Tuesday, June 18, 2024

June 18, 2024: Simpson Trial Figures: Mark Fuhrman

[On June 17th, 1994, O.J. Simpson was arrested by the LAPD. The subsequent trial featured a number of individuals whose stories have a great deal to tell us about America, then, now, and overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Simpson trial figures. Leading up to a special weekend post from one of my favorite young AmericanStudiers!]

On a longstanding context for the trial’s most infamous figure, what he frustratingly added, and where it’s gone since.

As I highlighted at the end of yesterday’s post, the Simpson trial can’t be separated from a very recent example of LAPD racism and brutality, the Rodney King beating. Back in a 2019 post I linked the Rodney King story to a pair of much earlier and even more sweeping LAPD horrors, and I’d ask you to check out that post and then come on back for some further Simpson trial thoughts.

Welcome back! That longstanding, if not indeed foundational, intersection of the LAPD with stories of institutional racism and police brutality offers a crucial context for a story that came to dominate much of the Simpson trial: that lead detective Mark Fuhrman was an inveterate racist who had brought that perspective into every part of his job, and thus (the defense argued) could conceivably have framed Simpson for the murders. The defense could make that argument in large part because of a striking and shocking layer to this story: that there existed hours of recordings of Fuhrman spewing his racism and hate, drawn from a series of conversations (beginning in 1985 and all the way up to 1994) with screenwriter Laura McKinny who was working on a script about police. Not unlike what I said in yesterday’s post about the cable news coverage angle of the arrest and trial, this multimedia evidence for LAPD racism and corruption represented a significant evolution of prior histories, and unquestionably changed the course of the trial and history as a result.

As you might expect, Mark Fuhrman didn’t keep his job after those recordings were made public—even the LAPD apparently has its limits when it comes to racist cops (or perhaps to convicted perjurers, since Fuhrman pleaded no contest to perjury charges stemming from the trial). In the decades since he has become a prominent media commentator on all things law enforcement and the justice system, writing books, hosting his own short-lived daytime talk radio show, and, most tellingly I would argue, as a Fox News pundit (WARNING: that’s a direct link to a short video from Fox News). I call that last job most telling because over the three decades since the Simpson trial, police brutality and even racism have gone from clearly agreed-upon flaws of the system to, for a significant percentage of Americans it seems, necessary features of that system. To hear Mark Motherfucking Fuhrman call teenager Mike Brown “the aggressor” in the 2014 police shooting that led to Brown’s death is not just to find one’s self through the looking glass, but to get a particularly clear sense of how these conversations and issues have changed over the last three decades.

Next figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Simpson trial figures or stories you’d highlight?

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