Black Lives Matter Is Not About Killing Cops
As two thousand supporters of Black Lives Matter take to the street today in Philadelphia, we all need to take notice. Like countless others across the country, I have closely followed the birth and evolution of Black Lives Matter, joining them and their supporters on the streets to protest racist shootings at the hands of police. I do not speak for Black Lives Matter, but blaming the recent tragic murders of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge on the movement is misplaced and unfair from my experience and study.
BLM and others are working on programs to create true community policing that is about public safety for all. Their rebellious method of organizing recognizes that meaningful, lasting change can only come about through collaboration with allies with common goals and experiences. Working with the labor movement, immigrant rights groups, Latino and Asian American organizations, pro-Palestinian activists, and grassroots groups like Critical Resistance, BlackOUT Collective, Stop Urban Shield Coalition, and Dark Matter represents a strong foundation for collective change. Their various proposals generally fall into three overlapping categories: procedural, attitudinal, or community-oriented.
The procedural realm includes the following: Curtailment of sales of military equipment to local law enforcement. Better transparency—including requiring body cameras. Recruiting better-educated officers. Use of Tasers and less-lethal weapons. Training on verbal warnings and warning shots. Requiring police officers to collect data on the people they stop, including perceived race and ethnicity, the reason for the encounter, and the outcome. Better civilian review, internal affairs, diversifying personnel.
To change police attitudes, advocates promote: Non-enforcement activities by police, sensitivity training, exploring root causes of social problems. Crisis intervention training. Implicit bias training. Prosecutions of officers and civil suits against police departments. Community-wise, they advocate for restorative justice and to train others to be first-responders to incidents involving individuals suffering from mental health or drug problems.
Thanks to social media and the ubiquity of 24/7 CNN news coverage today, images of shootings like those of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling are brought to us in our living rooms or smart phones in an instant. Just as quickly as those images are brought to us and spread across the internet, the substance of racialized policing can be distorted or displaced by the next hot topic or shocking image. One could make a good case that the only reason that racialized policing remains in the consciousness of many Americans is due to a new tragic incident on a regular basis. The risk we run is not that we forget, but that we become jaded—unresponsive –to the illness that apparently pervades so much of policing today. Strangely enough, perhaps the Dallas tragedy will keep the question of racialized policing on the table for a bit longer.
Most of us raised a skeptical eyebrow when, in Grutter v. Bollinger, the affirmative action case of 2003, Justice O’Connor predicted that “25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” We are half way into those 25 years. We wished that she was correct, but knew she was wrong. People of color in the United States experience racially insensitive comments or actions too often to know that judgment by character rather than skin color is not guaranteed. Attentive white Americans know their advantages and also hear and sense the racist sentiments or actions of their white neighbors or friends all too often.
We remain disappointed that in the year 2016 the need for a call to action to combat racism in the institution of law enforcement continues. However, in our lifetimes—in fact just in the past couple years—we have witnessed constant, violent racialized policing; we have witnessed 21-year old white supremacist Dylan Roof killing nine black parishioners and their minister during Bible study at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church; we have witnessed the attempt to hang onto the confederate flag by those who continue to cling to their racist glory days. As the latter examples demonstrate, when violent racist policing continues and goes unpunished, the malevolent actions of racist cops gives license to private vigilante racists who engage in their own brand of hate speech and violence.
This call to action is to address the illness that has plagued the nation since slavery, the institution of Jim Crow, the mass incarceration of the New Jim Crow, and the continued targeting of black men and women in violent racialized policing. This is the same malady that has plagued our nation since the mass annihilation of native Americans, the exclusion of Asian immigrants, and the relentless targeting of Mexicans for deportation.
Law enforcement may resist and argue that a decision had to be made in a millisecond, but we can see from videos of beatings and shootings like those of Sterling and William Chapman another black man, accused of shoplifting, that these are not decisions made in a blink. All too often these decisions are rooted in the evils of structural racism that licenses the individual officer. Other times, these are malicious decisions to simply join in on the fun of beating on a black man like Rodney King years ago.
Today more than ever, we need to recommit to racial justice in our criminal justice system. Today, more than ever, we also need to acknowledge that the ideas to reform policing may come from grass roots groups, from a range of allies, and that the leadership for reform also may come from those sources. We need to listen for those innovative ideas that can disrupt the convention. They may come from that young child on an American street or from some soul resisting similar oppression in the Middle East.
Those disruptive ideas will flow from the sorrow and anger over the racist shootings we have witnessed, as we and our friends turn that outrage into humanistic solutions based on the understanding that these lives mattered, as the souls of those who hold the guns and drive the tanks are transformed, willingly or not, into choosing peacemaking over violence.
For elaboration on my views, see From Ferguson to Palestine: Disrupting Race-Based Policing, 59 Howard L.J. __ (2016).