Black Lives Matter
Police Brutality in the United States
January 19th, 2015
Last November, a 12-year old boy named Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun near a gazebo when a nearby man called 911 to report a person pointing a gun, but repeatedly stating that the gun was “probably fake.” Shortly after the caller left the park, the police arrived in a car and, within seconds, shot Rice:
There was no warning, no demand to drop the (toy) gun. They simply pulled up and shot the child. When his 14-year old sister ran up to try to provide aid to her fallen brother, the police tackled her to the ground and put her in handcuffs:
His mother reported that the police also preventer her from reaching her slain son, and threatened to arrest her. Tamir died the next day.
The murder of Tamir Rice was not an isolated incident. There are countless examples of the police murdering people and, in the US, blacks are disproportionately the victims. The police do sometimes murder whites as well, especially if they are poor or mentally ill, but generally not as often. Regardless, it is unjust for the police to be murdering people like this. Usually, the police are not punished for this behavior (unless there are protests or riots), and when they are penalized the penalty is typically much lighter than what it would be if a normal person committed the same crime. Murder is only illegal if you're not a cop.
A Pattern of Brutality
The police do not protect us; if they did they wouldn't murder us. If these murders were just the work of a few “bad apples,” and the rest of the police really did protect us, then they would protect us from those “bad apples” by arresting them and treating them the same as a normal person who committed the same crime. The police only object to murder when someone else does it; they are the dominant criminal group. When they imprison other criminals they are just suppressing a competing gang.
Besides Tamir Rice, there are many, many other examples showing a systemic pattern of police brutality. These include:
The murder of John Crawford in Ohio. He was in a store, talking to the mother of his children on a cell phone when the police showed up and shot him within seconds.
The murder of Akai Gurley in Brooklyn, NY. A pair of police officers in the stairwell were startled by Akai and his girlfriend while they were returning home, so a cop immediately shot him in the chest. He died a few hours later. The police did not identify themselves before shooting, or give any sort of warning.
The beating of Bryan Spradlin while handcuffed, after arresting him for public intoxication. Police stomped on his head, nearly broke his arms, and elbowed him in the face. The officer who committed this assault, Mike Denton, was not prosecuted. The department initially fired him after video of his actions surfaced, but his firing was reversed upon appeal.
The murder of 68-year old Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr in White Plains, NY. The police responded to a false alert from his medical alert pendant, broke down his door, tasered him, and then shot him dead.
The beating of non-violent, non-combative inmates (none of whom had been convicted of a crime yet) in Mamou, LA jails. Police walked up to cells one at a time, opened the door, and sadistically tasered them. After someone leaked surveillance footage of these abuses to the press, the police responded swiftly - by launching an investigation to find out how the video got released.
The Department of Justice’s 2014 report on its investigation into the Cleveland police department’s civil rights record found that the Cleveland police department “has engaged in ‘excessive and unreasonable force’ in hundreds of” cases. Their report:
lists examples of officers firing at people who pose no threat and striking them on the head with their weapons. The cases documented in the report include that of a semi-naked hostage victim who was twice fired at by a police sergeant as he tried to escape his captors, and a 13-year-old who was repeatedly punched in the face while handcuffed in the back of a police car.
Another incident involved a man shot with a Taser while he was was strapped to an ambulance gurney after suffering from seizures.
‘Our review revealed that Cleveland police officers violate basic constitutional precepts in their use of deadly and less lethal force at a rate that is highly significant,’ the report said. It found use of force by Cleveland police was at times ‘chaotic and dangerous,’ even going so far as to suggest victims of crime and innocent bystanders should fear for their lives in the presence of police.
The Department of Justice is essentially the US’s top cop, and would normally be inclined to speak well of their fellow police officers.
The strangulation and murder of Eric Garner for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes. After video of Garner’s murder went viral online the police began a harassment campaign against Ramsey Orta, who recorded Garner’s murder. The police eventually arrested him, planted guns on him, and then charged him with violating gun control laws.
One former police officer recently wrote:
I knew police weren’t all bad. … I could use the police’s power and resources to help my community. So in 1994, I joined the St. Louis Police Department. I quickly realized how naive I’d been. I was floored by the dysfunctional culture I encountered.
