Last week there was a Black Lives Matter protest in the streets of downtown Tampa. Throughout the protest, officers on bicycles and in patrol cars kept traffic at bay for the safety of the protestors and kept protestors from marching up the Interstate 275 entrance ramp, which would have been extremely dangerous as it was during rush hour. At this point, the protestors stopped and instead formed a sit-in in the center of an intersection.
As I watched on the news, the camera showed an overhead view of the activities in the street below. Officers of the Tampa Police Department created a circle around the sitting protestors, both to be sure that the protest remained peaceful and to protect the protestors from vehicles that were being re-routed.
Before disbanding, the protestors formed their own circle within the TPD circle. The protestors said that their circle represented the circle of violence that must be stopped, and the unity and change they hope is coming.
This all sounds like a step forward, but when you view the scene from overhead it is saddening. You can clearly see the separation between police officers and the citizens they are charged to protect. Two separate groups, both rarely interacting with the other. I found myself wishing I would see someone step out of their circle and just acknowledge the other group with a handshake or even a smile, but there was no happy contact between the two. They seemed to be oil and water and it troubled me.
I cannot lump everyone into groups like they seem to be doing to themselves. Black lives and blue lives both matter, but it seems like all our country is left with these days is a painful bruise due to injustice and resentment.
Our country is dividing among itself.
Why should I have to choose between Black Lives Matter and Police Lives Matter? Fear and anger now roam the streets of our nation. You see it daily in peaceful and violent protests, videos of lives unjustly taken out of fear or anger, and mounting concern over citizen’s rights versus the policing of those citizens.
Where police officers are concerned, no matter how many good deeds are done, the evil of the few will be presented far more than the good of the many. Not all officers are bad; I know this. I remember a particularly difficult holiday season from my childhood and two local officers showing up with bags of gifts for my sisters and I on Christmas morning. I remember officers talking with my friends and I at a park, just joking around with a bunch of teenagers. Yes, there were white, black, and mixed race kids in our group, and the officers were white. They treated us all the same. I wish all officers were like those I have encountered.
Do my experiences equate to the experiences of everyone or the actions of all law enforcement officers? No, they don’t; but not all officers are willing to shoot first and ask questions later, most just want to be useful to their communities. These men and women are not strangers. They live and work in these communities, the same as you.
Maybe it’s not a question of good versus bad, but a question of better training and less use of firearms. After all, Tasers are on that belt along with firearms to stop things like accidental or unjust deaths from occurring.
Police officers are trained to see every interaction as potentially lethal and to be prepared for confrontation. When you are told on a daily basis that you could be killed just for putting on your uniform in the morning fear tends to be an ever-present emotion. As of July 14th 2016, 52 police officers have been killed in the line of duty and another eight have died due to things related to the job such as long-term illnesses from 9-11. Their job is a dangerous one. Is this an excuse to have a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality? I don’t believe so, but maybe we can empathize just a bit with the situations they are placed in every day.
Such is my view in the case of Philando Castile of Falcon Heights, MN. Where it was previously reported that Castile had been pulled over for a broken tail light, the vehicle had actually been stopped because of Castile’s resemblance to a robbery suspect from a couple days prior and the fact that the car was close to the location where the crime had been committed, which was said in a radio to dispatch before the vehicle was stopped and was told to Castile and Reynolds at the time of the stop. The video taken by Castile’s fiancé, Diamond Reynolds, shows the aftermath of a traffic stop gone wrong. In the video Reynolds says that Castile told the officer that he had a weapon and that he was reaching for his wallet, you can hear the officer saying “I told him not to reach for it, I told him to get his hands up,” which Reynolds does not refute during the video stream. Later, she says that Castile was had a concealed carry permit and that she had shouted that to the cop before he opened fire; whether she did or not, Castile had no such permit and as terrible as the outcome of this traffic stop was, it is far more possible to being a bad decision on the officer’s part rather than willful murder based on race and as Castile’s fiancé purports in a later interview.
What enrages people is the abuse of power given to officers who are supposed to protect communities, but instead believe their position gives them the right to take lives and pretend it was the suspects’ fault.
Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge, LA is a good example of this. The video footage of this interaction is something that horrified me beyond belief. Even I, being neither black nor male, felt a pang of fear of police officers in general after viewing this video. Sterling was shot multiple times while being held down on the ground by two police officers. Whether or not he had a gun seems irrelevant as he was already subdued. The most disgusting thing is that after Sterling has already been shot three times, you see the officers move away from him before one yells “get down on the ground” and shoots again three more times, as if he was trying to trick anyone who heard the commotion into thinking Sterling posed a threat as he lay dying. Alton Sterling didn’t seem like a threat before the officer threw him to the ground, he didn’t seem to be resisting, and after being shot he was probably confused as to what was happening, yet the officer saw it as necessary to continue shooting. This was pure and simple, an act of brutality and murder.
Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Tamir Rice, Dante Parker, Eric Garner, Tanisha Anderson, Jerame Reid, Tony Robinson, Phillip White, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, LaQuan McDonald. The list goes on, and it disgusts me.
The Black Lives Matter movement has prompted people to cry that All Lives Matter. Well, that’s true, but the point of B.L.M. is that black males are being killed at a disproportionally higher rate in police interactions than their white counterparts. And yes, I have heard the cries that the amount of deaths that result from police interactions between whites and blacks is nearly equal, which is true. So far this year, according to The Counted which is a collection of data on civilian deaths that occurred in encounters with police officers created by The Guardian, 585 people have been killed. Of that 585, 44 were unarmed whites, while 25 were unarmed blacks. (But remember, unarmed does not mean non-threatening.) These numbers are a bit shocking considering that there is an entire movement revolving around the killing of unarmed black males. But now consider the fact that 62 percent of the U.S. is white while only 13 percent is black… That kind of changes the numbers. Math is funny like that.
You are actually 2.5 percent more likely to die in an altercation with police if you are African American rather than Caucasian when you adjust the totals for population.
When can police use deadly force? When officers reasonably believe there is a threat to themselves or others. Then a court decides if the officer’s actions were reasonable at the time of the incident, not in hindsight.
This is an issue of fear and training issues within the police system that is only now coming to light because of video evidence of bad apples perpetrating police brutality on minorities. It’s disgusting and it has to stop, but that won’t happen by dividing from one another. Both, Black Lives and Blue Lives matter. Separate but equal didn’t work a hundred years ago and it won’t work now. We need to learn to live together in peace. We need to be able to trust each other. It’s a lot to ask, but I think we will get there eventually. I only worry that it will get far worse before it gets any better.
