Those demands sound familiar now, since they and new formal organizing grew directly out of the lingering fallout from Grant’s death. They also demanded effective, community-led police oversight committees access to reliable information about the frequency of officer-involved shootings more effective de-escalation training for officers and, eventually, an abolition of policing as an institution altogether. Grant’s family, their allies, and activists demanded that Mehserle be charged criminally in Grant’s death, and he was eventually, in November 2010, convicted of involuntary manslaughter, serving 11 months in jail. In Oakland, that anger fueled months of protests, rallies, and sometimes violent clashes with police in the city’s downtown. Suddenly, you could quickly gather similarly outraged viewers and point them toward a way to express that anger. While technology had long been a tool for protest, dating back to the invention of the printing press, never before had there been a way to so quickly and efficiently counter the official narrative of police-involved shootings. When we saw Grant’s death, we couldn’t know how many more videos we’d be forced to see, how many would be burned into our psyches. What was different was the way the organizing happened, the way our indignation was sparked. The violence wasn’t new. Neither was the organizing that followed. You could feel the shock of a train filled with passengers looking on, the ohh! after the gun went off. You could not only see what happened, but hear the gunshot echo through the station, the chaotic yelling and chatter that proceeded it. BART spokespeople worried aloud about public sentiment ruining its investigation, while witness videos proved much too compelling to brush the horrific incident under the rug. But I also know the activism it sparked became the template of what was to come over the following decade: People uploaded video of the shooting to social media, or gave it to local news. And before you clamor, but Grant’s death was more than a decade ago!-I know. That moment was a turning point that set the stage for the ensuing decade, the one we can now fucking finally say goodbye to. You could not only see what happened, but hear the gunshot echo through the station. Grant died seven hours later at a nearby hospital. But he took out his gun instead, and shot one bullet into Grant’s back. He’d later argue in court that he meant to grab his taser. At one point, officer Johannes Mehserle throws Grant onto his stomach and holds his hands behind his back. ![]() Then he stands up to make his point further, which turns out to be a fatal mistake, as the officers immediately try to subdue him. You probably know what happened next, which was captured by dozens of passengers’ smartphones: Grant, seemingly agitated at having been detained, points to something or someone off in the distance, as if to suggest that it’s proof of his innocence. There had reportedly been a fight earlier, and a group of officers had pulled Grant and his group of friends-all of them men of color-off the train to question them. ![]() In the early morning hours of January 1, 2009, a 22-year-old black man named Oscar Grant sat on the floor of Oakland’s Fruitvale BART station in front of two Bay Area Rapid Transit officers. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
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