It's Time Cops Faced the Justice They Swear to Uphold

An officer fired into a car carrying two women and a one-year-old over a shoplifting call. Now Kohen Wiley will never see his second birthday.

One years old, dead in a Walmart parking lot, because a cop opened fire over diapers.

On Sunday afternoon, June 14, a police officer in Senatobia, Mississippi fired into a silver sedan in a Walmart parking lot. Two grown women and a one-year-old were inside. The baby was Kohen Kartier Wiley, and in the photo his family released he is grinning that gummy, first-teeth grin, in a little shirt with a cartoon race car on it. A bullet went through the windshield. Kohen died at the hospital. The woman next to him caught rounds too and is in critical condition, fighting for her life.

Police came to that lot on a shoplifting call. A witness told WREG the women were carrying diapers.

Diapers.

Hold that picture, because the people paid to make it disappear will spend months trying to blur it. A baby is dead because somebody allegedly walked out of a Walmart with a pack of Pampers, and a man with a badge answered that with gunfire into a car with an infant in the back seat.

A Fleeing Car Is Going Away From You

The official story already smells.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation took the case, which happens the moment a department wants outside cover.

The MBI says officers reached the Walmart around 2:05 PM. They say two adults and a child ran for a car. They say the driver steered toward an officer and nearly hit him. They say the officer fired as the car pulled away.

You have read that paragraph before. The car was a weapon. The officer feared for his life. It is boilerplate, kept loaded for occasions exactly like this, and Mississippi made sure it hit the record first, in writing, before anyone had a quiet minute to think.

Kohen’s family calls it a lie. His great-grandmother, Carolyn Stokes, told reporters Senatobia police get away with too much and that it is always in the news. His grandfather, Carlos Haynes, said somebody has to answer for this. These are not out-of-town activists. They are the people who were going to watch this boy grow up.

And the story has a hole you could drive that sedan through. A fleeing car is going away from you. Firing into the back of it protects no one. The MBI admits officers watched a child get into that vehicle. They saw the kid. Somebody fired anyway, through the windshield, through the passenger window, through the only life Kohen Wiley was ever going to get.

He was one. He had a race car on his shirt. He is dead over diapers, and I am so far past polite I can barely see the keyboard.

The Officer Gets a Vacation, You Get a Press Release

Here is my prediction, and I would bet my last dollar on it, except a cop already took most of those (we will get there).

Nobody goes to prison. Not soon, probably not ever. The officer goes on administrative leave, which is the official term for a paid vacation you are not allowed to call a paid vacation. He draws a taxpayer check at home while the MBI runs out the clock on your attention. The department promises full transparency, the way a store promises to honor a coupon it already means to reject. A prosecutor skips the grand jury, or walks one to a polite no, and a man in a suit calls the shooting consistent with policy.

Consistent with policy. That phrase is a confession. It means the policy allows this. It files a dead one-year-old under acceptable outcome of a diaper call. If that is the policy, the policy is the crime.

In a few months that officer is back at the precinct, telling the story at the break room table. After twenty years of watching this, what still turns my stomach is that some of the men at that table will laugh.

I know they laugh. I have heard it.

I Have Met These Men

Everything I am about to tell you happened to me.

I work alone, with no corporate paycheck over me and no institution at my back. I run the whole operation out of a motel room. I dig where powerful people would rather I quit. It has put me in the hospital and it has put me in a cell.

Start with the worst of it. A young runaway turned up dead. She was naked when they found her. The report said her body was “dripping with semen.” She had been kidnapped and raped before someone killed her. The county coroner called it death by exposure.

Death by exposure. As if the weather had stripped her and raped her and killed her and gone home.

The land where she was found was being scouted for a four hundred million dollar recycling plant. Nobody chasing that deal wanted the site tied to a dead girl. So the file got cleaned up and exposure was the clean version. The deal fell apart anyway. The coroner’s lie outlived it.

I was the reporter asking who killed her. I got my answer three hundred yards from where she was found. Somebody beat me bloody and walked off with my notes. She went into a pauper’s grave. Her killers never spent a night in a cell. Neither did the cops who helped bury her.

That was the dramatic one. The next one is dumber and it tells you more.

A beat cop saw me carrying a backpack and decided that made me a thief. The backpack was his whole case. He took four thousand dollars in cash off me on the sidewalk and kept walking. That was the hobojournalist newsvan fund, built from skipped meals and reader donations. He took all of it in one stop. I have been trying to sue it back ever since and I have gotten nowhere. Every official I turn to is part of the same corrupt apparatus that shields him.

(His partner is worth a line too. He got arrested for sleeping with an informant who was locked in the county jail. She was behind bars and he had the keys. So he nailed her right there in the jail. He had a wife and kids who knew nothing about it. He is a defendant now, which in this business counts as justice.)

None of these made the national news. The national news needs a camera rolling and a hashtag behind it. The real rot never gets either. It is the steady hum of men who treat the badge as a hall pass. They use it on your wallet, on the woman in the cell, on the trigger.

A Badge Is Not a Hunting License

Most cops are not ‘evil’ like this, and I will say it plainly. There are good cops out there. Cops that respect the duty and the badge and the rights of the people they are sworn to protect.