I won’t say all, but many of my peers were deeply racist.
One example: A couple of officers ran a Web site called St. Louis Coptalk, where officers could post about their experience and opinions. At some point during my career, it became so full of racist rants that the site administrator temporarily shut it down. Cops routinely called anyone of color a “thug,” whether they were the victim or just a bystander. ...
many times, officers saw young black and brown men as targets. They would respond with force to even minor offenses. And because cops are rarely held accountable for their actions, they didn’t think too hard about the consequences.
Once, I accompanied an officer on a call. At one home, a teenage boy answered the door. That officer accused him of harboring a robbery suspect, and demanded that he let her inside. When he refused, the officer yanked him onto the porch by his throat and began punching him.
Another officer met us and told the boy to stand. He replied that he couldn’t. So the officer slammed him against the house and cuffed him. When the boy again said he couldn’t walk, the officer grabbed him by his ankles and dragged him to the car. It turned out the boy had been on crutches when he answered the door, and couldn’t walk.
Back at the department, I complained to the sergeant. I wanted to report the misconduct. But my manager squashed the whole thing and told me to get back to work. ...
I don’t think better training alone will reduce police brutality. My fellow officers and I took plenty of classes on racial sensitivity and on limiting the use of force.
The problem is that cops aren’t held accountable for their actions, and they know it. These officers violate rights with impunity. They know there’s a different criminal justice system for civilians and police.
Even when officers get caught, they know they’ll be investigated by their friends, and put on paid leave. My colleagues would laughingly refer to this as a free vacation. It isn’t a punishment. And excessive force is almost always deemed acceptable in our courts and among our grand juries. Prosecutors are tight with law enforcement, and share the same values and ideas. ...
The number of people in uniform who will knowingly and maliciously violate your human rights is huge.
The minutia of each individual case is not what is important; what is important is the broader pattern.
Barack Obama himself noted, “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in the department store. That includes me. There are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happened to me.” Despite being a victim of police harassment before he became famous, so far Obama has done nothing as President to reign in the police.
The police should not be allowed to just kill or assault whomever they want with no consequences, but they are not held to the same standards as the rest of us. If a normal person killed a police officer under the same circumstances as the above killings, that person would, at minimum, be arrested and almost certainly prosecuted. When the police kill someone for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, or murder a 12-year old for playing with a toy gun, they're not even charged with a crime. This isn't just one person, it happens on a regular basis all the time (mostly to people of color) and the perpetrators are rarely punished. In the rare cases where they are punished, its a milder punishment than the rest of us would receive if we did the same thing. Its also a race issue because the police mostly kill people of color, but its also wrong for the police to murder white people in the cases where that happens. Its more of a cops vs. blacks thing, than a white vs. black thing. The law discriminates in favor of the police.
Excuses and Coverups
Some people are so wedded to the police they will always come up with excuses for them, no matter what atrocity they commit. Many of the justifications for police misconduct can be used to justify shooting anyone, and could also be used to justify shooting police officers. If it is okay to shoot children because you mistook their toy gun for a real gun, then logically it is also okay to shoot a police officer if you think they have a gun. After all, the police have real guns (not toys) and they are a danger to our safety. They are paranoid people who will shoot you (or at least blacks) for the slightest reason. They might shoot me just because I startled them, or because they mistook my wallet for a gun. Should I just let the cops shoot me, or am I justified in shooting them to protect myself? Many of the arguments defending police are premised on the unspoken and unsupported assumption that police officer’s lives are more valuable than the lives of regular people.
Another of these excuses is that the police are in grave danger from being killed by criminals, and therefore this makes it okay for them to murder whoever they want. Again, the same justification could be used to justify killing cops - we are in danger from being killed by police officers, and therefore are justified in shooting them. Having a dangerous job shouldn’t mean you get to murder whoever you want.
Additionally, very few cops are actually killed by criminals; more die from accidents (especially traffic accidents) than criminals. According to the FBI, in 2013 seventy-six police officers were killed. Twenty-seven died from “felonious acts,” while forty-nine died in accidents. Many other jobs are more dangerous than police officer, including aircraft pilots, roofers, garbage collectors, steel workers, truck drivers, farmers, and construction laborers. Loggers and fishers are both ten times more likely to die on the job than police officers. The police and their supporters exaggerate the dangers police face in order to portray them as heroes risking their lives protecting us from danger in the hopes that this will persuade us to give them all the power and funds they want, and turn a blind eye towards misconduct.
