Part Six: What Came After
The investigation into the incident on Carver Boulevard moved with a speed that reflected the specific combination of circumstances involved: the seniority of the person detained, the volume of recorded footage from multiple sources, the presence of a district attorney’s office representative who had documented the sequence of events from an independent position, and the straightforward legal analysis of what had occurred.
I want to be careful here about what I say and what I don’t say.
I am a judge. I am not the investigator or the prosecutor of events involving myself. I provided my statement, fully and completely, to the investigators. I provided it with the same specificity and care I would bring to any documentation of legally significant events, because that is what the situation required, and because I understood — had always understood, but understood with a particular sharpness now — that the difference between accountability and its absence was often the quality of the documentation.
Thomas’s recording was part of the documentation. So was the footage from three phones on the street, two business security cameras, and the dashcam from Reynolds’s cruiser.
I have been asked, since then, whether I felt vindicated by what the footage showed.
Vindication is not quite the right word for what I felt.
I felt the specific, complicated emotion of someone who has been through an experience that confirmed something they had spent their career working on — the confirmation was real, but there was nothing triumphant about it, because the thing being confirmed was that a problem was real, and the reality of the problem was not a victory. It was a problem.
The appropriate response to confirming that a problem is real is to address the problem.
That is what I tried to do.
