In South Carolina, of all places, white cops don’t get away with gunning down black people. There, for the third time this year, a grand jury has charged another white cop for shooting an unarmed black man.
The somewhat complicated procedural history of this case goes like this: The cop had previously been indicted by a grand jury in 2013 for “misconduct in office,” specified as using deadly force when it wasn’t necessary. The indictment caused consternation in the town’s black community, which felt the cop should have been indicted for murder. This week, the prosecutor asked a grand jury to upgrade the charges to murder after a judge rejected the cop’s “stand your ground” defense claim. South Carolina has such a law, but it’s limited to when you’re on your own property.
The U.S. Department of Justice separately investigated the case, but declined to file federal civil rights charges against the cop.
Richard Combs, who had previously served as a county sheriff’s deputy and then a cop with another small-town police department, was appointed “chief” of a 1-man police department, and had just completed state police chief training a few days earlier. The victim, Bernard Bailey, 54, was a retired state correctional officer. After the shooting, the town put Combs on administrative leave, then fired him six months later; and the town later paid a $400,000 wrongful death settlement to Bailey’s family.
Here’s what happened. Bailey went to the town hall to complain about a traffic ticket issued to his daughter for a broken taillight on her car. Bailey apparently had an outstanding warrant for “obstruction.” When Combs attempted to arrest Bailey on that warrant, Bailey walked out and got in his car. Combs followed and reached in to turn off the car’s ignition. Combs claims he then became “entangled” in the car’s steering wheel, and was trapped between the driver’s door and a wall as Bailey put the car in gear. At that point, Combs shot Bailey, which Combs asserts was self-defense. But, following a state investigation, prosecutors sought an indictment, saying Combs escalated the confrontation when he should have called for backup or let Bailey go and made plans to arrest him later. Obviously, prosecutors are second-guessing Combs’ exercise of judgment in an evolving situation, and you’ve got to wonder how many cops would let a person go because he’s resisting arrest.
The shooting angered the black community, and the case was racially charged from the beginning. But Combs, who had just started working there, had no history of conflict with the town’s black residents, and media reports of the incident do not indicate there was a racial factor in the shooting — it was simply a verbal confrontation between two men that turned physical when the cop tried to detain the other man who was trying to leave.
At least two key differences between this case and the Ferguson and New York City cases stand out. First, this incident happened in a small town, in a place where everyone knows everyone else, whereas the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases involve big-city settings and urban police departments. Second, it happened in, ironically, a southern state that consistently deals harshly with white cops who shoot black people. As ABC News notes, this is the third case in South Carolina this year where a white cop has been criminally charged for shooting an unarmed black man.
A noteworthy similarity between this case and the Ferguson and New York City cases is that all three of these cases were put to grand juries; in two cases, the grand jury didn’t indict, but in this case the grand jury indicted twice. Which raises fascinating questions, especially as this case appears to be the most arguably justified of all three shootings. Does it therefore depend on the jurisdiction, i.e., are some states more lenient with cops than others? Or is it simply a matter of cop-friendly prosecutors in the Brown and Garner cases sabotaging the grand jury process?
I’m strongly inclined to the latter view. While South Carolina authorities do seem to take a different approach to white cops shooting black citizens, perhaps out of sensitivity to their state’s racist past, what marks the Brown and Garner cases is those prosecutors allowed the cops to defend themselves in front of the grand jury. This is a strange procedure, almost never seen, because the function of a grand jury is not to determine guilt or innocence, but to determine whether sufficient probable cause exists to require the accused to stand trial. You do that by presenting the prosecution’s case, not the defense case.
Prosecutors don’t normally allow the subject of a grand jury proceeding to appear and defend himself. Even if the law allows it, why would a prosecutor do that? Because he doesn’t want the grand jury to indict the defendant, that’s why. There’s no other way to rationalize it. Then why even bother to convene a grand jury? To deflect the blowback for letting an unpopular defendant go free away from the prosecutor, that’s why. It’s a cynical game.
I believe that’s what happened in the Brown and Garner cases. And most of the world believes this, too. The cop-hugging 
prosecutors in those cases have fooled no one except themselves.