Portside

On 26 November 2007 Brandon Moore, an unarmed 16-year-old, was shot in the back while running away from a security guard in Detroit. The guard made it look like sport. “[He] put one arm on top of the other arm and started aiming at us,” Brandon’s brother John Henry, who was with him at the time, told me.

“Brandon wasn’t involved in anything. He was the last one to take off running, I guess.” The shooter was an off-duty policeman with a history of brutality. Sacked from the force after he was involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident while drunk-driving, he was reinstated a few years later on appeal. He went on to shoot dead an armed man in a neighbourhood dispute, and shot and injured his wife in a domestic fracas.

The story got a paragraph in Detroit’s two daily newspapers. Neither even bothered to print Brandon Moore’s name. The policeman was reassigned to a traffic unit until he was cleared by an “investigation”.

The cold-blooded killing of Walter Scott, who was shot eight times in the back as he ran away from a policeman in North Charleston, South Carolina, is not news in the conventional sense. Such shootings are neither rare nor, to those who have been paying attention, suprising. Sadly, they are all too common. It is news because, thanks to the video footage, we have incontrovertible evidence at a moment when public consciousness has been heightened and focused on this very issue. While in this case the policeman involved has been fired and charged, such a degree of proof is no guarantee of justice. There was video evidence of police choking Eric Garner to death in Staten Island while he protested “I can’t breathe”, and his killers were acquitted; there was video of evidence of Rodney King’s beating in Los Angeles, and his assailants walked free. But in an era of 24-hour news and social media, video guarantees attention.

Black people have been dying for this kind of attention for years.

Michael Brown died for it; Kajieme Powell died for it; Tamir Rice died for it; Justus Howell died for it. The roll call could go on – and until something fundamental changes, not just with American policing but in the American psyche, it will get longer.

The fact that Scott was killed on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination makes stark the distinction between the reality of the post-civil rights era and pretensions to a post-racial era. The slogan of the day, born from a Twitter hashtag, is Blacklivesmatter. That says a lot.

You wouldn’t have a hashtag that said #blackmencanplaybasketball or #blackmusicmatters, because only the most deluded would ever deny that. But the reason #blacklivesmatter has resonated is because it succinctly summarises the current contradictions. We can celebrate a black president, black professors, black astrophysicists and black tennis players all we want. But the issue of the sanctity of black life has still not been settled.

The slogan of the day, born from a Twitter hashtag, is Blacklivesmatter. That says a lot
And so Scott’s murder stands not simply as an outrageous and horrific incident in its own right but as an emblem for all the Brandon Moores who have gone down in a hail of bullets to deafening silence; a proxy for a reign of racial terror that has not been removed since the civil rights era but merely refined; a harsh illustration of a system that both systemically criminalises working-class black communities and, on occasion, cavalierly condemns those who live in them to summary execution. It lends a name and a moving image to those who have perished unnamed and unseen, and whose deaths could not move the nation’s conscience.

“I have witnessed and endured the brutality of the police many more times than once – but, of course, I cannot prove it,” wrote James Baldwin in 1966, in A Report from Occupied Territory. “I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself, quite as though it were answerable only to itself. But it cannot be allowed to be answerable only to itself. It must be made to answer to the community which pays it, and which it is legally sworn to protect, and if American Negroes are not a part of the American community, then all of the American professions are a fraud.”

The fact that the country is at least recognising this issue is heartening. But what it took to get it there is sickening. For this is the standard of proof necessary to force a reckoning with contemporary racism.

This is what it takes to thwart a conversation about the ostensible shortcomings in black culture, from parenting to rap music, which – some claim – make such policing inevitable and instead concentrate on the pathology of state violence. If all young black men bought a belt and pulled their trousers up tomorrow, they still wouldn’t be able to outrun a trigger-happy cop’s bullet. The bar is so high, and the capacity for empathy so low, that apparently no amount of statistics and personal testimony can convince a critical mass of white Americans that the problem is not African-Americans claiming victimhood but their being victimised.

In the absence of such evidence, black people have to make the case for not being killed – no criminal record, no questionable acquaintances, no drugs or alcohol in your lifeless body, A-grade students and devoted fathers. If you want the nation to be outraged at your murder, be sure to have led an impeccable life. Nothing less will do.

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama recalls sitting in the Illinois senate with a white legislator watching a black colleague (whom he refers to as John Doe) explain why eliminating a certain programme was racist.

“You know what the problem is with John,” the white senator asked him. “Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.” “[His] comment was instructive,” Obama reflected. “Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America.”

Guilt, of any racial variety, never achieved much anyhow (even if it did, there are therapists for that). It won’t close the pay gap, the unemployment gap, the wealth gap or the discrepancy between black and white incarceration. It won’t bring back Walter Scott, Trayvon Martin or Brandon Moore. It’s not guilt that people are demanding but justice and equality. Only then will a tragic incident such as this be news for the right reason – because it is both rare and unexpected, not because someone was in the right place at the right time with a Samsung and a conscience.

