The escalating use of excessive force, as well as outright police militarization, has reached an apex. This is the kind of stuff that starts revolutions, people. But we don't need a revolution. We need to change police culture, and American culture while we're at it.
Right now, it seems (in the court of public opinion and media) that police strategy focuses on misdemeanors, hassling black folk, and shooting said black folk. How many unsolved murders are there here in Central Florida? A lot. What are the police across the state doing about it? Adding to the numbers. According to an Orlando Sentinel columnist, exactly zero of the police officers involved in officer-related shootings for the past several years were disciplined or fired, much less had charges pressed against them. This means only a couple of things: either they all were right in their decision to use lethal force (this is certainly the case for some, I'm sure), or we have a bro-system where law enforcement officials look out for their own.
Don't get me wrong. I'm thankful for the law enforcement system that we have in place, especially when compared to other countries. I'm not saying anything like take all the weapons away from the police or that they are not allowed to use force, even deadly force. I think there is absolutely a place for that in law enforcement. If we don't give criminals something to be afraid of, they simply won't be afraid of the police. Our courts and detention systems are laughable, so we need to start with the first line of defense. The police.
In my casual, amateur research of the subject, none of the victims of this violence were innocent people by any stretch of the imagination. Eric Garner was breaking the law by selling loose cigarettes and resisting arrest. Michael Brown assaulted a store owner before stealing from him, assaulting a police officer, and resisting arrest. Tamir Rice, a child, had a toy gun with all of the safety indicators removed from it, resulting in a tragic mistake. Cedric Bartee is a wanted car thief with warrants for his arrest. Each of these people was killed or critically injured by those sworn to protect and serve. None of these people were guilty of crimes punishable by death. None of these people were armed. We need to stop blindly accepting officers' statements that suspects "appeared to be armed," or were "seemingly reaching for a weapon." How is it that an officer has not been wrong in his judgment in any of these cases?
According to the coroner's report, Eric Garner was choked to death by police. Yes, he had multiple contributing factors (obesity, bronchial asthma, heart disease, and hypertension), but that does not excuse the actions of the police. There is never, and I mean never, an excuse for a police officer to occlude the windpipe of a suspect under any circumstance. If multiple officers are unable to use the training that they are given to subdue an unarmed suspect in a way that does not endanger the life of the suspect, then they are unfit for duty. If the officers were trained to use such force against a suspect that is selling illegal cigarettes, then the training is complete shit. That's it. There is not a valid argument otherwise. Mace/pepper spray him. Taze him. Restrain his arms and legs. But don't block off the only means by which a person can breathe. And yes, I know that the man could breathe to a certain degree; if you can scream "I can't breathe," then you are, in fact, breathing. But an officer does not know the complete medical history of a suspect, and so should approach any situation with the utmost care. Why not use the same intensity you use to choke a motherfucker to death and gear it towards protecting the public without violating the basic human rights that we are afforded in this country? The police are better armed, better trained, and have more backup than literally all criminals. Use that, you fucks. Save your gulag techniques for a war or something.
Same with Michael Brown. Was he a criminal? Sure, at that particular time, he was. He stole a goddamned cigar, and he punched a police officer. This is never a smart move, and I do believe that you risk your life attacking a police officer, no matter what. So shame on him for that. But evidence that has been made public leans towards the fact that Brown had started to back down, to submit and/or reconsider his aggressive actions, and was subsequently killed. A cool-headed, well-trained officer would not shoot this man. Call for backup, wound the suspect, use non-lethal means of bringing him down, but not lethal force. I'm not an expert on Missouri law, but I don't think that cigar theft is a capital offense. I don't care whether or not he had some kind of reputation as a thug (as the right-wingers scream in defense of Darren Wilson's actions). I don't care if Brown was bigger than Wilson. Wilson is a trained officer of the law and is also a big man himself. If he cannot use his training, non-lethal tools, verbal de-escalation techniques, and large build to subdue a single suspect, then he was clearly unfit for duty to begin with.
I worked in a psychiatric institution for a year as a psych technician, which is basically a hospital bouncer that protects nurses from potentially violent patients and maintains order in the facility. We were given a week-long course on verbal de-escalation and physical maneuvers to escape a person's attacks and physically subdue a person without injury to self or to the resident. Do you care to know how many times I ever saw a resident get injured or killed? Zero. None. And this was with people like me, with a week-long course under their belt and completely unarmed, against people who occasionally did not have the mental capacity to fear pain, self-harm, or others in general. In fact, I probably only had to lay hands on patients a couple of times, and never needed to inflict pain or injury on anyone. Most people calm down and comply with authority with simple, respectful conversation. These were psychiatric patients, not suspects with their full wits about them. How can an undertrained goofball like me do that, but an officer with much more training and experience under his belt not do the same?
