Police Violence, Dallas and Black Lives Matter

A lot has been happening lately, and I haven't been able to keep up with all that I'd like to write about. This post was half finished for a couple of days, and I've also been itching to comment on the recent ruling on China's South China Sea claims. Then there have been events ranging from the space probe Juno's arrival at Jupiter to the violence in South Sudan, the terrorist attack in Nice, and the coup attempt in Turkey. I hope that I'll manage to write up something on at least the South China Sea issue in the next couple of weeks.

Another week, another bunch of people killed in gun violence in the US. To a certain degree, especially given my residence outside the US, I can’t help but be a little desensitized to all of it. Still, there are some factors that make it hard to dismiss these incidents so easily. For one thing, I grew up in Dallas, and though I’m not particularly sentimental about it as a place, it was a little startling to see it make the headlines in the way it did. But to tell the truth, even before the sniper struck in Dallas, I was feeling the urge to comment on the police shootings that led to the protests like the one attacked by the shooter.

First off, let me make clear that I have absolutely no sympathy for the killer who struck in Dallas and every bit of sympathy with the families and loved ones of the police officers he killed and with those who he wounded. As someone else commented somewhere, by indiscriminately striking at people simple because they were police officers, he was engaging in exactly the kind of behavior that protestors have attributed with some reason to a minority of police officers, that of treating all members of a group with automatic suspicion and hostility. There is absolutely no justification for what he did. I will also add that I agree that everyone should support the police force as an institution, one that is absolutely necessary in our society, and the vast majority of individuals who constitute it. What form that support should take is the question, one which I will come back to.

On the other hand, I also support the Black Lives Matter movement in its quest to do something about the obvious disparities in how people of color are treated by law enforcement and the failure of the current system to hold police accountable for even egregious cases of abuse. I should note, as many others have, that when we say “black lives matter” it is not saying that other lives don’t matter. What it means is that black lives ALSO matter. While that should go without saying, the casualness with which black and other people of color have been killed by police in many recent incidents, and the way some people have defended the officers involved (e.g., saying that the person killed deserved to die, despite the often extremely minor nature of the offenses that were accused – and not even convicted! – of), it is clear that some people both in law enforcement and outside it act is if black lives really don’t matter. There is no doubt in my mind that in at least some of the incidents over the past few years, if the victim had been white he or she wouldn’t have ended up dead. It is for good reason that even African Americans who have never committed even the most minor crime say encounters with police make them extremely nervous. There are plenty of unequivocal instances of innocent black men being arrested for crimes they didn’t commit merely due to the misfortune of being nearby and black.

But the problems with law enforcement in the US are not limited to the unquestionable differences in the treatment people of color receive from the police. The other major issue is that of the almost complete lack of accountability for violence committed by police, regardless of the race of the victim. Hundreds of people are killed by police every year, and while in the majority of cases the police were probably justified, there are many in which they clearly were not. Even where there is some doubt about whether a police shooting was justified, it is not unreasonable to expect a thorough investigation and even a trial. After all, when a civilian kills someone, even in self-defense, they often have to prove it in court, unless the circumstances are so unequivocal that the prosecutor doesn’t bring charges. But police officers are almost never even indicted, much less convicted, even when it is clear that there was no justification for their actions. This applies not only to police shootings, but other violence such as beatings. Even if we accept that police officers should have a little extra leeway in their use of force due to the nature of their job, they can’t be completely unaccountable when they kill or assault innocent people.

The truth is, as many have pointed out, including some police officers, if the police commit unjustifiable violent acts and are never held accountable, this just makes it harder for the good officers to do their jobs. If people in a community see that the police not only behave badly but are never punished for their bad behavior, no one will trust them. Not only will the police be unable to work with the community to stop criminals, the people of the community will start to see the police as just as much of a threat as the criminals. This is already the situation in many communities across the US. If, on the other hand, police who abuse their authority are punished, not only will it make the police better by getting rid of the bad apples, it will show the people of the local community that the system is working, making them much more willing to work with law enforcement.

Of course, we should also recognize that the police have a difficult job, one in which they face a great deal of stress and even life-threatening danger for little reward. But that doesn’t mean we should support them when they have clearly crossed the line. The kind of support they really should be getting is better pay, better benefits, reduced work hours, more training (particularly in how to handle dangerous situations without resorting to violence) and other measures to make their jobs less stressful and more rewarding. What’s more, strong measures need to be taken to reduce the number of guns in the US. One reason police in the US are so trigger-happy is because they know that there’s a very good chance that anyone they deal with is armed. This is not something that police in most other countries have to deal with, and it makes the job of American police a lot harder. Though at this point it would take a mass confiscation of weapons as thorough as the most paranoid imaginings of gun nuts to reduce the number of guns in the US to a level similar to that of most civilized nations, even a few steps to make sure that the most dangerous people have trouble getting guns and the most deadly weapons are no longer widely available would at least make things slightly easier on the police.

In the end, holding police accountable by punishing abuses of authority and irresponsible use of violence; taking steps to improve the problem of conscious and unconscious racism among police by improving hiring practices, firing overtly racist cops and providing racial sensitivity training to the rest; training police better in ways to deescalate dangerous situations; and improving community outreach by law enforcement will in fact improve the lot of the police as well as that of the communities they police, especially if at the same time, we increase pay and benefits for police and take other steps to make their jobs easier, including taking steps to reduce the number of guns out there. The siege mentality displayed recently by many police officers and particularly their unions, on the other hand, will only make things worse for everyone, including the police themselves. As people from Jon Stewart to Hillary Clinton have observed, it is not at all difficult to recognize that police officers have it tough and to give the majority of them our sympathy and support and at the same time to want police who abuse their authority or through overly careless use of force kill or maim people unnecessarily to be held accountable, and for black and other people of color to be treated fairly. Indeed, the best kind of support that good officers can get it is to make sure that bad ones don’t cause ordinary people to lose their trust in the police force as a whole.

As an aside, it is worth addressing the claim by some that the Black Lives Matter movement and even President Barack Obama (and “liberals” in general) were responsible for the attack on police in Dallas because they created an atmosphere of hostility toward the police. This can be contrasted with the assertion that the right wing is in part responsible for the mass shooting at the gay nightclub in Orlando because of their anti-LGBT rhetoric. In the latter case, the anti-LGBT people have implied that gay and transgender people don’t deserve equal treatment, which is another way of saying that they are inferior. Some of the more extreme voices have come right out and said they shouldn’t even exist. On the other hand, while I have no doubt that on the fringes of the BLM movement there are some that act as if all police are the enemy (and therefore legitimate targets), that sort of attitude is not held or in any way implied by the majority of BLM activists, much less President Obama, who has bent over backwards to express his support for the majority of police officers. As I explained above, saying that the police who killed people like Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Darrien Hunt, or Philando Castile should be held accountable is not at all the same as saying that all or even most police officers are bad, much less that they should be targeted for assault. In other words, except for a few extremists, most people who have said that something needs to be done about police violence have not condemned police officers in general, and in fact many have specifically expressed support for most police. On the other hand, even the least offensive of the anti-LGBT rhetoric from the right implies a negative view of LGBT people in general. So which type of rhetoric can be most fairly implicated in an assault that indiscriminately targets members of the group in question? The answer to that should be obvious. In any case, what is needed in the case of police violence is for the police and those with authority over them to work with BLM activists and others to find ways to fix the problems that clearly exist. While that may not be easy, with a little good will on both sides it should be possible to make real progress. But it should be done as quickly as possible, before the hardliners on both sides make things worse.