The Great White Defendant

Via Disloyal Opposition, I came across this story about the Mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD, whose home was violently raided by the Prince George's County sheriff:

Members of a Prince George's County Sheriff's Office SWAT team shot [the mayor's] dogs Tuesday while bursting into the home of Mayor Cheye Calvo. The raid, conducted jointly with county police narcotics officers, took place after officers saw Calvo bring a package containing more than 30 pounds of marijuana from his front porch into his house. They had been tracking the package since police dogs sniffed out the presence of drugs at a shipping facility in Arizona.

The package was addressed to Trinity Tomsic, Calvo's wife. But law enforcement sources said last week that they are now investigating the possibility that the mayor and his wife were unwitting recipients and that a deliveryman might have intended to intercept the package as part of a drug smuggling scheme.

The package landed on Calvo's doorstep after police posing as deliverymen brought it to the door and Calvo's mother-in-law asked that it be left on the porch. Police recovered the unopened package from the home Tuesday night but made no arrests. Calvo has said he was interrogated for hours while handcuffed and surrounded by the bloody bodies of his dogs.

Check out the demographic profiles of Berwyn Heights under its link above, and compare them to those of Prince George's County. Then come back and try to explain to me that this really ISN'T a case of Black Democrats trying to use law enforcement to harrass White Republicans for political gain. Just try!

UPDATE: Perhaps I should explain myself further.

The phrase "Great White Defendant" entered the public lexicon with Tom Wolfe's 1988 (or so) novel Bonfire of the Vanities, and describes the enthusiasm with which public officials, who normally spend their days putting blacks in jail, greet the opportunity to prosecute a white person. The phenomenon explains the suspension of critical thinking that accompanies incidents like, for instance, the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax.

A similiar suspension of critical thinking afflicted the public officials of Prince George's County. Politically beholden to their black Democrat constituency, they jumped at the opportunity to pursue a white Republican for drug law violations. At some point, someone should have said, "You know, this guy doesn't exactly fit the profile. Maybe we should just ask him about it, or pursue an investigation back toward the source, or something other than sending in the SWAT team to kill his dogs!" But the political opportunity was too tempting.