I want to acquaint you with a scam that we should all be outraged by. It consists of a cadre of aggressive, usually Black lawyers who call themselves “civil rights attorneys” but who in reality ride a gravy train of persecuting police that has made them very rich men.
The game generally goes like this: a Black guy is injured or killed by cops while resisting arrest. The cops are immediately condemned in the public media (of course), but their employing police departments, after careful internal investigation, determine they were well within their rights. The local District Attorney similarly refuses to indict them, because the case would be so flimsy. The criminal’s family then turns to one of these “civil rights attorneys” and files a civil lawsuit against the cops, or the police department, or the city, or all three.
This being the Bay Area, where there’s so much animosity toward the police, city officials understand that a jury will almost certainly find the cops guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence they’re not. So the city decides to settle the case with the victim’s family. A cash settlement is agreed to, often in the millions if not tens of millions of dollars. Everybody knows this game is rigged, but there’s nothing anyone can or will do about it, so it goes on, year after year. And the plaintiff’s attorneys make out like bandits.
You all know the names of the most famous of these ambulance chasers so I don’t have to list them. But here’s a name you may not be familiar with: Adante Pointer. He achieved fame of a sort when he represented Oscar Grant’s family (together with John Burris) in their lawsuit against Johannes Mehserle, the BART cop who accidentally shot Grant after Grant was reportedly involved in a fight onboard a BART train. Grant tried to avoid being detained by the police at Fruitvale Station. When he struggled against the cops, Mehserle accidentally pulled his service revolver instead of his taser, and Grant died of the resulting wound.
Pointer has done very well in his career. He won a $21 million verdict against the Fremont Police Department. He won a $7 million settlement with Alameda County. He won $10.7 million against the City of Vallejo in yet another police lawsuit. He won $12 million in a suit against the City of Oakland and also a separate $6 million in another case. He won a $6 million settlement against San Jose. The list goes on and on: $5 million from San Joaquin County. $5.2 million from Sacramento. Another $5 million from Alameda County. $4.9 million from Contra Costa County. $4.5 million from San Mateo County. $3.9 million from San Leandro. $3.25 million from San Francisco. $3.25 million from Stockton. $2.9 million from City College of San Francisco. I could continue to list these cases but I’m running out of space. We can’t know exactly how much money Pointer personally made on these cases, but clearly it’s a lot.
One case in which Pointer is currently involved concerns the fatal shooting earlier this year in Sunnyvale of a young man who threatened cops while brandishing a 7-inch knife. The cops repeatedly warned the 19-year old to “Stop right now! I’m going to shoot you if you don’t stop! Stop right there!” But the knife-wielding man refused to comply and was shot and killed. The Santa Clara District Attorney’s office declined to file charges against the cops, for obvious reasons. But Pointer seems likely to file a civil lawsuit against the cops anyway. His argument: The young man “was in a mental health crisis, Okay? You're just not supposed to die, when you're in one and you're looking for help."
So much wrong here. For one, even assuming the young man was “in a mental health crisis,” what does that mean? How the hell were the cops supposed to know? All they knew is that someone hostile is approaching them with a knife. The slain man certainly didn’t look like he was “looking for help,” he looked like he wanted to stab a cop to death. Cops have the right to defend themselves. In the heat of a situation like that, they can’t possibly be expected to determine that the threat to their lives is in a mental health crisis. Yet this is precisely what Adante Pointer will argue, and he’ll probably collect another multi-million dollar settlement.
These scams are really outrageous. We need laws limiting the extent to which ambulance-chasing lawyers can file these nuisance lawsuits. If someone is menacing a police officer with a knife, the officer is 100% entitled to defend himself by shooting after repeated warnings. It’s absurd and wrong for officers to be sued under such circumstances. We shouldn’t tolerate such nonsense.
Incidentally, Pointer used to work for Barbara Lee, when she was in Congress. This provides another example of how anti-police ideology and pro-criminal inclinations have infected Oakland for decades. It’s why Lee is utterly unqualified to be our next Mayor. She’s cultivated a pro-crime, anti-law enforcement culture her entire political career, based on her racist Black Panther biases. Barbara Lee literally believes cops are racist pigs. She hasn’t intellectually matured in fifty years. It’s outrageous how the labor unions are doubling down on supporting her. There’s another scam we need to investigate: the role of labor unions in destroying Oakland.
Steve Heimoff