The menace of police officers killing (unarmed) black men has become a tragic feature of American life. Unfortunately, the way black activists react to these killings not only compounds but actually reinforces this feature.
Notably, they rush to make martyrs of these dead black men. This perverse ritual invariably has them
- holding street protests — complete with chants of “Black Lives Matter!” and “No Justice, No Peace!”;
- exhorting state and federal authorities to prosecute the officers involved;
- laying the predicate for multimillion-dollar lawsuits, which can seem intended as much to extort local municipalities as to compensate the families involved; and
- paying no regard to the menace of resisting arrest, which is the precipitating cause of so many deadly encounters with the police.
The point is that these activists do and say far too little to help other black men avoid similar martyrdom. Even worse, they appear to have a prevailing political/mercenary interest in cleaning up after these tragedies.
By contrast, I’ve been like a biblical John the Baptist preaching about what black men should do to survive their encounters with the police. I formulated my message in “Killing of Michael Brown: as much about Resisting Arrest as Police Brutality (only against Black Men?),” August 12, 2014.
Arguably, his killing remains the most infamous of these fatal encounters. Here in part is what I preached in that commentary:
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Not every fatal shooting by the police of an unarmed man is a case of police brutality. We’ve all seen far too many incidents of people resisting arrest – even wresting away a policeman’s gun and killing him – just because they feared being questioned or arrested … even for something as simple as petty theft.
You’d be hard-pressed to cite a case that resulted in fatality, where the victim followed the few general rules we should all follow when dealing with the police. Those rules, which form the acronym “Dodge” (as in bullets), are:
- Do not run.
- Obey commands. (Wait for the police to explain why you’re being stopped before politely posing any objections, concerns, or questions you may have.)
- Do not resist being frisked or handcuffed.
- Get the encounter on video. (Wait for the police to approach and make clear that you’d like to reach for your phone; i.e., avoid any sudden move that might make some trigger-happy cop’s day.)
- End the encounter civilly. (Not only might this spare another black man a racial-profiling stop (e.g., for DWB), it might make that cop less trigger happy during his next encounter with the next black man.) …
There would be fewer of these fatal encounters between black men and white cops if more (unemployed) black men became cops to police their own communities. I mean, am I the only one who was struck by the contrast between the black men looting and the predominantly white cops trying to restore law and order in this predominantly black community…?
In fact, this suburb of St. Louis, Ferguson, is almost 70 percent black, yet it’s being served by a police force that’s over 95 percent white. Perhaps, instead of leading St. Louis blacks in hackneyed chants of “No justice, no peace,” Reverend Al Sharpton should turn and shout at them “Stop looting! Start policing!”
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This is why I find breaking news about the police killing of yet another unarmed black man so distressing. However, when I learn that the victim was resisting arrest, my distress invariably turns to anger.
On the other hand, when I learn that the victim was complying according to my rules, my distress turns to despair.
Nonetheless:
My ‘golden rule’ is that black men would survive 99 percent of these encounters if they just obey police commands. Unfortunately, far too many choose instead to resist arrest — pursuant to some misguided (black) badge of courage. When a policeman is placing you under arrest (no matter how unwarranted you might think that is), it should not take him (and others) wrestling you to the ground to get handcuffs on you.
I readily concede that, in one percent of these encounters, obeying commands would not guarantee survival. The viral video of the killing of Philando Castile demonstrated this … in black and white. But this is the exception, not the rule. Which is why it’s plainly foolhardy to resist arrest because obeying commands only offers a 99 percent chance of survival.
(“Three White Cops Kill Two Black Men…,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 3, 2017)
This brings me to the case of Stephon Clark. Here is how I commented on his killing in “Stephon Clark and Alton Sterling – Police Killing (Sometimes) Justified,” March 27, 2018:
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Nobody can deny that resisting arrest led to the death of Stephon Clark. … I am frustrated and dismayed that more people aren’t preaching to black men about the tragic folly of resisting arrest. After all, this clearly makes more sense than preaching to the police about the presumed fairness of holding fire, especially in what they perceive as life-and-death situations. …
I have nothing but contempt … for lawyers and activists who rush in to make dubious martyrs of them. This, instead of admonishing other black men to do the right things to avoid ending up like them. Nobody wanted Clark dead. But I’m sure none of the (black) people whose cars he vandalized and burglarized considers him a martyr for any worthy cause.
Not to mention that, for those lawyers and activists, justice is more about getting their cut from civil settlements than getting any cop thrown in jail. And that’s not me just being my cynical self:
Al Sharpton is all about the Benjamins, a daughter of police chokehold victim Eric Garner claims in a bombshell videotape.
(The New York Post, February 24, 2015)
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I did not proclaim these killings “sometimes” justified to be provocative. Because the record plainly shows that both state and federal authorities almost always find them so.
Which brings me to the long-awaited, but all too predictable, finding in this Clark case:
Two Sacramento police officers won’t face criminal charges for the fatal shooting of a black man following a chase that ended in his grandparents’ yard and started a series of angry protests that roiled California’s capital city, the county’s top prosecutor announced Saturday following a nearly yearlong investigation.
Schubert said the evidence, including their reactions captured on body cameras, supported the officers’ statements that they thought Clark was pointing a gun. It turned out Clark was holding only a cellphone.
(The Associated Press, March 3, 2019)
Unsurprisingly, black activists reacted to this announcement with stale cries about Clark holding only a cellphone. This, while willfully ignoring the more glaring and consequential fact that, if he did not run in the first place, the police would have had far less cause to suspect that his cellphone was a gun.
Still, to reinforce the point that not every police shooting is justified, I’ll share this rather timely development:
A fired Florida police officer was convicted Thursday of manslaughter and attempted murder in the fatal shooting of a stranded black motorist in 2015.
Nouman Raja, 41, faces life in prison for fatally shooting musician Corey Jones, 31, who was waiting for help for his broken down SUV on the side of a South Florida highway when he was killed by Raja.
(NBC News, March 7, 2019)
Finally, this denouement from “Alton Sterling Latest Black Man Shot Dead … While (or for) Resisting Arrest” July 7, 2016:
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[N]othing I’ve ever written about these cases should imply any belief that white cops are licensed to kill black men who resist arrest.
To the contrary, in ‘Clarion Call for Body Cameras to Check Bad Cops,’ April 14, 2015, I cited the killing of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Eric Harris in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as two of far too many examples where similar shootings were wholly unjustified. Sure enough, the cop in the former case is awaiting trial in the fall for murder; the cop in the latter case was sentenced last month to the maximum four years in prison for second-degree manslaughter. But these prosecutions do not mitigate the fact that resisting arrest is always like playing Russian roulette. …
Meanwhile, it’s only a matter of time before lawyers extract millions from the city of Baton Rouge to compensate Sterling’s family for his death. You might think this provides a deadly incentive for black men to keep resisting arrest.
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[Note: You’d be forgiven for thinking that the police kill more black Americans than any other group. In fact, according to an investigative report in the October 2016 issue of In These Times, they kill Native Americans at an even higher rate. Except that Native Americans do not have media-savvy activists like Al Sharpton or protest movements like Black Lives Matter to force similar coverage and compensation when the police kill one of their own.]
Related commentaries:
Killing black men…
Killing of Michael Brown…
Alton Sterling…
body cameras…