Whatever happened to meeting force with equal force? Cops used to deal an ass beating if you tried to fight them or hurt others, possibly also pepper-spraying or tazing you. Now the solution is a gun. Why are the people sworn to protect us so paranoid about crime that they are shooting unarmed people? I'm not saying that any of these people who have been killed recently were innocent of crimes, but certainly they were not guilty of something so grave that they deserve to be killed.
I believe that this is partly because of American society's passion for guns. Everyone is armed to the teeth, and most have exceptionally shitty training on how to use the weapons they have, much less when it is appropriate to do so. Gun laws are a joke. In states like mine, all you have to do is say you fear for your life and you basically get a free pass to kill anyone. Hell, you can even hunt a potential victim down and instigate them into attacking you. Just ask George Zimmerman. Everyone here wants to be a victim, and that feeling is not race-specific. If we don't have a gun, then we feel naked against the people out there who want to get us; the invisible boogeymen who will eventually taste a bullet from our "just in case" weaponry. If we do have a gun, then we're emboldened to put ourselves in precarious situations because of it. Somewhere along the way, "fearing for my life" became an acceptable substitution for "I'm afraid of brown people."
Look, minorities are here to stay, and we're a better nation for it. In the beginning, us whites were the minority. We will be again soon, according to statistics. We as a population have to collaborate and work together. Dump this "us against them" mentality on both sides. Minorities feel like the system is stacked against them. So far, they have been right about that. It was less than a century ago that we shot at them with water cannons in the fucking streets for being black in the wrong part of town. Chris Rock recently did an interview where he described his mother's experience with racism:
"My mother tells stories of growing up in Andrews, South Carolina, and the black people had to go to the vet to get their teeth pulled out. And you still had to go to the back door, because if the white people knew the vet had used his instruments on black people, they wouldn’t take their pets to the vet. This is not some person I read about. This is my mother."We need to accept this as fact and figure out a way to develop a system that works for everyone, not just the majority. This is the very foundation that our country is built upon. Those that were different than the majority powers of their nations of origin came here to form a collaborative society where everyone is accepted. When did we decide that this was no longer the case? Did you think that just because we got a black president, racism was gone? Do you really think that laws don't need to be updated with the changing times?
I'm married to a Hispanic woman from a different country (don't even get me started on immigration laws). Why, in this day and age, do I still need to be upset that people look upon this as some kind of trendy move? Why do I still worry that my wife and/or son will be treated unfairly in the workplace, by law enforcement, or by other people in general? Will my son catch hell from people of all colors for being biracial?
Through the years, I've heard a lot of white people screaming "reverse racism." I'll openly admit that I have thought the same way at times (although the very concept of reverse racism is inane; racism is racism, and it simply works in all directions). I do believe that whites are not the only race of Americans that are racist. The way it differs between races, however, is that whites that are racist feel this way based on unfounded principles. They don't like people because they are not like them. Those amongst minority groups, black and otherwise, are racist because they are approaching a situation from a less-advantageous viewpoint. It's hard to argue for racist whites who look down at others from their crystal castles. It is much easier to understand racism from minorities who look up at the system that we've created and see that we didn't include a place for them at the table to begin with.
These current protests, however, have a different tone to them that we as white people cannot ignore. These are not people who are pushing for something that is not owed to them. This isn't reparations. These are not people crying racism (if you actually look past the headlines and completely ignore Fox news). These are people who are shining light on actual inequality. They are revealing an element of our society that we have chosen to overlook for the sake of stability. They are letting the world know that the laws we stand behind have been stacked against them and that we have expected them to submit to tyranny or face death. These are blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, atheists, Christians, Muslims, the poor, the wealthy, and everything in between.
These people are all fighting to change the way we police human beings in the United States. This is something that deserves everyone's attention. We need to be having these conversations. We need to educate ourselves on the issues from all perspectives.
Ask yourself these questions: how would we white folks feel if the tables turned? What if when the minority population becomes the majority population, they treat white people the same way we treat them now, using the existing laws and arguments against us? Are the current laws adequate? Would you be OK with receiving this kind of treatment from the new majority?
If we don't do something to change this country, we may very well find out what being different from the American majority feels like. Very soon.
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