Threats Against Police? Or Emotional Freedom Of Speech? The Court Case Of Joe Grits In Hands Of Jury

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Representing himself in court, local artist and activist Joseph Thompson, AKA Joe Grits, may learn his fate on Friday when a state jury begins deliberations to decide if his social media posts were intended to incite violence against police involved in the fatal shooting of Dyshan Best in March 2025.

Police Officer Yoon Heo, who shot Best during a foot chase after a gun was pointed at him, according to a state investigation that declared the shooting was justified, testified on Thursday “I was scared for my life, I was scared for my family.”

During cross examination, Thompson asked Heo if he was ever physically harmed as a result of the social media posts that included a picture of Heo with a caption “Somebody should die with a badge on.”

Heo responded no, adding, however, he still fears for his life.

Read CT Post coverage here

After Thursday’s trial, Thompson posted this on his Facebook page:

Today reminded me that sometimes a courtroom ain’t just about law… it’s about narrative.

I sat there listening to people try to turn emotion, music, activism, speech, and public frustration into something darker. Meanwhile after all these years, all these protests, all these posts, all this attention… not one officer could say I ever physically harmed them. Not one act of violence. Not one weapon. Not one real-world attack.

Yet somehow I’m still treated like a major threat. That told me everything I needed to know.

Maybe I’m not important to everybody else… but clearly I matter to them bekuz I speak out and speak up while y’all shut. While y’all only go at and after those that look just like you and come from the same poverty as you.

To everybody who came out today — love forever. Some left work early, pulled up on their break, some drove many cities away some even made a statement 🤷🏿. Real ones know this fight bigger than just me. Some people see humor in moments like this I didn’t create laughter it may come off as it, but it’s a reason for everything. Others understand the weight of fighting for your freedom while standing on your beliefs publicly.

Either way… I’m built Ford tough. Allah got me. I’m prayed up, grounded, and standing tall through it all.
POLICE CONTINUE TO WATCH ME I COME IN PEACE 😇

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  5. Side note, not sure where this can play in, added as a witness or closing Joe, but Sen. Reveran Gaston can either be a co-conspirator to the officer’s fear and your guilt of innocence, #incitement 🙂

    Call Sen Gatson to the stand, seopean if you have to, 🤣

    What say you people? 🙂

    https://onlyinbridgeport.com/wordpress/senator-gaston-a-nation-that-grows-accustomed-to-state-violence-is-not-safe/

    “Every time the government kills a civilian, something sacred is lost—not only a life, but a promise. The promise that power exists to protect, not dominate. The promise that dignity is not conditional. The promise that democracy means more than words recited while blood dries on the pavement.

    What should terrify us is not only the act itself, but our response to it. How quickly outrage fades. How easily the dead become statistics. How often silence is mistaken for prudence. In moments like these, passivity is not peace—it is permission.

    America’s children are watching. They are learning what their country values by what it tolerates. They are absorbing the lesson that some lives are expendable, that authority answers only to itself, that justice is negotiable. This is not the inheritance any nation should pass on.

    History is unforgiving to societies that normalize cruelty. It records, with brutal clarity, the moments when people could have acted, and did not. Long after official narratives collapse, what remains is a single question: Did they speak when it mattered, or did they sit passively by?

    People of goodwill must act now. Not out of rage, but out of love and human decency—for life, for democracy, for the fragile moral core that still binds us together. Action does not require violence or hatred; it requires courage, solidarity, and the refusal to accept that this is simply “the way things are.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltGZH0RWmlw

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