Black Robes, White Justice: Does Being Black in America Justify Police Shootings?
Amadou Diallo. Sean Bell. Rekia Boyd. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. Freddie Gray. Walter Scott. Jayson Negron. Tamir Rice. Laquan Mcdonald. Shelley Frey. Keith Scott. Eric Gardner. Stephan Clark.
These names and others — 20 in 2017 and 6 this year to be exact — were mostly unarmed, all of color, and a few whose teenage lives were abbreviated before their eighteenth birthdays. They all belong to families, all were someone’s child, and none deserved to find themselves mentioned in the throes of social justice protests to demand justice and prevent police from shooting the unarmed likes of those who fit their profiles — being Black in America!
As Campaign Zero reported, “A decades-long focus on policing minor crimes and activities — a practice called Broken Windows policing — has led to the criminalization and over-policing of communities of color and excessive force in otherwise harmless situations.” In 2014, police killed at least 287 people who were involved in minor offenses and harmless activities like sleeping in parks, possessing drugs, looking “suspicious” or having a mental health crisis. These activities are often symptoms of underlying issues of drug addiction, homelessness, and mental illness which should be treated by healthcare professionals and social workers rather than the police.
This week’s video-captured graphic shooting of (another) unarmed African-American, Stephan Clark, swelled another level of emotions in me that was a reminder what could’ve been the likes of my fatal encounter.
Hands Up…
A couple of years ago I was on my way to work. I drove through the predominately White town of Prospect, CT, and made a pit-stop at a gas station to fuel up. It was around 5:30 a.m. I had Fred Hammond’s My Destiny cranked about a quarter to the volume’s max to motivate my morning. It was a Friday, so the usual business casual dress code at my job in social services was “dress down”; I was rocking an orange Ralph Lauren short-sleeve shirt, blue jeans, fluorescent orange Nike Air Max’s, and sunglasses. From my periphery, I noticed the conspicuous police SUV tucked to the rear of the Mobile station and quickly did the vehicular mental checklist that most African-American men do when noticing an officer who notices us — Registration? Check. Insurance? Check. Driver’s license? Check.
No sooner than I pulled out of the station, after properly signaling a right turn the police SUV sped in back of me and activated its lights.
I stayed strapped in the seat belt, muted my Gospel groove, rolled down all of the windows on my lightly tinted Ford Explorer, turned off the ignition, put the keys on the dash, grabbed the motor vehicle registration, activated my dash cam, swiveled the fish-eyed lens in my direction to capture our interaction, and secured my hands to the steering wheel.
The Caucasian officer tentatively approached my window from the passenger side, hand on his holster, as I could see from my side-view mirror. My heart-beat seemed to take on the bass line pound of Busta Rhymes’ Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See. My palms were clammy with sweat. There was a lump swelling in my throat I couldn’t swallow down. My anxiety had little to do with the fact that I had been indicted by the United States Government more than 16 years ago; my consultations for and collaborations with government agencies as high as The White House had now demonstrated a credible degree of rehabilitation. My nervousness wasn’t because I had drug paraphernalia or something else illegal in my vehicle; I hadn’t so much as dropped a Tylenol without conducting a CSI sweep to recover it. I was internally distressed because I am a Black man by definition, pulled over by a White officer, in a White area, on a very dim road, at a very heightened time in our nation when popular hashtags associated with other Black men as myself include a line-up like #oscargrant #trayvonmartin. There was a montage of thoughts that escorted my mind to a possible justification that would be written about my life being abbreviated at the hands of this officer. I couldn’t help but conjure the notion that the media would try to criminalize my passing, suggesting that my history was justifiable means of an officer being in “reasonable fear” of his life to shoot me like I was a target for practice on the range.
I wasn’t afraid that because I had done something “wrong”, but I was afraid that I had actually done something right! I had the right to be a tax-paying citizen. I had the right to safe travel. I had the right to be free from racial profiling. I had the right to travel through the town of Prospect at 5:30-something in the morning, dressed down, on my way to work, and get gas without police bias, intimidation, and/or harassment. I had the right not to get shot simply because I was at the right place at the wrong time! These aren’t rights just conferred upon me through the merits of articles such as The Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, or a state or federal statute. This was a sovereign, God-given right to life that supersedes, trumps, and tramples any man-made piece of legislation running counter to or attempting to validate it.
No sooner than the officer cautiously leaned his head in the passenger window, I asked what was the purpose of me being stopped, knowing I had not committed any moving violations.
The officer inquired if I was a “resident” of the town. I knew that was code, a connotation of the sort to mean, “What crime were you scheming on committing in these here parts?” Indignantly armed with the knowledge of my rights and loaded with an understanding of Connecticut State motor vehicle law, I shot a rapid response to the officer in the form of: “No, I am not a resident of Prospect, but I AM a State of Connecticut resident with a valid license. I also want to cite, officer, that this exchange is being recorded on my dash cam for both of our interests!”
The officer’s eyes darted to the camera smiling at him under my rear-view mirror, and stammered, “Yes, sir, the reason why I stopped you is that I noticed you gazing around at the station and you looked lost — .”
“I’m not lost at all; I actually travel this way daily to work,” I interjected.
“Feel free to use your GPS if you can’t find your way…have a good day,” he dismissed me with.
As I forced the weight of my anxious foot on the accelerator to head to work, the Black Lives Matter tagline was plastered to the windshield of my mind, thinking how I very well could have been in the fraternity of the countless other individuals who didn’t have counter-surveillance equipment to either deter a potential situation from turning fatal or post-posthumously contradict the “facts” as reported.
…Don’t Shoot!
Stand still for a moment while I fire some frightening nationally researched facts at you, according to Washington University in ST. Louis:
- More than 57 percent of African-American women were killed while unarmed; white men were the least likely to have been unarmed when killed at just under 20 percent.
- Nearly 94 percent of those killed by police are men; about 46 percent are white; about 22 percent had a history of drug abuse or mental illness.
- The ages of unarmed people killed by police in the database range from 5 to more than 100 years old, including people who were 101, 103, and 107.
- In 15 high-profile cases involving deaths of Blacks, only one officer faced prison time.
If those statistics aren’t enough to challenge your notion, here is a look at some of the cases involving black men and women who died following police encounters.
2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2006 | 2005 | 2003 | 1999
Protecting and Serving
Being an officer is a hard task. There are unthinkable dangers that require a brave heart and focused mind to encounter. However, police officers can undress out their uniform at the end of their shift and no one would know them from a hole in a wall. African-Americans don’t have the luxury of undressing from our complexions and other racial identifiers that make us the target of biases, stigmas, and other prejudices from society — all of which inform “fear of life” encounters when engaged by law enforcement. Our White counterparts don’t need to have dinner table discussions with their children about what not to do if approached by law enforcement and, as standard as having roadside assistance, have their vehicles equipped with dash cams.
The deaths of unarmed black men highlight broader racial issues reflected in police-public relations that we have not quite addressed in the U.S. These issues create inequities in health, well-being and in productivity. To address police brutality and limit its impact, we must focus upstream. Upstream in mandating cultural sensitivity training for officers. Upstream in having social workers deployed in responding to calls involving the mentally ill. Upstream in both intentionally recruiting from neighborhoods where officers are to serve, or requiring cadets to engage in community affairs. Upstream in requiring mandatory annual stress evaluations or after critical incidents. If our focus fails do so, we will remain blinded by the crimson-colored tears of our black and brown fellow Americans whose lives are in no less value as those who bleed blue.
