I think the Fuhrman revelations, especially the taped interviews he had with Laura McKinny between 1985-1994, were the most important thing to come out of the whole sorry Simpson trial saga. They revealed not a rogue policeman, which is how the Media tried to play it, but a rogue and very racist LAPD. Note Fuhrman's words "We were tight. I mean we could have murdered people and got away with it. We were tight. We all knew what to say. " It revealed an LAPD where the most outspoken racists were tolerated and even encouraged, the most offensive terms were generally used to refer to Black people. It showed a group of cops that regularly arrested people on false charges, fabricated evidence and committed brutality and even murder under color of authority. He didn't have to hide what they were doing. There was no Serpico around. He could be very open about it, even to the point of bragging about his exploits to the screen writer. |
| The Mark Fuhrman Tapes + Enhanced Version |
The trial was broadcast by CNN, and that is when I had a chance to record these tapes. While they [transcripts] were played in court before the judge, they were never heard by the jury. They were never heard by most trial watchers either, thanks to suppression by the Media. I don't believe they were ever replayed substantially on TV after that morning court session. Even during the initial broadcast, CNN would generally be live through the boring procedural stuff and then run a bunch of commercials when the court got back to the tapes, so the public never got to hear much of it the first time. By the evening news cycle they had completely cleaned it up. A few of the tamer Fuhrman quotes were played and the myth was propagated that the whole dust up was simply that Mark had used the N-word and lied about it.
Not hardly! The heart of his evidence was not the "words", N or otherwise, it was the "sticks and stones." He bragged of committing murder in one of those interviews, and yes Virginia, there is a body. The Police departments own cover up, I mean follow up, MARK FUHRMAN TASK FORCE after the Simpson Trial identified 12 incidents from the tapes that they could connect to actual events, and they weren't even trying.
These tapes gave us a rare window into the real workings of the LAPD. This is a very good thing. This stuff came out in the Simpson trial because he had enough money to properly investigated the police that were investigating him, and because for a decade Fuhrman had the arrogance to commit his crimes to tape. The fact that they came out in the context of the Simpson trial was used to obscure them, but they should have been socially much more important than the verdict on OJ himself. They involved the accusation of misuse of violence, not by one man on one night, but by a state institution of thousands specifically entrusted with a monopoly on violence over a period of decades. Not only was the jury justified in finding 'reasonable doubt' in Fuhrman's story of how he found the bloody glove, every person that Fuhrman had a hand in sending to jail in the preceding decade should have gotten a new trial as well.
So for 13 years it has been on my very long 'to do" list to extract some essence from this generally very boring 6 hour VHS tape and put it in some modern electronic form, if for no other reason than to fill a void. While you may Google transcripts of the Fuhrman tapes at a number of places, I have not found any place on the Internet with actual bits of the audio before this and this stuff has to be heard to have the full impact it deserves. So now the Media is on another Simpson diversion and Fox News has the nerve to put Mark Fuhrman front and center as a respectable commentator. So I figure what better time to take this off my to do list. This one is a little better than the first one I posted.
You know it's just possible that OJ is guilty and the police planted the evidence. They're not above planting evidence on a suspect they know to be guilty.
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