Editorial:
Another man, another Black man, was killed while in the hands of the Baltimore police.
If you haven’t heard, the man was arrested after running when police showed up. They were not there to arrest him, they were not stopping him, he just ran and so the police ran after him and apprehended him. Apparently his crime was living in a high crime area. In a short video of the arrest, one of his legs appeared limp. No medical attention was given to Freddie Gray at the scene.
Gray was placed in a police van where, at some point during the police transport, his spine was 80% broken at the neck. Police then called paramedics, who transported him to a nearby hospital. Freddie Grey lapsed into a coma and died from his injuries a few days later.
In South Carolina, on April 8, a Black man was shot eight times in the back by a police officer. The initial stop was for a broken tail light.
Michael Brown, in Ferguson, was killed by a white police officer. A jury determined that it was a justified killing but it sparked a national conversation on police relations with the black community and racial bias.
Eric Garner was choked to death in New York for selling penny cigarettes.
Then there is the shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, 35, in Washington State. While running from police, he turned and threw his arms up. But he was still shot to death by three police officers. He was unarmed. His crime was throwing rocks at cars and police officers.
In 2010 Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was arrested at the San Ysidro Port of Entry and was brutally beaten, tasered, and killed by over a dozen border agents. This was caught on video. The government has filed frivolous appeal after appeal delaying the court hearing for five years now.
And the list of killings goes on.
It is not just the killings. The list of individuals who have been beaten into submission is long and ugly. The homeless woman walking alongside a freeway was savagely beaten. The man who rode a horse to get away from police, was savagely beaten, long after he had surrendered and was handcuffed. And more recently the LA police chief recommend to the District Attorney that one of his officers should be charged for assaulting a suspect after he saw the video of the brutal beating.
The common thread through all these incidents, with the exception of the Michael Brown killing, is that all these killings and beatings had been caught on video. There is no disputing video evidence! Hard to explain away what your eyes are seeing.
The really scary aspect of all this is, what about all those other cases where victims have claimed brutal attacks at the hands of police but there was no video to back-up their claims? Questionable killings that due to a lack of video evidence police officers have been able to justify their abuses of power and essentially get away with murder!
Police have always been given the greatest of latitudes with the assumption that they are constantly facing life and death situations. District Attorneys bend over backwards for the police. In most cases, the DAs have the back of the police officers and have rarely, if ever, charged a police in a shooting. District Attorneys need the endorsement of local law enforcement in order to win elections.
But the tide may be turning. Video cameras are everywhere and nowadays most folks have cell phones with the ability to record violent arrests. It has become clear that in many of these past shootings and killings there may have been validity to victims’ claims: Citizens had been justified in bring forth charges of police brutality.
What has come forth from these videos of the police beating and killing suspects is that the training police have received may have created a sense of “them against us” attitudes, where killings and beatings are justified in the performance of their duties.
However, it is not just the individual police officers doing the actual brutal action who are guilty, but the police officers who stand around and watch, allowing the other police officers act without impunity and later backing the stories of the assaulting police officer(s).
Police and minority community relations are at an all-time low. The fear that Black and Hispanic individuals feel when confronted by the police is real.
Recent decisions by police departments to utilize body cameras is good step in the right direction. But ultimately change needs to occur at the training level, at the attitude level. The sense of us against them needs to change. The police state of mind needs to change.
There will never be a perfect solution or answer to the police–minority community relations question. The reality is there are some real scumbags out there with criminal intent. Yet there needs to come a time and understanding that ultimate force is not always required or needed when dealing with minorities who have committed crimes.
The fact that innocent and minor offenders are dying at the hands of the police is unforgivable. This needs to stop!