The murder trial against Officer Amber Guyger is scheduled to begin on Monday, September 23 and law enforcement is prepping and training on how to manage crowd control in case of a possible riot.
Since Guygur killed Botham Jean, 26, on September 6, 2018, there has been numerous protests calling for the officer to be jailed.
Request to Delay Trial and Possible Riots
With the motion to change the venue denied, top ranking officers within the Dallas Police Department advised last week that no officers will be given any additional time off until the trial ends.
According to Philly Trib:
““Detectives were also told to have their uniforms, gas masks, helmets and other gear ready,” WFAA reported, citing “separate memos” from department higher-ups.”
As officers are preparing for a possible acquittal, Sgt. Mike Mata, the head of the Dallas Police Association, is calling for the trial to be delayed 60 to 90 days based on safety concerns.
According to CBS:
“We’re going to have this trial during period of time that we have 1 million people come visit the city within a calendar month,” said Sgt. Mata. “Within those two weeks we will have 1 million people come in and out of that fair and I think it’s just very, very poor leadership. I do believe that the smart thing would’ve been to just delay this trial 60 days, 90 days. It’s unheard of that a trial any trial much less a trial of this magnitude didn’t have one delay.”
Lee Merritt, the family attorney for the Jean family fired back on Facebook:
“In effect the DPA – Dallas Police Association has concluded that the parents of Botham Shem Jean should be required to wait a few more months while their child’s killer roams free– so that corndog festivities and deep fried butter sales aren’t adversely impacted. The very notion is profane. Such a call is absurd.”
As we have seen in the past with other high profile cases of officers killing unarmed black men, the cities tend to turn a deaf ear.
“I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years,” as the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said.
But King also believed in being peaceful.
One of the best ways to riot while being being peaceful is with using your money, or not using it. If the city does not want to hear the cries of its citizens, it will hear the cries from the pockets of the businesses within its city.
Many major and Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in Dallas.
AT&T, Southwest Airlines, Chili’s, Dean Foods, Dave & Buster’s, GE Capital, Greyhound Bus Lines, Match.com, and MoneyGram are all based in the Dallas area.
If a physical riot happens and property damage is done, the major companies will be covered by insurance. As we seen in Ferguson, when Officer Darren Wilson killed Mike Brown, many mom and pop stores could not recover after the riots.
Dallas has suffered enough with the tragedy of losing Jean, do not give police the thought that it is fine to take another life.
What Happened on September 6, 2018
After Guyger finished up a 12-hour shift she went home to her Southside Flats apartment but she did not enter her own apartment.
Guyger claims that she thought she was entering her apartment when she entered Jeans’ apartment who was one floor above hers, according to PINAC News.
Neighbors reported that hey heard someone banging on a door and demanding to be let in, but Guyger claims that the front door was slightly ajar, which she claims made her believe there was a burglar inside the apartment.
Once she entered, she saw Jean and fired her gun at him twice.
Guyger’s lawyer, Robert L. Rogers, believes she was fully in her right to shoot and kill Jean as she thought he was an intruder.
“We cannot have this culture where we shoot first and ask questions later,” Daryl Washington, one of the lawyers for Jean’s family said.
One of the neighbors recorded the apartment from the outside after hearing the shots.
After one day of the department investigating the shooting as an officer involved shooting, an arrest warrant was created for Guyger and the investigation turned into a murder investigation.
The 911 Call
In April, in defiance of a judicial gag order, the 911 call was eventually leaked to the media. The phone call showed that Guyger was more concerned about her job than the well being of Jean. According to the 911 transcript, Guyger never mentioned that she believed him to be a burglar.
Texas District Judge Tammy Kemp called a hearing to figure out how the call was released to the media but both sides denied involvement.
At the time of writing, the court case against Guyger is still set for September 23.
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