WARNING, I have included links for reference, mostly out of a habitual need to cite my sources. However, many of the links include videos and photos of violence and death, and the content is potentially traumatic. Please click with caution. I do research so that others who cannot don't have to. Please be aware of your limits.
Today is the #MillionsMarchNYC, the Day of Anger demonstration in support of protests against police brutality, and the over-abundance of use of force against black bodies, in particular.
I could spend a lot of time enumerating the numbers of persons killed, breaking down the individual situations and the lives of the persons involved. I could parse the entirety of the Darren Wilson grand jury documentation and tell you precisely why the whole thing was a sham (based on law, not based on facts). I have, in fact, done both these things. I have occupied hours and hours of my time doing what a lot of news sources have done over the past few months. I'm not going to do that today.
Instead I want to put a few things in perspective. The #BlackLivesMatter, #HandsUpDontShoot, and #ICantBreathe campaigns are about a lot of things to a lot of people. Once you get started digging into the details behind those meanings, it's easy to get mired in the specific, and in the hard work involved in trying to suss the difference between fact and fiction, real events and myths. It is not that such work is not important, in my mind it is paramount, because it is vital to justice. However, none of these details are at all important to the reasons behind the protests, and it's key that we keep the two processes completely separate.
Things like "was it actually a choke hold?" "did he really suspect the men of shoplifting?" "did the cop have problems that should have kept him off the street?" etc, aren't important when deciding whether or not to support the protesters. This is because the details of individual cases are not pertinent to the belief that there is something systemically wrong.
Further, statistics, are just as moot, as are the questions involved in reviewing them. (Do they really show a higher incidence of police use of force against young black men? Yes they do. But do statistics also show a higher incidence of crime and violence involving young black men? Does that contribute to a cultural view among police officers that young black men are very dangerous?)
What really matters, when boiled down, is actually very simple. No one life, regardless of how the individual inhabiting that life chooses to live, is more or less valuable than any other. When a cop shoots, or beats, or suffocates a citizen, there is no point in saying "well, he was a criminal," "she was assaulting an officer," "he was resisting arrest." There is equally no point in trying to pin down the validity behind the reasons why cops may be subconsciously profiling by race, in order to justify their actions. Whether an individual person is a "good person" or whether an officer has "good reason" for their actions/reactions, is not at issue.
Let me just repeat that in case you're skimming this and missed it: The innate goodness or badness of a person or his/her actions is not at issue. It is not why people are protesting.
What is in question here is a concept that if you concentrate very hard on, you may remember from high school civics class: positive vs negative rights. We are all very conscious of our positive rights: the right to free speech and assembly (this is protesting), the right of freedom of religion, etc. What most people aren't as clear on, is their negative rights. You have the right to not be beaten, killed, or imprisoned. These are negative rights which are implicit. So implicit that we often wander from one day to the next without ever considering them.
What protesters are saying, in no uncertain terms, is that the constant equivocations being made when one person violates another person's right to bodily integrity and safety, are invalid at the root. They are particularly invalid when a person of power and privilege, a police officer wearing body armor and carrying lethal weapons, places his/her physical security over the value of another person's absolute right to life and freedom from physical harm.
Let me repeat that, as well. Each and every person is valuable simply because they are alive. Police officers, in particular, have no recourse to hide behind their own concern, for their own lives, when harming another person.
I won't insult a reader's intelligence by pretending that this is not a grey area. A person who shoots and kills, or otherwise violently disables someone who has the potential to kill many others, is often considered a hero. A person who shoots, or otherwise violently disables his/her rapist, is generally considered to be acting in self defense. I am not advocating an unthinking allegiance to pacifism.
There is, however, nothing grey about saying the following: When a certain type of person (in this case a police officer, but in general, any other person walking around armed and looking for danger), engages any person, but particularly someone who they are predisposed to view as a threat, must be incredibly careful before using their power to subdue someone else.
The previous statement is incredibly general on purpose. I am not attempting to be pretentious by using inclusion-speak, instead I am using it so that the reader will notice precisely what specific examples they plug into these ambiguities. Even if the reader fundamentally disagrees with me, he/she cannot deny the truth I have demonstrated by this example.
It is my personal belief that it should be the sworn duty of a police officer to put himself/herself in danger, in order to serve and protect the inhabitants of the community he/she serves, regardless of who those inhabitants maybe, or what they may or may not be guilty of. We do not fire our citizens for being poor, lazy, or stupid. We do not engage in euthanasia with regards to the homeless, the mentally ill, or the disabled. Why then do we permit our police force to go beyond the bounds of our justice system, and determine who has the right to live, and who does not? By allowing this to happen, we are engaging in a kind of unthinking eugenics, where young, black men who appear somehow threatening or criminal, or anyone who appears to threaten a police officer at all, may be terminated without trial or recourse.
Please imagine, if you aren't already living this reality, that you are a member of a community that is being disproportionately considered dangerous and therefore disproportionately being killed.
Now, what do you do?
