Police shouldn’t be shooting so many Black people. But.
When a denunciation of police brutality and racial injustice is followed by a major caveat, such as “that doesn’t give people the right to burn down businesses” or “that doesn’t mean it’s OK to loot” or “police have a tough job,” it isn’t much of a denunciation.
TV self-help guru Dr. Phil says that any statement followed by “but” means that you can disregard what came before because the speaker is about to say what they really think.
Of course, property has value. Of course, businesses are owned by people, and those people don’t deserve to have their livelihoods damaged or destroyed. Of course, police officers have one of the most challenging, important and dangerous jobs. Of course, most exchanges between police officers and suspects end without violence. Of course. These things should go without saying.
When we say them so close in proximity to a statement of support for minorities who have been unjustly shot, killed, arrested, and harassed by the very people who are supposed to be protecting them, we take the emphasis off the bigger injustice and focus it elsewhere. It’s deflection, and it’s not helpful.
The fact that the nation has seen so many high-profile cases of police shooting Black suspects speaks to a real problem. A recent example is Daunte Wright, killed in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, by officer Kim Potter, a 26-year veteran of the force who allegedly confused her Taser and her service weapon. She has since been charged with second-degree manslaughter.
Wright’s death occurred about 10 miles from the courtroom where a jury was hearing the case of Derek Chauvin, the officer on trial for the death of George Floyd last year.
The Chauvin case has been plagued by a lot of “buts.” The jury will have to determine if any of them provide a plausible reason for Floyd’s death, over and above the 9.5 minutes that Chauvin kneeled on his victim’s neck.
Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be shot by police officers than white Americans, according to the advocacy group Mapping Police Violence. The group’s 2020 report notes that Black people were also “more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed.”
And while it is always appropriate to urge peaceful protest, it is also impossible to deny the sense of hopelessness that must permeate communities in a country where minorities are often arrested at higher rates, sentenced to longer prison terms, hired less often, suspended from school more frequently and subjected to greater poverty, all because of systemic racism.
Despite this, the vast majority of Black protests are peaceful, minus the few situations where emotions get the better of some involved or where opportunists see a chance to use chaos for their own ends.
Even non-violent protests are criticized. Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling for the national anthem was peaceful, yet still disparaged. Black Lives Matter, an attempt to call attention to discrimination, was followed by All Lives Matter, thereby showing that organizers of that last movement missed the point.
BLM focuses on an overlooked demographic; if all lives truly mattered, there wouldn’t be a need to say that Black lives do, too. It’s like criticizing an organization for calling attention to breast cancer because other cancers are also deadly.
Racial discrimination is a societal cancer. It needs to be rooted out. Discussions over when and how police officers deploy weapons of all kinds — guns and tasers — are vital. Mapping Police Violence notes some communities have transferred traffic-enforcement duties from police to “unarmed civil servants” and invited mental health experts to join police on some calls to help better defuse potential violence, among other solutions.
These are alternatives that must be prioritized, pursued and publicized, not merely trotted out after every new tragedy. It would also help if many Americans focused less on the aftermath of such events and more on the injustices themselves.
This means fewer expressions of sympathy watered down by “but.”
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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