Gary Younge is a feature writer and columnist for the Guardian based in the US

The Police Propaganda Machine in Action
Andrew Jerell Jones
The Intercept

A video supplied to The New York Times, showing the shooting death of 50-year-old Walter Scott at the hands of a South Carolina police officer, appears on first viewing to be the latest example of an unarmed black person killed unnecessarily by a white cop.

But it’s so much more than that. Because three days elapsed between the shooting and the publication of the video of the shooting, the Scott incident became an illuminating case study in the routinized process through which police officers, departments and attorneys frame the use of deadly force by American cops in the most sympathetic possible terms, often claiming fear of the very people they killed. In the days after the shooting, the police version of events — an utterly typical example of the form — was trotted out, only to be sharply contradicted when the video surfaced. In most cases like this, there is no video, no definitive, undisputed record of much of what happened, and thus no way to rebut inaccurate statements by the police.

The first report of the Saturday afternoon incident, from Charleston’s The Post and Courier, followed the usual script: The police department’s story portrayed the victim as behaving dangerously, in this case, purportedly struggling to take an officer’s Taser as part of a violent altercation. Family and friends of the slain black victim mourned his loss and questioned the narrative offered by authorities.

The pro-police spin continued two days later, when a lawyer for Michael Slager, the officer who shot Scott, said Scott “tried to overpower” his client, who “felt threatened and reached for his department-issued firearm and fired his weapon.”  Scott’s family and allies could do little more than note that Scott was unarmed, and call for the truth to somehow emerge.

That was before the video of the incident — from a brave soul now identified as 23-year-old Feidin Santana — got into the hands of the Scott family. And in one dramatic instance, a cop’s tale of fearing for his life was replaced with a clear recording of the truth — a truth so damning it appears to have motivated Slager’s lawyer to stop representing the officer (the lawyer has declined to discuss his motivation, but told The Daily Beast, “All I can say is that the same day of the discovery of the video that was disclosed publicly, I withdrew as counsel immediately.”)

“Feared for my life” has become a crutch for law enforcement in cases where an officer has used deadly force, especially deadly force against people of color and particularly when those people are black and unarmed. It conjures the possibility, even the likelihood, of an exoneration, serving as a sort of “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” chant whenever there is no deadly weapon in the hands of the person just killed. The officers who shot unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson last year and unarmed Sean Bell in New York in 2007 famously claimed they feared for their safety, to take just two recent examples. The same could also be said about the two recent tragedies in Ohio, where 22-year-old John Crawford and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, despite appearing as if they were armed with real guns, were never given a real opportunity  to put down their BB and airshot guns, respectively. Officers in both cases have claimed they ordered the victim to drop his apparent weapon — but Crawford was shot within one second of contact with police, and Rice within two seconds, according to analyses of footage of the incidents.

One incident in Texas in 2008 that has largely gone under the radar illustrates how hard it is — without video — to litigate against officers who claim to fear for their lives. In the Bellaire, Texas incident, a white police officer shot former minor league baseball player Robbie Tolan, saying he feared Tolan was reaching for a gun. Tolan, who was unarmed, had been suspected of driving a stolen car after an officer incorrectly entered his license plate number. When he was shot, he was in front of his parents’ home protesting how his mother was being treated by responding officers as she and his father tried to explain that the car belonged to the family. Tolan survived, but a police bullet remains lodged in his liver. He filed a federal suit in 2009, and the Supreme Court last year unanimously ruled that a federal appeals court must reconsider a lawsuit by Tolan, which the appeals court had originally declined to consider. (The officer who incorrectly entered his license plate number received an “Officer of the Year” award in 2013.)

Without video, Tolan has been in court for six years and still has no verdict; his federal case resumes in September. And, without video, Walter Scott’s loved ones would have been left with questions haunting them forever. Their accounts of Scott being a calm and controlled individual — “He’s not a violent guy, never seen him argue with anybody, I just can’t see it,” Scott’s cousin Samuel told The Post and Courier — would have had to contend with racist stereotypes and insinuations about his 10 arrests, even though those were described as “mostly for failure to appear for court hearings and to pay child support.”

Though more cameras — body cameras on cops, increased recording of stops by smartphone-wielding citizens — won’t automatically stop some police officers from engaging in racist assault, they provide the best means of countering the stories assumed to be true, that turn out to be false, told by police officers and propped up by the spin machines that stand behind them. In the Scott case, a cop was not lucky enough to sell his dubious story to the public. We should all be thankful for that. But Lord knows how many thousands of police con jobs involving claims of fear before shooting black victims have been pawned off on the citizenry.

Andrew Jones is a Brooklyn-based journalist and commentator covering cultural affairs, civil rights, criminal justice, and national security issues. Andrew also covers global sports stories. His work has been published at MSNBC, Talking Points Memo, The Raw Story, and The Grio. Andrew has also made media appearances on RT and the Huffington Post’s “HuffPostLive.” Email the author: andrew.jones@theintercept.com Follow: @sluggahjells