Lights, Camera, Good Grief

It's the cameras that are new.

It's not the violence that's new.

- Ta-Nehisi Coates

I have had a busy week, so I don't have time to go over everything that's going on right now.  Frankly, most of it is vanity and chasing after the wind anyway.  Hillary's emails, Trump being Trump, the Brexit, blah, blah, blah.  Oh yeah, and two more black men have been shot by police (actually more than that, but two that were actually recorded on video) during "routine" stops for things that shouldn't have even amounted to more than a "Hey did you know your tail light is out."  I used to drive a junker (1984 Chevy Cavalier), I had cops stop me to tell me that something or other was wrong a few times, on most occasions they didn't even ask to see my license or registration.  But then again, I'm white, so I don't pretend that my experience with police has anything to do with what has happened so often recently.

It's easy, too easy really, for me to say I support the police, because to me the police are my neighbors (literally, my neighbor is a Police officer).  They are also generally pretty nice to me, even when I have gotten caught being naughty.  I have never been brutalized or really even seriously intimidated by a police officer, they have never pulled a gun on me and told me to get down on the ground (and I have actually been arrested once, long time ago, galaxy far, far away).  I have worked with police officers, I have talked to police officers, and I know that most of them really are good guys (and women), but even good guys can do bad things, especially when they are trained and conditioned to respond to certain types of people in certain situations with more violence than they would otherwise exercise.  Especially when the whole context of their work teaches them that it's okay and expected.

There is no better example of the fact that racism is a systemic problem, and not just a matter of collective individual prejudice, than the growing list of black men who have been killed by police in less than critical situations.  It is not, I believe, a matter of the individual police officers being racist, though there may be some, most are probably not. Our police, black, brown and white, are enmeshed in a system that is undeniably racist.  Black men are incarcerated at a tragically higher rate than white men, even though the controlled substance violations that largely cause these incarcerations are actually more prevalent among the white population.  White kids (like me) usually get a lawyer and walk away with a fine and probation, black kids go to jail or juvenile detention, and once you've experienced the institution of incarceration, things generally don't get much better for you.

As a culture, we assume things about black men, we impute to them the qualities of arrogance and danger, it is not surprising that we largely support our police doing the same thing. While it breaks my heart to see videos of people dying so pointlessly in the streets at the hands of the people who are supposed to be protecting us, I feel that we all need to see these things, including police officers who are not in the heat of the moment.  My hope is that the good guys will take notice of their own behavior and that they will recognize the blind spots in the system of which they are the hands and feet (and guns).

We need these videos, because we will not believe the voices, like Mr. Coates, who tell us how it is to live on the other side of the tracks, unless we have other documentation. We don't want to believe them, and our own experience of policemen and women tells us that something is awry.  We would much rather make individual exceptions, label this victim a thug, or say that victim resisted arrest, or finding any little excuse why a black somebody had to die.  We would rather believe that the officers were following their training (the part that teaches them command presence and use of force) and not acknowledging that they were probably not following their training (the part that teaches them situational awareness, deescalation, and peaceful intervention).

Want to change this pattern? I believe that our police officers are the ones who can start to fix the system, but they have to be empowered to do so.  I believe that the reason most people become police is because they are fundamentally good people who want to protect and serve, and we should give them the tools they need to do that, for everyone, equal protection under the law.