Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Police Shootings, Property Damage, and the Responsibility of Bystanders

Imagine you get lost walking in the woods. You are starving, unable to find food, and you realize a winter storm is starting. You happen across a cabin in the woods. While clearly it is someone’s cabin, when you knock no one answers the door. There are no lights, no shadows. Everything indicates they are not home. You wait an hour and they do not return home. You call out asking for help. No one answers. You fear for your safety. You suspect – based on the few things you can see through the windows – that there might be food or supplies inside. To save yourself, you’ll have to break a window and take someone else’s supplies. Do you do it?

The question was raised my first day of law school. It’s been over a decade, but every now and then I come back to it – and the responses of my classmates. Every single one of us said we would break the window and take the supplies.

Would we feel guilty about it? No.

Do we think we should be prosecuted for property damage? Of course not.

Why? Because sometimes the need to survive trumps other rights and interests.

It’s why no one watches Les Miserables and actually thinks Jean Valjean should go to prison.

I’ve had cause to again reflect on this issue this week as I listened to friends lament the property damage occurring during protests in Charlotte, North Carolina. The protests are in response to another police killing of a potentially unarmed black man. Whether Keith Lamont Scott had a weapon or not, and whether he pointed it at police or not, is currently disputed. The police chief has refused to release the videotape, which he admits “does not give . . . absolute, definitive visual evidence” to support police claims that Mr. Scott was pointing a gun.

It’s important to note that North Carolina is both an “open carry” state, meaning there is an individualized right to openly have a gun, and a “concealed carry” state, meaning that there is an individualized right to carry the gun on your person without having to actively show the gun in public. Collectively, these laws suggests that the police have even less reason to shoot someone for carrying a weapon; openly doing so should not be regarded as a suspicious behavior if there is a recognized legal right to do so. Unless he was actively, absolutely, and definitively pointing the weapon, there is no reason he should be considered suspect or dangerous for having a gun (and that’s assuming he did, in fact, have a gun, which is a disputed fact).

But Mr. Scott’s death is not surprising. Statistical evidence suggests black men are 2.5 to 3 times more likely than white to be killed by police. According to data collected by the Washington Post, about 13% of all black men killed by police since January 2015 were unarmed; only 7% of white men were. And based on available data, “[t]he only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police  was unarmed was whether or not they were black. … Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.”

Mr. Scott was killed the same week as Terrance Crutcher, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, man shot in the back while his hands were in the air and he was walking away from police. The video released by the police also incudes an officer in a helicopter claiming Crutcher “looks like a bad dude.” And clearly from a helicopter, he could tell tons of relevant things about Crutcher. Like his race and his height and his weight and his … well, that’s about it. 

The officer in that case has been charged with manslaughter, which is a rarity in US police shootings. Had the video not been released, I’m not certain this would have happened. Particularly since the female officer who shot him claims she was “never so scared in my life as in that moment right then.” She was referring to when Crutcher “reached” into his car, which videotapes and blood splatter suggests was a hell of a magic trick since the window appears to have been closed throughout the incident – as was the car door. Without clear video, her word would likely be enough to exonerate her.

Without any videotape of Mr. Scott’s shooting, people in Charlotte are left to imagine their own ending, and when you’ve experienced a series of injustices – from the killings of Tamir Rice and John Crawford III, neither of which were prosecuted, to the exoneration of the officers involved in the death of Eric Gardner and Jonathan Ferrell – the ending seems clear-cut.

For those who are unable to keep up, Tamir Rice was the 12 year old with a toy gun supposedly tucked into his waistband who was killed outside a park gazebo in Cleveland, Ohio, and John Crawford was the father killed for walking around an Ohio Wal-Mart with an air rifle he was intending to purchase from the store. Like North Carolina, Ohio is both an open-carry and a concealed-carry state, so unless an individual is posing an active threat, there is even less reason for the police to suspect they are dangerous. Eric Gardner was the man choked to death by police for selling cigarettes in New York City, and Jonathan Ferrell was a former college football player who was shot in 2013 when he went to a house to ask for help after crashing his car and injuring himself. Technically, the officer in Ferrell’s killing was not exonerated; instead, a mistrial was declared and prosecutors chose not to re-file charges. The officer in that case remained employed by the Charlotte police department until October 2015, approximately six weeks after the court declared a mistrial.

Now, there is a lot to write about in regards to these cases and more generally the use of force by police and racial inequality in the U.S. But today, I want to talk about the response and responsibility of white Americans as bystanders to this violence. This is not a legal analysis piece, but one discussing moral and philosophical responsibilities when it comes to witnessing human rights violations.

When black people get a little too loud and demanding in their calls for justice – whenever protests get disruptive to white lives – I watch as white American friends post Facebook statuses calling for quiet and rest, pointing out that there are ways to protest but this just isn’t it.

Of course, those friends also criticized American football player Colin Kaepernick for choosing to sit or kneel during the playing of the national anthem. That was deemed disrespectful to the U.S. and to American military vets. (The shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice apparently was not as disrespectful to American values…)

Kaepernick responded to the criticisms:
“You deplore the demonstrations taking place. But your statements, I am sorry to say, fail to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Charlotte and around the country, but it is even more unfortunate that the country’s power structure left the black community with no alternative.”

Actually, that wasn’t Kaepernick. Sorry, I got my inappropriate protests confused. That’s an edited version of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

To me, it’s not surprising that protests over police killings sometimes result in property damage. The peaceful ones rarely make the news and black people – desperate for survival in a country that has a long history of failing to protect them – have knocked on the door, they’ve checked the windows, they’ve cried for help, they waited in silence, and now they are desperate to be let in.

What surprises me is the silent complicity of white Americans – and it is silent complicity. When bystanders – those with no particular interest in an outcome – watch oppression with silence, they become complicit.

“In a situation of oppression, silence does not support the oppressed, it reinforces the position of the oppressor.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said it, but history proves its truth.

It proves its truth in the silence of Thomas Jefferson on the issue of slavery. A slave-owner himself, he had reservations about the institution and its premise of racial superiority (reservations one can only hope increased when his own enslaved children were born). But he did not speak these reservations publicly, and his failure to do so has forever tarnished his legacy.

History proves the complicity of silence in those who failed to speak out against anti-Semitism in the 1930s, allowing it to become an accepted social standard. In the silent majority of white South Africans. In the Hutus listening to radio messages calling the Tutsis “cockroaches” without challenging the dogma.

In such situations, it is not a responsibility on those who are protesting -- standing up for their lives and their survival -- to make those watching feel better about the protest or their silent complicity. Or as the activist (and actor) Jesse Williams put it earlier this year: "The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, alright – stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression." 

If you want to complain about property damage in Charlotte, you better have taken a stand against the racism that led to those protests. Otherwise, you are doing nothing to make the situation better.

So when I think back to that first day of law school, I think the question stopped too soon. The relevant questions of responsibility do not start and end with the prioritization of human suffering over property, but about the prioritization of human comfort over lives. The question must be this:

Imagine the cabin is not empty, but rather people are inside. You knock on the door and they look out at you, from the comfort of their dining room where they feast on a roast clearly too big for only themselves. You beg for assistance and they turn away. You call and pound on the door and on the window, you tell them you have been lost for a week and will surely die if they do not let you in. Could they at least call the police or a rescue agency? They simply respond, “You are not our problem.”

If you die, are they at fault? 

I think, regardless of legal liability, the answer is clearly yes.