights laws passed. All well and good, but somehow the broad base of the black population — those facing the police almost daily in our time — got left behind.

In all such cases, the danger is that social actors who are better organized than the protesters will move into the vacuum, and the protesters will have no way to hold them accountable. Speaking truth to power can create the space but is not sufficient to fill it.

For example, the established civil rights leadership is planning a “March on Washington” for Dec. 13, in an attempt to get out in front of the protests. Will it be a replay of the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March, in which the elite were cordoned off from the masses? Will it be merely another fundraising opportunity?

Even more, are these leaders prepared to deal with the real problem, which is how to deal with the descendants of a huge population brought here as slaves to do manual labor for which there is no longer a need?

Mind you, when there was a need, black labor was extremely valuable. One might say black labor built this country, North and South. That labor remained valuable when slavery ended, so a problem arose: how to milk that labor for as long as possible?

One key element was to keep black people who were no longer plantation-bound under control. During slavery, blacks who were off the planation, even at their master’s behest, were subject to the equivalent of “stop and frisk” by slave patrols, arguably the country’s first organized police force. The Klan and local law enforcement picked up that responsibility when slavery ended. Since ex-slaves were no longer plantation-bound, they were always under suspicion. Sound familiar?

These practices continue, even though the purpose is no longer to discipline a cheap labor source. Unemployment in the black community, and especially among young black males, is sky-high.

Police practices today not only lead to harassment, injury and death for black citizens, however. Along with prosecutorial discretion and majority-white juries and parole boards, they also lead to the mass incarceration of black people. That huge black prison population does provide a source of cheap labor. It also provides employment for prison guards and support staff, as well as huge profits for a wide range of corporations that supply goods, services, management and physical plant, to round out the “prison-industrial complex.”

So black people are understandably wary of the police. Some members of the black middle class believe they are immune. We will leave it to history and current events to determine if their optimism is justified.

But what about the police? Police spokesmen who came to Howard told students that the responsibility of a person stopped by an officer is to make the officer feel safe. That’s the same mantra you hear from police spokesmen who have been interviewed by the media. (A former Chicago police officer walked out of a Ray Suarez talk-show panel when the narrative began to stray from that line.) This attitude presents the police as a quasi-military force whose job it is to occupy and dominate the community rather than serve it. Their growing fetish for military hardware simply drives the point home.

Despite their protestations, it seems pretty clear that many police officers fear for their lives when patrolling black neighborhoods and/or confronting black males. Maybe they’re thinking about the kind of uproar they could expect in their own neighborhoods if they were forced to live under such conditions.

Be that as it may, it seems that only signals of complete submission will be sufficient to make officers feel safe under present conditions. For historical reasons, reflexive submission to white authority is a particularly bitter pill for black males to swallow, so that’s going to be an ongoing problem.

We haven’t said anything yet about the increasing incidence of police harassment — and worse — directed at black females. One of my students has been doing some extensive research on this problem and coming up with some eyebrow-raising results. Apparently, some police want black women to be submissive as well, but in a gendered fashion that has nothing to do with the officer’s safety.

So is the answer that black people, male and female, must act as if they are back on the plantation?

I hope not. Because that’s not going to happen.

I don’t think legislation, or commissions, or studies are going to fix this. Even resort to the UN Human Rights Commission, though certainly worth a try and especially embarrassing as our government criticizes the human rights records of other nations, remains, like the others, a top-down remedy, unlikely to affect the objective conditions faced by the broad base of the back population.

The national budget and political climate would not support reparations, repatriation to Africa, or the creation of a black 52nd state, all approaches that have been considered in the past and which still retain some adherents.

So I go back to civic infrastructure as a way to fill the “free space” the protests have created.

One approach might be to organize Neighborhood Watch chapters in all black communities and cumulate them into a national alliance. Neighborhood Watch was founded by the police, so there would have to be a formal link with them. Who knows? That might promote some accountability, as the watchers and the police would both be keeping an eye out for criminal behavior, and protocols for Neighborhood Watch require close contact between them.

Clearly the watchers would be not only “taking a bite out of crime” but watching the police (though perhaps not as aggressively as CopWatch). But they could also “watch” to be sure kids got to and from school safely, watch out for job opportunities and shared child care, and complain to the authorities when municipal services fall short.

Perhaps this is the American Spring. Perhaps it is the movement I “dreamed” about last year while reflecting on the March on Washington’s 50th anniversary.

I dreamed then of young black people drawing attention not only to police brutality and racial profiling but to mass incarceration and the “school-to-prison pipeline.” I had bigger dreams: I saw them turning to gun control, predatory lending, the hate speech of right-wing talk-show hosts, and ALEC. I saw them “watching” businesses that spite their communities and politicians who spend too much time with big donors and not enough with the people who elected them.

But most of all, I saw them joined by youth of all races and class backgrounds, who would then engage their own communities on their own issues. That seems to be what is happening.

It gives us all hope to see young people behaving as if they think America is worth fighting for here at home as well as abroad. My students, of whom I am immensely proud, are among them.

I’m hoping for civic infrastructure in particular, but then again, I’m not driving.

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‘American Spring’?

MARTINEZ, Calif. — A police officer who fatally shot an unarmed man during a struggle said Wednesday he feared the man “was going to take my gun and kill me.” Richmond Officer Wallace Jensen, testifying for the first time since he shot Richard ‘Pedie” Perez III, 24, outside a liquor store in September, said he saw Perez’ hand on his gun, so he fought him off and opened fire. “My concern was Mr. Perez would take my gun,” said Jensen, a canine officer, explaining why he fired three rounds at Perez. Wednesday’s Contra Costa County coroner’s inquest was largely a formality to determine the manner and mode of Perez’s death. It has no legal bearing on whether Jensen is charged, but it…

MARTINEZ, Calif. — A police officer who fatally shot an unarmed man during a struggle said Wednesday he feared the man “was going to take my gun and kill me.”

