This is What is Happening With Police in America
Some very important things have happened in policing in this country in the last three weeks. And none of them are good. It is imperative that we take the time to acknowledge them.
On the evening of March 18, Sacramento police tracked Stephon Clark as he walked through his neighborhood. At worst, Clark broke some vehicle windows as he made his way to his grandparents’ home, although his connection to that minor nuisance crime isn’t even clear. As Clark stood in his grandparents’ backyard, officers didn’t identify themselves, never gave him a chance to comply with the order to put his hands up, and shot him eight times. The officers on the scene have said that they thought he had a gun.
It was a cellphone.
An autopsy performed by Dr. Bennet Omalu — the pathologist who gained fame for discovering CTE and for dogging the NFL for its failure to acknowledge the issue — found that Clark was shot with eight bullets; seven of them hit him in the back.
According to Omalu, it took Clark three to ten minutes to die. The officers involved waited five minutes to call for medical help. They also muted the microphones on their body-worn cameras after the shooting.
These are facts about Clark’s death that a person can find with a simple internet search. But I’m writing them here because it is important that we repeat them. People need to know what happened.
Nine days after Clark was killed, on March 27, the attorney general of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, announced that Baton Rouge police officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake would not be criminally charged for killing Alton Sterling in 2016. Salamoni shot Sterling as the two officers had him pinned to the ground, after threatening him by saying, “Don’t fucking move or I’ll shoot you in your fucking head.” Sterling was shot six times. He was known to locals as “the CD man” because he sold CDs and DVDs outside the convenience store where he was killed.
Finally, on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a police officer from Arizona who shot a woman outside her home. The victim, Amy Hughes, was shot while standing outside her home and talking with her roommate, Sharon Chadwick. Police had been called to the scene because they received a call that Chadwick was hacking at a tree with a knife and behaving erratically. Hughes emerged from the home holding a kitchen knife. She never made an aggressive move toward Chadwick, she spoke calmly to her, and Chadwick later said that she never felt threatened by Hughes. Officer Andrew Kisela shot Hughes, anyway. She survived and sued him for excessive force, but the court found that Kisela has qualified immunity, which, according to Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog, means that “Kisela still could not be sued because any rights that he might have violated were not clearly established.”
In America in 2018, it is not clearly established that police officers should refrain from shooting someone who is not posing a danger to themselves or other people.
In a dissent joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority’s “decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”
In all three of these cases, witness accounts indicate that the police were the aggressors.
It’s easy to let these stories scroll by in your newsfeed with so many other distractions — some profound, some inane — before us. Young people are marching for their lives and for reasonable gun safety laws. President Trump has appointed an unstable bully to be national security adviser, the worst possible job for someone of that pedigree. And the president’s lawyer says that he didn’t tell Trump that he paid an adult film star $130,000 to remain silent about an affair that he says didn’t happen.
But we cannot become complacent each time police abuse people and are not held accountable. We have to read about it, talk about it, and express our outrage about it. That’s where change starts — with knowledge. And knowledge can then be turned into action.
A few years ago, I participated in a panel discussion at Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, PA, about people’s rights when encountering the police. I sat next to an officer from the Carlisle PD, and during the panel, I glanced at the notes he had in front of him. In those notes was a description of a gladiator fighting in a stadium in front of a crowd. The people in the crowd were yelling at the gladiator, telling him what to do, but the gladiator believed that they didn’t understand what it was like to be in the fighting ring. Although the officer never verbally expressed that thought, it was there on paper for me to see.
This is how police officers think. At least two people I know who are retired from law enforcement have told me that police are responding to the movement for greater accountability not by listening to what’s being said by the people they serve but by digging in their heels. They’re in a siege mentality. They do not understand that, as public servants in a democracy, they are accountable to the people.
Last week, I talked with my friend Brandi Fisher, who founded the Alliance for Police Accountability in Pittsburgh, for a soon-to-be-launched podcast. I asked her about finding the will to keep working when the barriers to reform and change seem like they could be insurmountable.
“You have to continue because you know the cultural problem is so entrenched,” Brandi said. “That is the very reason you continue because, if you don’t, then you’re allowing that problem to permeate, fester, and get worse. And you’re allowing people to lose their lives.”
In 18 years of activism and advocacy, I’ve learned a few things. One of the lessons I’ve learned is that it seems like you’re losing right up until the moment you’re winning. Today, ending police brutality may seem impossible. It might look that way tomorrow, too. But the only way to change it is by continuing to work toward the world we want. What other choice do we have?