The refusal of the police to be transparent about shootings is a way for them to avoid consequences for their own misconduct; police won’t even count how many people they have shot. In theory, state & local police are required to report killings to the feds. However, there are no penalties for failure to do so and as a result most do not comply with the law. State & local police often do not compile comprehensive statistics because if they did it might make them more accountable. There are a handful of journalists who have attempted to put together accurate lists of people killed by the police, but for the most part their efforts are incomplete because its a pretty big task. Most news organizations get a lot of information from the police, and if they piss them off too much (say, by trying to compile comprehensive statistics on police killings) the police will cut them off by refusing to talk to their reporters. Its cheaper to just regurgitate what the government says than to do real investigative reporting.
The use of grand juries to investigate police killings is another way to coverup police crimes. A grand jury is not a normal jury, it just determines whether to file charges. If charges are filed then the accused gets a trial with a normal jury. When a grand jury decides not to indict a police officer that means there isn't going to be a trial; that cop got off scot-free without even going to trial. Defense attorneys are not allowed to make a case to a grand jury. Grand juries do whatever the prosecutor wants 99% of the time. If he wants them to indict a ham sandwich, they'll indict a ham sandwich. If they don't indict its usually because the prosecutor didn't really want them to indict. If a prosecutor makes a big deal about leaving something up to the grand jury, that means he’s made a decision that will be controversial or unpopular and is trying to distance himself from it. Pretending the grand jury made the decision is a way to shift blame from himself to the members of the grand jury.
Crime and Race
Police apologists will sometimes attempt to justify police murder of blacks with the argument that blacks commit crimes more, and that black parents (unlike white parents) do not raise their children to behave properly around police officers. The association of blacks with crime is a racist myth; it is a stereotype. Its common to depict a minority as criminals to justify persecuting them. For example, before Stonewall similar myths were used to justify police harassment and killing of homosexuals, who were stereotyped as serial killers. Most African-American parents actually teach their children to be very careful around the police, not to make any sudden movements or anything like that, because the police are paranoid and crazy violent around blacks. They will kill a black man at the slightest provocation. This is how one black father explains it:
When the constitution was amended to outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude at the end of the civil war Congress wrote a loophole into the 13th amendment allowing slavery/involuntary servitude "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." So former slaveowners and other racists immediately sought to take advantage of this loophole to force blacks back as close to slavery as possible by portraying them as criminals and then forcing them into involuntary servitude. In order to do this they needed to promote a stereotype of blacks as criminals. They searched for things that blacks did more than whites, criminalized them, and required harsher sentences than crimes commonly committed by whites. They also put more resources into enforcing laws among black people, so as to arrest and convict more of them. Once convicted blacks were subject to forced labor - prison labor today, the convict lease system in the 19th century.
Although the people who initiated these policies are long dead, the practices and stereotypes they started never really ended, although they have evolved in various ways. Over eighty percent of the people stopped under NYC's stop & frisk policy were black or Latino, yet blacks & Latinos were less likely to have a weapon than whites stopped by the same policy. It’s not just a case of a few people being subjected to excessive force, it happens all the time - there is a broader pattern of police misconduct.
If you look exclusively at violent crime (murders, muggings, etc.) and control for income & unemployment the crime rate is the same for all races. Due to racial discrimination (both past and present) and the legacy of slavery, blacks have a higher unemployment rate and, on average, lower incomes than whites. If you're unemployed or poor and can't make ends meet you're more likely to turn to illegal means of making ends meet than if you can make enough money legally.
If you look at certain non-violent crimes, especially drug laws, many of these de-facto target people of color. When marijuana was outlawed back in the thirties one of the main reasons was because it was thought of as a black & Mexican drug. A lot of the mandatory minimums for drugs "coincidentally" are higher for drugs that are popular with blacks than for drugs that are popular with whites.
