It has been just over four and a half years since police in Aurora, Colorado, violently detained Elijah McClain, who had committed no crime, after a teenage 911 caller reported he "look[ed] sketchy" as he walked home from a convenience store in August 2019. The encounter, which originally flew under the radar, epitomized the sort of hyperactive, abusive policing that people of varying political persuasions could admit was excessive as the U.S. engaged in a national debate about the broader subject in 2020. And the cursory internal investigation—if you can call it that—into McClain's death embodied the government's not-so-subtle tendency to insulate itself from transparency and accountability at the expense of the people who pay their salaries.
But all these years later, accountability is finally coming. And the results are, to put it mildly, a bit weird, raising potentially uncomfortable questions about what justice should look like in similar cases of abuse.
