Uh, hate to break it to you there, but if you're referring to the Tarika Wilson shooting in Lima, Ohio, by Officer Joseph Chavalia, you're leaving out some salient points (and, might I add, attempting to smear the victim with irrelevancies).
For starters, she wasn't just "shot during a drug raid". That implies that the target(s) of the raid exchanged fire with the Lima police department. What actually happened is that another Lima police officer shot and killed the two dogs that lived in the house. Chavalia mistook the shots of a fellow officer for incoming fire from a bedroom where Wilson was holding her infant son. Without stopping to identify a target, Chavalia fired blindly into the bedroom, striking both Wilson (who died) and her son, who — thank whatever deity you like — survived.
A jury concluded that the officer had a reasonable fear for his life, which is something that juries have been singularly unable to do for innocent citizens who, when their homes were unjustly invaded by militarized police officers, sought to defend themselves against people they believed to be criminal intruders. See, for example, Derrick Foster, Corey Maye, or Ryan Frederick.
Was the Tarika Wilson shooting racially motivated? Almost certainly not. Was Joseph Chavalia's acquittal a miscarriage of justice? I believe so.
If we hold police officers to a lower standard than the citizenry they are supposed to be protecting, we do nothing less than create a government-sanctioned criminal organization, one without conscience or accountability.
NB: Before you start calling me a bleeding-heart liberal or some such similar crap, I'm actually a former USAF Security Policeman. I just happen to believe that putting military hardware into the hands of police, giving them a macho name like SWAT, glamorizing their ass-kicking behavior in movies and reality television, and then expecting them to behave with restraint when they're sent out to serve non-violent drug warrants is a pretty damned stupid policy.
