The ease of their voices shocked me: a white district attorney and a white police officer shooting the breeze, discussing how they could have killed a black arrestee whose case was causing them trouble.
It was January 2010. Ojore Lutalo, a Black Liberation activist who had formerly spent nearly three decades in prison, was traveling on an Amtrak train back to his home in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The woman sitting in front of Lutalo, who was eavesdropping on his conversation, reported hearing alarming remarks to train staff. When the train pulled into La Junta, Colorado, Lutalo was arrested at gunpoint. He spent three days in jail. Meanwhile, town officials had realized they could not substantiate Lutalo’s purported terrorist threats, prompting the embarrassing question of whether charges would even be filed. Assistant District Attorney Barta phoned arresting Officer Mobley to confer about how to salvage the investigation and secure an indictment. (Lutalo was never charged.)
If the circumstances of Lutalo’s arrest were different—if he didn’t have a high profile or access to legal support—we’d probably never know about this incident. The recordings were disclosed during discovery after Lutalo filed suit against the city for violating his constitutional rights by making false claims to justify his arrest. The suit was ultimately settled out of court.
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“How many people have heard on tape something like this from an assistant district attorney? It’s rare, I’ve never heard it before. We’re used to looking at the police and racial profiling, but this is the kind of thing that goes on every single day, at every single level of the justice system," she adds. "These are not shocking dialogues, these are dialogues that happen with great regularity… It’s a validation of things that me and people like me, and people [on the] inside, have been saying always.”
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Publishing these recordings carries the risk of having their importance misconstrued, of giving credence to the suggestion that Barta and Mobley are simply bad apples and that what happened to Lutalo is extraordinary or unusual. That's why we should heed Lutalo’s words:
"That tape? People need to hear what’s been said. This is how they think, this is how they operate, behind closed doors. Again, if it could happen to me, it could happen to you. You don’t need to do anything. They kept me in isolation for 22 years just for entertaining thoughts they didn’t approve of. And they put that in writing.”
'You Should Have Shot the Son of a Bitch': Listen to Police Joke About Murdering a Black Man | Alternet
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