Dismissing the charges against the officer who killed Eddie Irizarry also dismisses the urgent need for police accountability

You want to know how long even the whiff of justice lasts around here?

Last week came the welcome (and rare) reminder that police are not above the law — at least they’re not supposed to be — when a judge revoked the bail of Philadelphia Police Officer Mark Dial, who was accused of first-degree murder for killing Eddie Irizarry in Kensington on Aug. 14.

On Tuesday, Municipal Court Judge Wendy L. Pew dismissed all the charges against Dial, ruling that prosecutors had failed to present evidence that the officer had committed a crime when he shot Irizarry as he sat in his car.

I was struck that the judge agreed there was a lack of evidence because the evidence that the public has seen so far is damning.

The Police Department, you might remember, initially told all of us that Dial and his partner had stopped Irizarry for driving the wrong way down a one-way street, and that Irizarry had gotten out of his car and lunged at them with his knife.

In that scenario, the evidence suggested that Dial had fired his weapon (at near point-blank range) because his life was in mortal danger.

Except ... none of that was true.

Video evidence — from police body cameras and nearby home security systems — showed that Irizarry was sitting in his car, with his windows up, when Dial and his partner pulled next to Irizarry’s vehicle.

Irizarry had a knife in his hand but made no attempt to get out of his car or to threaten the officers. Dial fired six shots at Irizarry within seconds of stepping out of his police cruiser.

Another piece of evidence that seems troubling: Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw fired Dial for refusing to cooperate with the Police Department’s own investigators when they tried to piece together what happened that night.

Despite Dial’s partner testifying in court that in the moments before the shooting, he told Dial that Irizarry appeared to be holding a knife, Dial’s lawyers — who argued their client acted in self-defense — leaned hard into audio that they said sounded like his partner said there was a gun.

But there was no gun. No. Gun.

And this bears repeating as well: Irizarry was inside his car, with the windows rolled up. So the assertion that Dial and his partner were reacting to a situation in which they believed Irizarry presented an imminent threat to their safety just doesn’t add up. (District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office appealed the ruling in an attempt to refile the charges. A hearing on that request is scheduled for next month.)

Weren’t police supposed to learn something about nonlethal options in confrontations from the fatal shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. in 2020? Wallace, a mentally distressed Black man who was holding a knife, was fatally shot by police outside his West Philadelphia home, just five months after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked national outrage over police brutality. In the wake of Floyd’s death, cities across the country — including Philadelphia — pledged to review police practices and policies.

And yet here we are.

Some have said the fault lies with Krasner for charging the officer with first-degree murder. Even the detective investigating the shooting said he had recommended Dial be charged with voluntary manslaughter — not murder. It was a tragedy, many insist, not a crime.

It was both, and characterizing it as anything but — especially with video evidence — is nothing more than “Back the Blue” bellicism.

Outside the courthouse, Irizarry’s aunt Zoraida Garcia told reporters, “The officers can go out here and kill a person that’s not doing anything and get away with murder, because this is what it was.”

She’s right, and the message — loud and clear to this family, to this community, and to this city — is that police in Philadelphia are untouchable. That those post-Floyd police reckonings were a farce, a reckoning in name only.

At this point, we shouldn’t be surprised by cops in this city getting away with just about anything, from exaggerating injuries to get time off, to assaulting residents, to hanging out with Proud Boys, to murder — aided every step of the way by systems that embolden police to act with impunity.

“Today they went 1,000 steps backward, and they shattered the faith we have in the justice system,” Charito Morales of Philly Boricuas, a grassroots organization of Puerto Ricans organizing the diasporic community in Philadelphia, said Tuesday after learning of the ruling.

I agree on those 1,000 steps backward, with a lot more zeros added. But I got stuck on the word faith. Because I increasingly wonder how anyone in this city can possibly have any faith in our unapologetically broken systems.

The answer always comes from the most unexpected corners of Philly; from people who have long been neglected and mistreated by public institutions and officials, but who don’t have the luxury of tapping out or giving up.

People like Eddie Irizarry’s family, who, like so many bereaved families in Philadelphia, are forced to put their grief on hold to seek justice.

The family is angry, justifiably so. But what I see and hear, in addition to that anger, is an extraordinary amount of faith as well. Faith that if they just keep fighting, keep pushing, there might one day be justice. If not for their loved one, then for someone else’s.

After the ruling, members of Irizarry’s family cried out in the courtroom. And later, they marched around Center City with about 100 supporters to protest the judge’s decision.

We need to hear those cries and join them in the fight.

Because this fight for justice doesn’t belong to just one family.

It belongs to us all.