The New American Civil War
By now, we’ve all seen the gut wrenching video of Alton Sterling being murdered by two police officers in Baton Rouge over the Fourth of July weekend. Most who’ve watched the video openly admit that it moved them to tears. How could it not? We’re witnessing, yet again, the people tasked with protecting us doing the exact opposite.
Last night another black man was murdered by police just outside Minneapolis. The last minutes of Philando Castile’s life were caught on video by his girlfriend while her 7 year old daughter watched from the back seat. Castile was pulled over for a busted tail light, and now joins people like Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, LaQuan McDonald and Eric Garner as devastating examples of police brutality caught on video. Incidents like this have been happening since Nixon’s crackdown on crime in the 60s. The difference is, in 2016, everyone has a video camera in their pocket, and we can’t escape the indisputable video evidence of these acts. In fact, if every moment in this country were captured on camera we’d see the police kill an African American male nearly 4 times per week. 115 black males have been killed by our police in the 189 days of 2016. 248 were killed by police in 2015. Clearly, something is terribly wrong with the way American police officers engage with minority communities.
Some claim that if Eric Garner or Alton Sterling had just complied with the officer’s requests they’d still be alive today. Fair enough, but have you ever considered what it would be like to be constantly harassed by the police while you’re doing what you can to make money for your family? At some point pride kicks in, frustrations boil over and resisting becomes inevitable. Eric Garner was begging officers to “Please just leave me alone” because “Every time you see me you want to harass me, you wanna stop me. I’m minding my business, Officer.” These were the words uttered mere seconds before the infamous “I can’t breathe.” The words of a man who had reached his breaking point. Are selling loosies or CDs really infractions we want our law enforcement responding to with force? Do we really need militarized patrols in the neighborhoods in this country that have the least?
Let’s take the case of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Freddie had his spinal cord severed because officers took him on a “rough ride” after his arrest in April of 2015. A “rough ride” is when police officers intentionally leave individuals in their custody unshackled in the back of the police van and drive recklessly so they bounce around and get “roughed” up. The egregious crime committed by Freddie that morning that officers felt justified in severing his spinal cord for was simply making eye-contact with an officer and running. A single switchblade was all that was found in his possession. I’m fairly certain there has never been a case of someone in a middle-class neighborhood taking off running after seeing a police officer because they have a switchblade in their pocket. Sadly, because Freddie was from the inner-city, he knew exactly why police officers were in his neighborhood that day. The same reason they’ve been in his neighborhood since the day he was born. They weren’t there to protect him and his community, they were there to harass him and meet their arrest quota.
The most heart-wrenching aspect of the asininity of law enforcement’s relationship with poor communities in America can be seen in the video of Alton Sterling’s 15 year old son breaking down emotionally next to his mother while she reads a statement about his father’s death to the media.
When the police kill someone without cause it has an effect that reaches far beyond that individual’s life. It affects their families, their friends and their community as a whole. Put yourself in this 15 year old’s shoes. He has been forced to witness his father getting murdered on the street. How would you feel, at 15, seeing someone shoot your father four times from point-blank range in the chest when they had him completely subdued on the ground? I’d imagine, at the absolute minimum, most of us would harbor a life-long resentment to the individual or group who committed that heinous act. Every single time the police murder someone without cause we create multiple individuals who will never again have the capacity to trust law enforcement in this country.
It’s telling that we fully embrace this concept when it comes to our troops. We understand that some of them will never be the same after witnessing their platoon mates get killed in action, and we accept that many of them will feel hatred towards the “enemy” for the rest of their lives. The first step in stopping these senseless deaths is to recognize that we’ve tasked our police officers with an impossible job. We’ve asked them to be an occupying force in communities they don’t hail from. We’ve manufactured a new American Civil War.