My own great-grandfather worked homicide in Italy before he came to the USA, because he believed the dead were owed someone who would fight for them. Plenty of officers still carry it that way. They run at the gunfire. They would sooner eat their own sidearm than put a round into a car with a baby in it. None of this is aimed at them.

It is aimed at the growing crowd who treat the badge and the gun as a license to stand above the law they swore to defend. This is America. The people in that lot were citizens. The Constitution did not switch off at the sliding doors. A cop is not a judge. He is not a jury. He is not an executioner, and he does not get to run a kill squad with a quota. Find me the statute, in any state, where stealing diapers carries a death sentence. Now find me the one where it carries that sentence for the baby in the back seat.

Something broke, and I can tell you roughly when. Before September 11, your local cops were peace officers. The car said protect and serve and the words meant something. Then the towers fell, and federal money and surplus war gear opened up on departments that a year earlier had to beg city council for a typewriter.

Now the average mid-size department rolls with armored trucks, battlefield rifles, level four plates, drones, a helicopter, and a SWAT team that trains like infantry. Some park a mine-resistant vehicle built for Fallujah in a town of nineteen thousand people.

They took the kit of an occupying army and, somewhere in the paperwork, the attitude that comes with it. An occupying army controls a population. Every civilian is a possible enemy, and enemies who drive away get shot at.

After all those billions, is your town safer? Look out the window. The sidewalks are full of addicts nobody will treat. Men with rap sheets a mile long bond out and go knife some girl on the train home, while the jail fills with people doing real time over a dime bag or a shoplifting charge. The machine has the firepower to aim a rifle at a baby in a parking lot and nothing left to keep a predator off the platform. They spend like the Pentagon and protect like a failed state, and they want your money to keep both running.

We Ran This Country Without Cops Once

Organized police are a young invention. For most of our history there was no standing force, and the republic survived fine.

Before the 1900s, a town kept its own peace. Neighbors watched neighbors. When something went wrong, people raised the alarm and went after whoever did it, and the sheriff could swear in citizens to settle it.

Step out of line and your neighbors handled you. Step far enough out of line and you might be swinging in the town square by sundown. That is brutal, and I am not pretending otherwise. But the man with the authority knew the same rope would hold him, and that kept him honest in a way no internal affairs unit ever has.

I am not fool enough to think we tear it all down tomorrow and bring back the night watch. I am asking the one question we are forbidden to ask. Is this working? From a motel room, after twenty years of watching this thing from the inside, and from the wrong side of a cell door more than once, I see a trade. We swapped a flawed system that answered to the neighborhood for a militarized one that answers to no one. The bill came due in more crime and more dead babies.

Walk through any American city and tell me it looks like order. It looks like a dystopia, and the cops in it are too often worse than the men they chase.

God Saw the Whole Thing

I will end where I always end, because it is the only court left that I trust.

The officer may walk. The grand jury may fold. The prosecutor may shrug. The leave may stay paid. The story may fade, the way these are built to fade, until Kohen Wiley is a hashtag and then nothing. The machine is good at outlasting our outrage. It is counting on yours right now.

But there is one record no PR shop can scrub and no prosecutor can decline to file. God saw that parking lot on Sunday. He saw the trigger pulled. He saw the baby in the back seat. He will see every man laughing at that break room table. He sees all of us, which should terrify the guilty and steady the grieving in equal measure. There is a real prison, and it is nothing like the county lockup where the right lawyer or the right friend on the bench buys you out. There is no good-behavior credit, and no bribing the right politician. The door only opens from the outside, and the Warden is not taking calls.

Kohen Wiley is one year old forever now. He never got to fear the dark, or wreck a birthday cake, or roll his eyes at his mother. The men who did this will tell themselves it was justified, that they were upholding the law, that the family fucked around and found out the hard way that a man with a high school diploma, two years of criminal justice at the community college, and a service weapon is no one to fuck with. That is the judgment we hand a loaded gun and a guarantee of immunity, and a baby is in the ground for it. They will believe their own story right up until it stops counting for anything. They got away with nothing. They postponed the hearing, and the Judge in that courtroom does not take administrative leave.

His family gathers at Senatobia City Hall today to demand the justice this world owes him. Show up if you can. Make noise. Make him impossible to forget. And remember that the noise we make down here is only the echo of a louder verdict already being entered upstairs.

Justice for Kohen Wiley. The real kind. The kind that does not expire.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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The Wise Wolf runs on reader subscriptions and nothing else, which is a dignified way of saying I am writing this from a motel where the air conditioner is broken and the room holds steady at the temperature of a parked car. I had a real shot at a comfortable life once and walked away from it to go yell about dead kids and crooked cops for a living, a move any financial planner would gently file under “questionable.” Lily, my partner on this beat, finally has her journalism degree and is spending the summer at a camp coaching teenagers who want to do this for a living, God help them, and she would love to retire her relationship with the city bus and get a car. I want a hobojournalist newsvan so I can report from the City Halls where this happens instead of from a desk forty miles out. None of it is free. If this reporting matters to you, a paid subscription keeps me fed, keeps Lily off the bus, and keeps a one-man newsroom asking the questions the badge would rather nobody asked.