Tag: #Police

  • Short Story Review: “A Shooting in Rathreedane” by Colin Barrett

    (The short story, “A Shooting in Rathreedane: by Colin Barrett appeared in the December 13th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    This was a good, old school, short story. “A Shooting in Rathreedane” by Colin Barrett even starts off with a good title. A shooting is dramatic; what happens?

    Not making lite of the story, but to sum up – The local police are called when a shooting happens on a remote farm in the Irish countryside. The police and an ambulance arrive at the farm, and then there is the fall out of all of these actions.

    Yet, what really happens is this story is seeing characters unfold. Our protagonist is Sargent Jackie Noonan, a forty-five-year-old police woman, and I liked how Barrett kept dropping these little nuggets of her personality as the story developed. The way she drank her coffee, took notes, talked to other officers. And though the story clearly was meant to stick with her, the other characters who came along were all given depth, and actions that fit accordingly to their characters. I also appreciated that the solving of the shooting wasn’t the point of this story. That the shooting was the starting off point to watch how these characters interacted and dealt with the situation. The story also did a very good job of avoiding cliché traps, that I think lesser writers would have fallen for. The caveat to that statement was I found the run in with the local teenagers predictable, but that is a minor critique.

    And when I said old school before, this story reminded me of the short fiction that was assigned to read in high school, like in a Sherwood Anderson ilk. Not that Anderson ever wrote like this, and I can also say that Anderson is the wrong author to compare Barrett to. (Go with me on this…) It’s the feeling that both authors created characters in rural places that were compelling, and you wanted to know what they are going to do tomorrow because you felt you knew them. As “A Shooting in Rathreedane” concluded, I wanted to know, what is tomorrow going to be like for Sgt. Noonan?

  • When I Heard the Verdict

    Yesterday, I took the kid to the park, which is a very normal thing for us to do. We were there for about a half hour when I got the news alert on my phone that the jury would return their verdict in the Chauvin trial in an hour. Well, I just stopped what I was doing, which was keeping an eye on the kid and writing in my journal, and started the watching the clock till 4:30. I kept scrolling through Twitter, which wasn’t the best idea, but I was sure that would be the place where I would get the news the fastest. I say that it wasn’t the best idea because every tenth post or so, there would be a really awfully racist comment about George Floyd. Then, after 5pm, the first tweet came through;

    Guilty

    Or my favorite;

    Guilty Guilty Guilty All Counts

    Nothing could be more simple or powerful to express exactly what the verdict meant.

    I did feel a huge release of the anxiety from the trial. We all know the history of this country, and we all know that justice and accountability haven’t always been present when the police are on trial. I really wanted to believe that we’d get it right this time, and I was nervous that we’d just repeat past mistakes.

    But we didn’t. And that is a step forward.

    And as me and the kid walked back from the park, the new reality started to sink in; we’re not done, this isn’t over. There is still much work ahead. We still need to march. We still need to demand reform and accountability from the police, but also the DA offices, and our elected officials. Reform isn’t easy, and it takes time, but that arc just bent a little closer to justice.