Richmond Officer Wallace Jensen, testifying for the first time since he shot Richard ‘Pedie” Perez III, 24, outside a liquor store in September, said he saw Perez’ hand on his gun, so he fought him off and opened fire.

“My concern was Mr. Perez would take my gun,” said Jensen, a canine officer, explaining why he fired three rounds at Perez.

Wednesday’s Contra Costa County coroner’s inquest was largely a formality to determine the manner and mode of Perez’s death. It has no legal bearing on whether Jensen is charged, but it provided revelations about the ongoing investigation.

The Sept. 14 altercation began when Jensen, a seven-year veteran, cruised by Uncle Sam’s Liquors, where he said loitering had been a problem. A clerk called out that Perez, a customer, was “causing problems” inside the store.

Jensen said he ordered him to sit down outside the store.

“I could tell he was unsteady. He swayed from side to side. His speech was slurred,” said Jensen, wearing a dark suit and yellow tie. “He was very talkative. He kept talking. He was animated with his hands.” A pathologist testified Perez had a high blood-alcohol level.

Less than two minutes later, Perez was dead.

While Jensen tried to contact another officer on police radio, he said Perez got up and walked away, even though the officer said he had told Perez he was not free to go.

“Fuck this. I’m out of here,” Jensen said he recalled Perez saying.

Perez’s father Rick Perez with a t-shirt honoring his son outside court in Martinez, Calif.

Jensen grabbed Perez from behind and swept out his legs, knocking him to the ground, he said. Perez got back to his feet. The officer said he radioed for backup and knocked Perez down again, this time from the front with something like a “judo throw.”

“I was telling him to stop resisting, to stop fighting, that he was under arrest,” Jensen said. “I related that over and over.”

With Perez fighting back from the ground, “I felt something began pulling on my gun. I felt several pulls,” Jensen testified. “I saw Mr. Perez’s left hand on my gun.”

Jensen said he dislodged Perez’s hand from his holster. Standing a “couple feet” from Perez, Jensen said he drew his gun.

“My concern was Mr. Perez would take my gun,” Jensen said.

He said he fired the first shot when Perez “advanced” toward him, and two more rounds as Perez continued coming.

Perez grabbed his chest and doubled over, then stumbled into the liquor store and collapsed, according to Jensen.

Hearing officer Matthew Guichard presided over the inquest and was the only person to question witnesses. An attorney for Perez’s family later complained that the questioning was not vigorous.

The inquest began with a pathologist describing Perez’s autopsy.

Two of the three bullets that hit Perez were fatal, according to Dr. Arnold Josselson. One tore through his lungs and aorta. The other hit his left lung, spleen and liver. Bruises and abrasions on Perez’s body were “consistent with a physical altercation,” Josselson said.

Perez had a blood alcohol level of 0.247, according to Josselson. That’s about three times the legal limit to drive. There were several medications in his system, but Josselson testified the levels were so low he didn’t think Perez had abused the drugs.

A Richmond detective investigating the shooting testified that the liquor store’s cameras and a witness with a cellphone camera recorded glimpses of the struggle.

The footage, which was not played in court, showed “Mr. Perez with his hand around” Jensen’s belt, according to Detective Hector Esparza.

Esparza testified Perez’s previous run-ins with the law included an arrest on DUI charges the night before he died. He was convicted of DUI last year and was once arrested on a gun charge that did not lead to a conviction, Esparza said.

The rap sheet was “not significant,” according to Esparza, but there was a “pattern beginning to form.”

Heresay testimony is permitted in inquests and Esparza said an aunt of Perez told police that “when he drank, he would lose his temper,” and that he expected to die by age 25 at the hands of a police officer.

Other family members, speaking outside of court, said the aunt had misinterpreted a conversation she overhead Perez had with a woman.

The jury still unanimously decided in about 20 minutes that Perez died “at the hand of another person, other than by accident.” The other options were natural causes, suicide or accident.

Family and friends of Perez wept and rejoiced after the verdict. Several wore white T-shirts with Perez’s picture on front and the words “Justice for Pedie” on the back.

Attorney John Burris (left) spoke to Perez’s family and friends outside of court on Dec. 10.

“What else could they have come back with,” said Perez’s father, Rick Perez. He said he was bothered by “one-sided” testimony about his son. “He was never violent. He was happy-go-lucky.”

His son, the only child of he and his wife, had worked for him in the family’s paper recycling business in Richmond.

The shooting of Perez comes at a time when national attention is on police conduct in the killing of unarmed men by officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York.

But even in the San Francisco Bay Area, where demonstrations have become a nightly disturbance in Berkeley and Oakland, Perez’s case is below the radar.

“It’s a unique time in our country,” said John Burris, an attorney for Perez’s family. He said he plans to file a federal wrongful death lawsuit. “The object is to turn that into something positive.”

Richmond Police Chief Chris Magnus has been empathetic to complaints about police shootings. At a protest on Dec. 9 he carried a sign saying “#blacklivesmatter,” according to the Contra Costa Times.

In a statement to HuffPost, Magnus said:

“Because today’s inquest was open to the public, it was a good source of accurate, factual information and it reflected the findings of the various disciplines involved…The department continues to view this incident as a tragedy and we appreciate that the Perez family is still grieving.  We remain committed to providing as much information to the family and the public as we can legally disclose.”

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California Cop Says He Shot Unarmed Richard ‘Pedie’ Perez Grabbing For His Gun