Disruptive Protests
Engaging in disruptive protests, up to and including illegal activity, is a justified and effective means of addressing police brutality. Disruptive activity imposes costs on the powerful and can force them to change their policies. I support the Boston Tea Party and the American revolution, so I do condone rioting, destroying businesses property, etc. under some circumstances. Given the scale of crimes committed by police, the Black Lives Matter protests are actually a fairly mild response.
Disruptive protests have improved society many times in the past. If you are always against blockading traffic and doing anything illegal than you are against the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the American revolution, and most successful campaigns for social justice. The civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., broke the law all the time. They violated laws against segregation by going into white-only establishments, held protests without permits, and disrupted traffic in Selma, Birmingham, and other locations. When MLK died he was working on a "poor people's campaign" which would have used massive civil disobedience to shut down Washington, D.C. (grinding traffic to a halt, among other things) in an effort to force Congress to pass a poor people's bill of rights. The modern gay rights movement literally started with a riot - the Stonewall riot. That riot caused the number of police raids of gay bars to plummet. If there were no riots there would be no gay rights movement. The American revolution not only destroyed enormous amounts of property in the Boston Tea Party, they also took up arms and actually killed large numbers of government officials. Many of these protests did destroy property in addition to disrupting traffic. The Boston tea party alone destroyed large amounts of property. And the revolutionary war was far, far more destructive than any riot and far more illegal.
If no one ever engaged in disruptive protest the United States would not exist & British colonialism would still be around. If no one ever even blocked traffic, or did other non-violent civil disobedience, overt Jim Crow segregation would still be around and gay rights would not have advanced. A strike by airline employees (or other transportation workers) can have the same effect as blocking streets - that's why the threat of a strike is an effective bargaining tool. We know disruption is an effective means of protest because it has worked before. The purpose of blocking streets (and other direct action) is not to change people's minds, but to impose costs on elites, by disrupting commerce and impeding their ability to control the populace, and force them to chance policy. The Stonewall riot was effective, so other riots can be effective as well.
These disruptive protests only appear different in hindsight, but lots of people at the time they happened had the same objections to them that are raised today. They were equally controversial at the time, and most of the same arguments were used against them then as are used now. In fifty years people will look on today's protests against police brutality in a manner similar to how we look on past disruptive protests today.
It is true that MLK's faction of the civil rights movement didn't riot or set police cars on fire, but there were an enormous number of riots in most major cities in the sixties, which were much larger than what we are seeing now, and did destroy cars. MLK believed breaking laws in a non-violent manner (including disrupting traffic) was a better approach, but his faction indirectly benefited from the riots. The government feared that there would be even more riots if MLK's faction joined in the riots, and granted concessions to the civil rights movement to prevent that from happening. That's why MLK is often glorified by the government, media, and public schools while more radical civil rights leaders are usually ignored (or occasionally portrayed negatively).
King’s approach to non-violence was not to sit on the sidelines and whine about protestors, but to non-violently break laws in a disruptive manner that placed pressure on the authorities to change policy. He and his followers deliberately made themselves targets of violence by doing so, both from the police and from civilian white supremacists. When that violence arrived they did not fight back or run away, but allowed themselves to be assaulted. If you are not deliberately making yourself a target of violence and allowing others to assault you then you don’t really believe in King’s non-violence, and should not be wagging your finger at other people who also do not practice non-violence.
When the media disapproves of riots they often portray them as just destroying things at random, but in practice that is not the case. In the Boston Tea Party rioters destroyed the property of the East India Company, which benefited from British policies at the expense of the colonists. In the "race riots" of the sixties they targeted government property (especially police property), police officers, symbols of white authority, and businesses that discriminated against blacks. There were cases of businesses not being touched, despite being surrounded by other businesses that were looted or torched, because they had a record of hiring blacks and treating them well while the others discriminated against blacks. In the Stonewall riot homosexuals assaulted police officers, destroyed their property, and destroyed the property of homophobic businesses. Every target of destruction has some sort of grievance associated with it. When riots happen in Syria or other enemy states the media does not depict riots that way. Rioters are depicted as freedom fighters, and destruction is downplayed or justified.
Police murder of blacks and other people is completely unacceptable and must stop immediately. Protestors are justified in using any measures necessary to prevent the police from murdering or otherwise brutalizing people. Black Lives Matter is the civil rights movement of our era.