Thursday, April 30, 2015

Don't you dare take the word "thugs" away from me





All over the T and V today rather than report actual news, talking heads have been arguing over whether the word "thugs" is the new "N-word" after someone used that term to describe demonstrators in Baltimore this week. Years ago in a short story I described a rugged bunch of crew on a crab boat "thugs." It was meant to be humorous exaggeration. Though I never stated it, I didn't visualize any of them as African American. Years later my daughter and I went to see "The Perfect Storm." In one scene the boat crew stood together on deck and my daughter elbowed me and whispered "thugs." We both laughed and I was secretly thrilled that she remembered something I had written. I will not let Fox noise take that word away from me.

When I was a kid growing up in a bread-white suburb, if I got in trouble, the police drove me home, even after stops for some extreme driving while intoxicated where they made me follow them to my house and left me with a warning not to show up around town again that night. Even now from over here in my ivory neighborhood and my ivory segment of society where I feel no threat from police it has been difficult to comprehend the current deadly conflicts between police and African Americans in American cities.

This year as a police shooting is exposed almost weekly, the outrage has been growing. How many have killed black people just since the first of the year? At the beginning, I thought each case was an isolated incident perpetrated by a single out-of-control officer. But as the number of incidents has grown it becomes increasingly clear that the incidents are not isolated, in fact, they are very common on the streets of our cities and they have been going on for a long time.

It's easy to say there are more now than ever. More likely this has been going on for a long time and in a lot of places but the media has largely ignored the incidents and they have gone unreported. Finally someone is paying attention and not just that, publicizing these incidents letting the rest of the world know about the pattern of police violence against citizens. It doesn't hurt that publicizing effort that most people are now carrying video cameras in their pockets and finally have a way of proving the attacks they have been reporting, but getting into a he-said, he-said situation where the word of a black person is seldom believed over that of an officer.

Now a guy can walk up with video that shows an officer gunning down a man running away from him and then laying a taser next to the body as evidence the victim attacked the policeman. You can't argue with video. Now some locales are trying to make it illegal to video a police officer making an arrest. Well that should solve the police attack problems. To be fair several departments across the country are requiring officers to wear cameras in one attempt to prevent escalating incidents.

A hint about how deep this goes and how long it has been going on came a few months ago when  Attorney General Eric Holder and then President Obama, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, told how they had sat with their children and explained to those children, among the most privileged in the world, how even they need to act in an interchange with a police officer so the officer would have no cause to mistreat them in some way. As it came out this is standard procedure for mothers in African-American neighborhoods who want to see their children grow into adults.

Just ask the mother of that 12-year-old kid carrying a toy gun who was shot down by a police officer in Cleveland seconds after the officer spotted the child.

Most of us have heard of Michael Brown  who was shot to death by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson is a tiny city of maybe 20,000 near St. Louis and has a small police force of mostly white men in an area of mostly black residents. It is kind of like a Duchy, small and autonomous. One person in the area said part of the problem with a city like that is it is easy for a cadre of racists to get entrenched with little oversight. She pointed out that there are 97 of those tiny municipalities in the St. Louis County area and what is needed is an area-wide police force that can afford adequate training and equipment instead of each of those places having a small entrenched army of poorly trained  and racist members.

Take these in point: In the past couple of months, two black women have been elected mayor in two of those St. Louis duchys. In one, almost the entire police force resigned. In the other, police actually blocked the entrance to City Hall and refused to allow the new mayor to go to her office.

Now people are rioting in Baltimore over another death, this time a suspect in custody suffered a fatal neck injury. Apparently a small number of people in a few neighborhoods have been violent and those are the ones we see on television. The media pretty much ignored more than 10,000 people in downtown Baltimore demonstrating peacefully. Some of the media fan the flames, encourage by political idiots. For example presidential candidate Rand Paul dismissed the rioters with a racist stereotype saying that's what happens when a loving father is not present in a kid's life,  this from a guy whose kid was arrested for DUI just within the past couple of weeks.

What has been becoming increasingly obvious is that this has been going on for a long time. That folks in black neighborhoods have lived in fear of a violent police force whose officers at any time can beat and or kill people they encounter and get away with at worst "a mention in their jackets." Back during the cold war we heard a lot about police states. Those were obscure third-world countries that occasionally made the news for a day or two when a coup occurred. Looking at what is happening to almost one-fifth of our population, it looks like at least those folks are living in a police state right now in the United States of America. What kind of situation can you expect when that large a segment of a population is afraid of the police rather than seeing the force as public servants, there for the general protection?

It's most likely true and easy enough to say that these incidents are caused by a few officers and that most policemen are not like that, just a few bad apples. There's an old saying that those who only stand and watch and do nothing are also to blame. The continued violence could not happen if police departments stood up, admitted it is a problem and weed out those officers causing all the problems. It is a damned shame when an officer kills someone and then it turns out he has had dozens of reprimands for violent actions in the past. Lay down the law. If an officer doesn't want to abide by the rules, get rid of him.

We should not have to be afraid of our own policemen no matter who we are. What is incredibly obvious is that for this and several other examples those of us not directly involved have to admit racism is still very well entrenched in our national psyche and for some it is deadly and more than ever needs to be addressed and purged. When we support a society where parents have to warn their kids how to act to keep from being shot by policemen something is very very wrong.
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  1. AnonymousMay 1, 2015 at 3:59 PM

    You speak like someone who has become wise rather than a wise... and I like that.

    ReplyDelete

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Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

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My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

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If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

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