GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

Pushing Back Against the Occupation

At some point, we have to stop making excuses. At some point, we have to look at law enforcement and stop assuming their actions are warranted, that we give them far too much leeway as to when and under what circumstances they use their weapons.

Diante Yarber and Stephon Clark are just the latest victims of American racial assumptions — two more unarmed black men shot to death by police. Police officials in both California cases have explained the shootings by saying officers had a legitimate fear of their circumstances, that it appeared that they were firing to protect themselves and others. In both cases, there were reports of crimes or suspicious behavior in the area. And in both cases the men are dead, victimized by social mores that assume black men are threats, an attitude that infects police departments and has governed policing strategies for decades.

Attorney Dale Galipo, who is representing one of the injured passengers, disputes the police account. As The Guardian reported, “the investigation so far has revealed Yarber was unarmed and that officers were not in the path of the vehicle, which means they should never have discharged their weapons, let alone fire a barrage of bullets.

The details in the California cases are unique but eerily familiar. Yarber, 26, was in a car with four others in front of the local Walmart in Barstow. Police fired 30 bullets into the car, and they’ve alleged that Yarber attempted to run officers down. According to The Guardian (UK), police say “Yarber was ‘wanted for questioning’ in a stolen vehicle case and that he “‘accelerated’ the car towards officers when they tried to stop him.”

If the argument sounds familiar, its because it is. Nearly every story of an unarmed black man killed by law enforcement is accompanied by a report of suspicious behavior or accusations of criminal activity, as though that excuses the violence.

Stephon Clark was killed in the backyard of his grandmother’s home, shot multiple times when police mistook his cell phone for a gun. Police were responding to a report that someone was smashing car windows.

Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Michael Brown. Terence Crutcher was shot on an Oklahoma highway after police mistakenly assumed he was reaching into his car for a gun. Tamir Rice, 12, was playing with a toy gun in a park, when he was killed by an officer responding to a call about an adult with a gun.

This is just a partial list, and only covers a few recent years, which might create the impression that police violence is a relatively recent phenomenon or that it isn’t as big a deal as we’re making it now. This is ahistorical. Both James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. focused their attentions on police, Baldwin calling them an occupying force and King describing in his most famous address “the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”

Accountability is rare in these cases — thanks to a series of court rulings that give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt when firing weapons. In Graham v. Connor, a North Carolina case from the 1980s described by Shawn King in the New York Daily News last year, the US Supreme Court “determined that ‘reasonable use of force’ by an officer must be viewed from the perspective of what appeared reasonable in the moment of its application — not from 20/20 hindsight.” Basically, the police are given a pass for their mistakes if they can offer even the slimmest sense of fear.

“Officers, therefore, are fully empowered to act in the moment,” King writes, “even if just a little bit of restraint would’ve proven those actions to be completely egregious.”

This creates an impossible standard for those seeking to rein in police, and leaves the families of mostly black and Latino victims with little hope.

This is about race, but not about individually racist officers. This is about police, but not about the proverbial bad apple. It is about the broader American dysfunction that is white supremacy and about police departments, which are now multi-racial and multi-ethnic, operating with an oppositional and militarized mindset that treats communities of color as, to quote Baldwin, an “occupying territory.” Reforms are needed — body cameras, training, new use-of-force guidelines — but they can only go so far. The changes need to be systemic and reach beyond the police into the broader culture. This is not going to be easy, but the white supremacist mindset — embodied in the Trump presidency, the Republican Party, and far too many Democrats and public employees — must be eradicated or the list of victims will not end with Clark and Yarber.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; tumblr, hankkalet.tumblr.com; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.kalet; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2018

Populist.com