Not to beat a dead horse, but the year 2014 was a horrifying year for unbridled police violence against black men young and old.
We were shocked when 43-year-old Eric Garner, a father and grandfather, was strangled to death by officer Daniel Pantaleo who continued to choke the unarmed man after he repeatedly insisted: “I can’t breathe.”
We were appalled when an unarmed Michael Brown, who according to many witnesses had his hands up in a gesture of surrender, was shot by officer Darren Wilson, and then puzzled when unarmed John Crawford was shot by police in an Ohio Walmart while carrying a toy rifle that Crawford had bought there. Puzzled, because police say they shot him because they thought the toy rifle was real, even though Ohio is an open carry state that allows Ohio citizens to carry real rifles in public.
We were angered by the shooing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland, Ohio playground, where police had been advised by the 911 caller that the gun was probably fake. “Shoot first, ask questions later” knows no age limits when the victims of police brutality are black.
The words of the late Michael Jackson still sound loudly in my spirit: I’m Not Going To Spend My Life Being A Color. And yet the reality is that irrespective of how we personally feel, there is yet a wide line of color that defines and categorizes us and it remains the veil through which our presumptions about each other flow.
For many blacks the fact that we are able to marry whomever we choose to, without regard to color or ethnic background, is a sign of society’s maturing. But the plain truth is that our bloodlines in this country have always been mixed– but it has not entitled us to equality of economic opportunity or freedom from discriminatory treatment.
I recall watching on television a taped encounter between a motorist and a state trooper. The officer walked over to the vehicle and asked for the driver’s license and registration, and the driver immediately began screaming at him and cursing him out for stopping him instead of being out catching real criminals. The officer took the driver’s credentials back to his vehicle and returned with a ticket. The driver began screaming and cursing him out again. He then tore up the ticket and threw it at the officer. The trooper calmly told him that if he didn’t pick up the paper, he would arrest him for littering. The driver existed his vehicle, picked up all the paper, got back in his car, cursed the office out again, then stormed off heading down the road.
You figure out if the driver, who was never touched, never thrown up against the car, never forced to lie down in the road, was black or white.
We’d like to think that the trooper in question would have responded the same way no matter who or what color the driver was, but the reality in America is that no sane black man would even risk screaming or cursing at or calling a police officer a-holes or m-fs, because we know that we can be gunned down– unarmed– with no fear on the part of the officer of there being any kind of repercussion.
2014 reminded us that black men are simply fair game for any officer of the law with anger management– or bad judgment– issues. It’s a deeply sickening feeling, because whether by rope or by gun, a lynching is still a lynching.
We had hoped that some sense of sanity would be injected into the equation after the world-wide attention focused on the brutality and by the violent protests that erupted in response. But 2015 isn’t looking all that great.
Just this week, a police officer in Gastonia, North Carolina shot and killed 74-year-old James Howard Allen in his home after family members called police and asked them to go to his home to check on him. The 74-year-old veteran had recently undergone surgery.
An officer stopped by the home and no one answered. Police then talked with the Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services and a decision was made to enter the house because of concerns that Allen could have been inside and unable to come to the door. They broke in through the back door, apparently woke Allen up, and he pulled his gun. Needless to say, he was immediately shot dead.
Police say they identified themselves before going in. No surprise there. But Allen was apparently of sound mind. It’s certainly possible, but hard to imagine a rational, 74-year-old recuperating surgery patient intentionally drawing down on people he knew to be the police.
I can’t help wondering if he’d been an elderly white veteran whether or not he’d have been shot down on the spot by his “rescuers.”
Let’s pray that 2015 turns out to be a much better year in the history of black male/police relations.
