Michael Johnson should open up ... or shut up

Phoenix City Councilman Michael Johnson has dropped his case against the police officer he claimed used unnecessary force and violated his civil rights in March, the Republic is reporting this a.m.

But that’s not how the paper is reporting it:

Authorities dropped a criminal investigation into Phoenix City Councilman Michael Johnson and the Phoenix police officer accused of violating the councilman’s civil rights after the two “resolved the matter and are committed to moving forward.”

Neither will be charged with a crime, U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke said in a statement released Friday. A separate federal probe into potential civil-rights abuses also has been closed, Burke added.

This doesn’t make sense. Johnson made an incendiary charge against a police officer.

If the police officer did what he said he did, the councilman, and the city, should pursue the charges.

If he didn’t, Johnson needs to apologize.

And in either case he should face public questions about what happened that night. Until now, he’s just made his big charges but refused to talk further.

Johnson, who’s black, says he woke up to sirens and a fire at a neighbor’s house down the street.

He says he got permission from a fire department person of some sort to approach. He says that after that he got as far as a cop named Brian Authement, who wouldn’t let him pass, and that he ended up handcuffed on the ground.

He charged the cop with violating his civil rights; the cop got bounced down to desk duty and a federal civil rights investigation was opened.

Of course there’s a problem with how police interact with blacks and Hispanics, particularly in a place as backward as Arizona.

And of course there are some questions worth raising when a professional man gets out of bed to help his neighbors at a fire and ends up on the ground handcuffed.

But the Michael Johnson story has never smelled right.

There are two scenarios here.

In one, Johnson politely asks a cop a question—and the cop whirls on him and throws him to the ground and handcuffs him.

For absolutely no reason.

In an alternate scenario, a pompous yuppie asks the cop to get through amid a chaotic fire scene in which property and live were in danger.

The yuppie is refused, for the obvious reasons.

He reiterates his case, is refused again, and then acts like such a dick—including, in this case, apparently, physically hitting the cop in some way—that that the cop finally gets fed up with him and handcuffs his ass.

Which seems more likely?

The scandalous thing about this incident at this point is that Johnson has never faced hard questions about his actions that night.

When asked his response to the cop’s statement that he had “smacked” the officer … Johnson declined to comment.

Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but any answer to that question that doesn’t begin with the word “no” raises big questions.

Some other questions Johnson should answer:

Why didn’t he just leave when the cop did not give him access in the first place?

In what universe do cops let passers-by into emergency scenes anyway?

Once refused access, wasn’t he by definition interfering with an officer at an emergency scene by continuing to pester him?

Since he was obviously in the wrong on about four levels, isn’t it a little cheap to toss race into the equation?

Doesn’t it muddy the waters for the times cops do harass blacks or Hispanics?

Now Johnson’s besmirched the cop’s reputation—and heightened race relations in the city—and yet has never had to explain himself.

After he made his charges, others have come forward and said they’ve been treated badly by Phoenix cops. All of these charges should of course be investigated.

But in this case the civil rights aspect doesn’t really wash. The cop wasn’t down in a minority neighborhood cruising around and looking for innocent people to harass.

He was at the scene of an emergency doing his job, in this case protecting the lives and property of minority members of the community.

As for Johnson, he had no business being there in any case.

He says he knew the people in the house that was on fire.

All the more reason for him to stay out of the emergency personnel’s way.

Do you think the police sergeant on the scene said,

“Authement, your job is to keep people back and away from the fire.

“Unless, that is, there’s a barefoot chucklehead in his pajamas who wants to run in there and get in the fire department’s way. Go ahead and let him in.”

But the most important thing Michael Johnson needs to do is respond to questions about his actions that night.

Until we hear those facts from him, this incident will look from the outside like a guy whose own reckless actions got him into trouble—and to get out of it resorted to yelling race.