By Calvin Hill
One of the police officers who apprehended Dylan Storm Roof, accused murderer of nine South Carolina churchgoers, holstered his weapon as he approached the door of the vehicle occupied by Roof. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, an armed senior citizen shot and killed a helpless, unarmed man already subdued by police. An unarmed woman was fatally gunned down after knocking at a door seeking assistance for her broken down vehicle. And a young man was shot to death while sitting in the back of a vehicle by a man who disapproved of the content and the volume of the music emanating from said vehicle. The common denominators of the aforementioned acts were that the unarmed Americans killed were black. All of the suspected killers, who were white, and by most accounts would be considered armed and dangerous, were taken alive and without incident.
A Cleveland police officer was acquitted after mounting the hood of an automobile and emptying his revolver at an unarmed black couple who had been subjected to over one hundred rounds of gunfire from his fellow officers following a high speed chase. In Baltimore, a perfectly mobile black man, Freddie Gray, suddenly appears disabled as police officers dragged him into a police van where he subsequently died in custody with a partially broken spine. And Sandra Bland, a black woman, died in the custody of a Texas police department, under a dubious suicide claim, after being arrested at a traffic stop merely for asking the white officer why she had to put out her cigarette while sitting in her own vehicle.
The peaceful protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, with the aid of social media, have pointed out that these were not isolated incidents. They are just the latest in a culture of street jurisprudence meted out by law enforcement and civilian aggression against black Americans, without the complexities of lawyers, indictments, trials, juries, or the discomfort of Miranda or civil rights. Nevertheless, the recent spate of police killings have led Bill O’Reilly of FOX NEWS CHANNEL to blame the Black Lives Matter movement for these cop killings. The absurdity of some of the nonsense that regurgitate from the mouth of Bill O’Reilly can often be excruciating if not downright ridiculous – as well as dangerous. Almost all valid social movements can be infiltrated, either physically or emotionally, by a loner who does not understand, or care, about the reasons for the movement and is willing to take matters into their own hands. The act of a lone wolf does not delegitimize the issues or the goals that the movement wishes to accomplish.
If O’Reilly and other conservative mouthpieces believe that the peaceful protests of the Black Lives Matter movement is responsible for the recent cop killings, they need to comment on the following. Candidate Rudy Giuliani was subsequently elected mayor of New York City having attended a rally by thousands of NYPD officers who marched on City Hall, some who were drinking and in a state of public intoxication, boisterously castigating Mayor David Dinkins while also referring to him as a “nigger.” Did Mayor Giuliani’s support of those police protestors lead to law enforcement sanctioning the killing of unarmed Patrick Dorismund, unarmed Amadou Diallo and the near death sodomizing of Abner Louima? Mayor Giuliani was quick to defend the actions of the police without knowledge of any facts or investigative findings, and the multitude of protests that ensued, which saw many prominent protestors arrested, did not result in the ambush or killing of police officers.
Black Americans are well aware of the difficulty of policing. Those relegated to underserved, undereducated and unemployed communities know it more. They, more than most Americans count on the effectiveness of local law enforcement. The total ineffectiveness of federal and state authorities, and the absence of congressional concern, to keep guns and drugs out of their communities have kept them and their families, bodily and emotionally victimized. They should not be victimized by their police.
In the effort to protect these American communities and its citizenry from the criminal elements that endangers them as well as law enforcement, the police count on, and often receives the cooperation of the community to help rid the streets of those pariahs who prey on them. And in the interest of justice, protests like the Black Lives Matter movement simply want the cooperation of police so that the pariahs in their departments suffer the same fate.
[Title courtesy of a Richard Pryor bit.]
The Op-Ed Alternative 