Day 745: 5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: sea level (and the Posture of Innocence, day 14)

In yesterday's portions of The Posture of Innocence, Officer Joe Cadbury, the true murderer of John Soames, got snatched up -- in today's portion, Commissioner Scott makes the best use that he can of the fact, even while his department is being drowned ...

To get totally caught up on The Posture of Innocence, here are the prologue, day 1, day 2, day 3, day 3.5, day 4, day 4.5, day 5, day 5.5, day 6, day 7, and day 7.5, day 8, day 9, day 9.5, day 10, day 10.5, day 11, day 11.5, day 12, day 12.5, day 13, and day 13.5!

Commissioner Scott's entire thought as the press conference approached: he had been in New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina, and he remembered the devastation of that beautiful city as its location below sea level caused it to fill like a bowl when the levees broke and the flood waters came in.

His mind kept replaying that, day after day as more revelations came out about his department, and how deeply it was sunk into corruption … and how the blowback of those revelations was drowning everything good that he was trying to do.

The only thing to do was shore up what remained and man the pumps.

Commissioner Scott came right out of police headquarters after Captain Lee, Lieutenant Anderson, and Officer Cadbury went in, and the commissioner held court, driving home the point that his department was past the point of covering even for its own officers at the expense of “all citizens of Lofton County, regardless of their race, color, and creed.”

Nathan Turner, senior reporter for the Lofton County Free Voice, kept a straight face while trying not to laugh. The games White men in authority played when nervous about being held to account by the people … suddenly, they found a way to catch men that they had known were guilty for decades, as if the general public was so stupid that somebody wasn't able to find it out and report on it.

Commissioner Scott was relatively new, and there was no evidence he had been involved in the old corruption, so, the Free Voice didn't have a personal bone to pick with him. But, racism – and anti-racism – were about business: who profited from racial division and inequality, and who didn't. Who had systemic power, and who didn't – and who had power to even things up.

The Lofton County Free Voice had shifted the power landscape dramatically in Lofton County because of the dramatic overreaction of corrupt forces in policing throughout the county that had led to many of the corrupt rank-and-file, and a few small-town bigwigs, being culled by the men of the Free Voice and their supporters, with one small-town captain, Ironwood Hamilton of Tinyville, invited along to give official cover for the culling of the 119 corrupt police officers who came out to do the terrorist act called the Gilligan House Burning. That, alone, had given the Free Voice ways to introduce all the materials they had to the public.

Lofton County had reeled and rocked ever since, and its historically disadvantaged Black population – a full 39 percent of the population – had been getting its agenda done. The thing was about to go to higher levels, beginning with Mr. Turner tripping over Mr. Jetson Black just as accidentally as Lieutenant Anderson had teed off on Officer Cadbury's knee...

Day 14 is up!