Dear BART Police

Why is it that the justice system tends to work against those it was designed to protect? Or better yet, since when are a taser and a handgun so similar, that one can be mistaken for the other? These are both questions begging to be answered as we reel in the aftermath of the Oscar Grant murder trial. Grant was shot in the back during an altercation with your kind, brutal police, after being accosted for a fight on San Francisco's BART. Now, from the video, it would seem as if this incident didn't occur during the wee hours of the night. In fact, if it wasn't clearly at night, I'd be sure it was around 3 PM when kids were getting out of school. That said, wouldn't it be smarter to not engage in unwarranted police violence elsewhere? As a matter of fact, wouldn't it have been smarter to just accost the young men and make your way to the squad car, rather than play the scene out for much longer? #imjustsaying

You see, in this day and age, where everything except the cameras themselves have cameras, it's not smart to say or do anything that you don't want 500,000 Youtube hits for. Officer Mehserle seemed more like he was putting on a show than attempting an arrest. That's right... a TV show. A new episode of Police vs. N*ggers. Next week Mel Gibson might make an appearance. Jokes aside, Office Mehserle did what he did. He shot a young man in the back for a fact that we will never know. What we do know is that he was charged with involuntary manslaughter. How is that possible? Involuntary manslaughter means that that the killer acted without malicious intent, yet it's inherently impossible to uncover one's intent after the fact. Also, lack of intent isn't synonymous with lack of malice. Office Mehserle could have been intensely malicious in his act, without intending to kill Grant. Therein lies the problem with police today: for those who are supposed to be enforcing the law, too many times they're asked to be interpreters of the law and bastions of morality.

Neither of those titles should be apt when dealing with police. You guys are usually so muddled in the wrong things that when an opportunity to do right arises, you're too busy watching your colleague shoot a kid in the back. Just imagine, all of this could have been avoided had you trained Mehserle not to confuse his taser and handgun. BART Police, I'm not from the Bay Area, nor will I be, but I (along with any sentient being over 18) can tell when an act has gone too far. Officer Mehserle got off easy and you know it. Had the shots gone the other way, Lord knows Oscar Grant would be losing his life in prison rather than at the hands of a dumbfounded policeman...