A little fact-checking would have prevented Frank Medeiros from publicly embarrassing himself with a letter copied almost verbatim from a piece written by Jerry Schaefer in the Las Vegas Tribune three days before: http://lasvegastribune.net/police-officers-killed-fund/
True author aside, whoever wrote it sure did a lot of cherry-picking of police killings, yet still managed to get things wrong. His/their contention, that anyone who objects to police shooting unarmed black men is a racist … is, charitably, disorganized thinking. Or, less charitably, racism trying to defend itself.
Referring to the killing of officer Melvin Santiago, Medeiros and/or Schaefer ask why Atty. General Holder didn’t weigh in on the officer’s death. Perhaps it was because President Obama had already sent condolences to Santiago’s parents, as had Senator Cory Booker.
Medeiros asks, “How about Officer Jeffrey Westerfield?” Good question. This was not merely a case of Bad Black Man kills Good White Officer. It was a domestic abuse case gone terribly wrong, in which the killer’s half-brother did not hesitate to implicate him. Westerfield was not killed because he was white, and his killer was not arrested without help from the black community.
Medeiros and/or Schaefer also chose Kevin Jordan, a black officer who was killed by a white man, Michael Bowman. The author(s) ask why there was little public outrage. Perhaps because an officer was killed while working at a Waffle House by a gang of white thugs with legal gun permits. A better question would have been why so many people in the United States are carrying weapons into Waffle Houses.
Yet the real issue is and always has been how communities are policed.
In 2012 88% of all officers were male, with percentages over 92% in most small towns and cities. Nationally, between 70-80% of police officers are white, again with higher percentages in small towns. But cities are a huge problem. The New York Times recently ran a piece about police departments whose white officers exceed the overall white population by 30-50%. In the greater Boston area, Chelsea is 25% white but has 78% white officers – 53% higher. Dozens of Massachusetts cities have this problem and almost every major city has even worse figures than greater Boston. Ferguson, Missouri is absolutely the national norm.
Worse, these predominantly white police departments police black communities with very little accountability – and they kill on average one black man every 28 hours – so, yes, it does bring out the protests and occasionally a riot. It is impunity that has people so upset.
Statistics demonstrate that white officers are suspicious more, stop more, harass more, and shoot more when those they interact with are not white. All this increases distrust and resentment of the police. The status quo is not working.
We also cannot disregard the fact that Americans are one of the most heavily-armed people on earth. Put weapons in the hands of gangs and thugs – or even an angry boyfriend – and murders happen – to civilians and police officers alike.
According to the FBI’s figures on 48 killings of police officers in 2012, 42 officers were white and 6 were black – pretty much in line with police demographics. Medeiros and/or Schaefer imply, first, from their examples, that blacks are more likely to attack white police officers and, second, that the Sharptons and Jacksons and Obamas and Holders (translation: black people) only care when black blood is spilled. But as we have seen, both claims are nonsense.
The school-to-prison pipeline – a system that still uses “broken-windows” policing (coming down hard on minor crime) – results in one in three minority men being incarcerated sometime in his life. It is a system that prevents people from ever finding work again, denies them the vote, and fosters a cycle of anger, hopelessness, alienation, violence and more crime. Michelle Alexander, the author of the “New Jim Crow,” notes that more men are incarcerated today than under slavery.
We certainly need economic justice in this country, but we also need police departments that reflect the communities they work in and that treat everyone equally. We have a long way to go.
But to paint these calls for change in community policing as a sort of “reverse racism” is another right-wing “blame the victim” tactic. And as such it’s deeply, offensively, racist.
This was published in the Standard Times on September 18, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20140918/opinion/409180349