Afroman

Why do I have this craving for lemon pound cake?

I’ve never followed Court TV type trials. I just find trials to generally be dull as dirt. While there may occasionally be something interesting happen there’s an awful lot of listening to minutia.

But, I think that I’ve watched most of the Afroman trial.

With publicity like this, who could resist:

If you missed it, here’s the story in a nutshell:

Acting on what should have been an obviously bad tip, police obtained a search warrant for Afroman’s house. They executed the warrant while he was away from home, breaking down his gate and door in the process. They also disconnected his security camera system, but importantly did not seize that system.

Additionally, and interestingly, the police seized all of the money found in Afroman’s home. Officers counted it, then sealed it in evidence bags with the dollar amount written on the bags. When the money was later returned to him, it was counted out at the police station, but there were less dollars than the amount marked on the evidence bags.

Much of this was caught on his security cameras (prior to them being disconnected) and on the body cameras the police officers were wearing.

Nothing of consequence was found in the search, and as a result Afroman was not charged for any crime.

Following the fruitless search, Afroman asked the government to pay to fix his gate and door. A request that the government denied. He also requested that the government return the full amount of money seized, another request that the government denied, claiming that the officers who seized it must have simply miscounted.

I presume angry, and of course facing a financial loss for no reason, Afroman decided to make music videos expressing his contempt for the raid and making fun of the police officers who carried it out.

Most of the police officers who were involved with the raid, and mercilessly mocked in Afroman’s videos, sued him for more than three million dollars, claiming that he had defamed them and that his defamation dramatically harmed their lives.

The officers lost.

The officers didn’t get a judgement, nor Afroman’s money, and due to the Streisand Effect the videos mocking the officers became even more popular.

Here’s the thing…

Afroman suffered real harm. His gate was broken. The doorway to his home was completely destroyed. His security system was disconnected but not taken for evidence. Some hundreds of his dollars evidently disappeared.

For all of those things, he reasonably expected compensation.

But received none.

So, he made music videos viciously mocking the police officers who inflicted this harm upon him. Undoubtedly they in turn suffered reputational harm because of these videos.

By suing Afroman though, the officers badly misunderstood exactly who was the cause of their reputational harm. The bad actor here wasn’t Afroman.

The actual bad actors were:

-The confidential informant who told an obviously untrue, and ever changing story.

-The specific police officer who typed up a search warrant request that omitted all of the problems with the confidential informant’s story.

-The judge who signed the warrant without any apparent questioning of its veracity.

-The Ohio Legislature that chooses to leave a statute on the books which allows local governments to refuse to pay for damages caused in botched police raids.

-The county government that took advantage of that statute and refused to pay for the damage it caused to Afroman’s property and that refused to compensate Afroman for his missing, yet officially accounted for, money.

All of the police officers involved, who have had videos made about them, other than the one officer who wrote an obviously bad search warrant application were innocent of wrongdoing. They were just doing their jobs, and they suffered because of it. It is understandable why they would seek to hold someone accountable for what happened over the course of this situation.

But they misdirected their ire. Rightly they should be upset with their colleague who got a bogus warrant, the judge who signed it, and the government that refused to make things right. Not at Afroman.

The jury got it right.