In search of justice
3rd April 2018 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
Anyone who knows anything about Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry or have read anything about his love affair with the Tea Party movement and his comments about his political opponents had to know that this man was not going to file criminal charges against the two white police officers who are responsible for the death of 37-year-old Alton Sterling back in July 2016.
You just had to know.
But you also had to hope against hope that the man elected as the state’s top prosecutor would be touched with a bout of human decency or moved by his sworn oath as the state Attorney General to give justice a chance to take root in the slave state of Louisiana.
As fate and political expediency would have it, there was no such luck last week.
Instead, AG Landry reinforced the sentiment expressed so poignantly by Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney in a 19th-century ruling that said Black people in the United States have no rights that whites are bound by law to respect.
It doesn’t matter what we see or think we see, or what witnesses capture on their cellphones. All that matters is what the powers that be say matters.
And right now, there aren’t a lot of wealthy and powerful white folks going around saying that Black, Brown or poor lives matter.
Adding insult to injury, Landry told employees at the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office to stay home Tuesday, apparently because he expected those seeking justice for Alton Sterling to not be able to control themselves once he announced his decision not to indict Officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake.
While police have been killing unarmed people of color across the U.S. and acting like it is normal to take nonwhite people’s lives for Walking While Black, Breathing White Black or Simply Being Black, they have been pushing this narrative about melaninated people being genetically predisposed to violence and murder.
A narrative, I might add, that has also been promoted by at least one federal judge in the New Orleans-based U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal.
This illogical fear of Black people is at the core of many of the problems that lead to the unconstitutional and unjustified killings of unarmed and innocent human beings.
Mainstream media outlets fan the flames of racial distrust and hatred by presenting images of Black and Brown people as volatile and violent people who kill those they come into contact with for no reason.
Some might argue that image more closely resembles what communities of color experience in their interactions with cops from lily-white surrounding suburbs or rural areas that have had very little substantive contact with people of color.
While they make the decision to work as law enforcement officers in communities whose residents often look nothing like them and their families, there appears to be a great deal of resentment and anger on the part of these officers about having to work in low-income communities with very little in the way of amenities and community services other communities may take for granted.
Even though most of those who are raking in tremendous wealth from the unlawful sale of drugs and guns in impoverished communities do not live there, these officers equate the hazards drug and gun trafficking bring to poor neighborhoods with those who are forced to live in these “urban jungles.”
In the minds of many law enforcement officers who commute to these urban jungles daily, it is clearly the fault of Black, Brown and poor people for choosing to “live like that.
It should be noted that Brother Alton Sterling was murdered twice: Once by the two cops that took his life on July 5, 2016 outside the Triple S Food Mart and again by those who saw nothing wrong with assassinating his character in a failed attempt to make the public think that Alton was not worthy of the kind of compassion and empathy routinely given to white victims of deadly violence.
Shame on the Baton Rouge Police Department, state Attorney General’s Office and various media outlets for leaking to the public that Alton Sterling had several previous brushes with the law and that there were chemicals in his body at the time of his murder. None of that justifies what BRPD Officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II did to him.
It’s interesting how often the public does not get to know the names of trigger-happy officers who fatally shoot unarmed Black and Brown people or how many previous complaints were filed by the public against these officers before they finally “graduated” to taking a human life.
Clearly, everything AG Landry does is strategically planned to improve his chances for a successful gubernatorial bid. If that means he has to overlook the murder of a few Black, Brown or poor people by law enforcement agencies, so be it.
Do you recall his plan to bring in officers from other Louisiana law enforcement agencies to “help” New Orleans get a handle on violent crime?
Both he and his fellow GOP member U.S. Sen. John Kennedy have used violent crime in New Orleans to take shots at current La. Gov. John Bel Edwards.
And it is telling that Landry has spent more energy and effort trying to vilify, criminalize and prosecute New Orleans Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell than he spent investigating two police officers for taking an innocent man’s life.
What AG Jeff Landry and others who support law enforcement officers who think they have the right to take innocent people’s lives because they are having a bad day, hate their job or are afraid of Black or Brown people don’t seem to understand is that every time they let these cops get away with murder, they erode the public’s trust in the criminal justice system a little bit more. That moves us closer to total chaos and the kind of racial explosions that claimed the lives of three police officers in Baton Rouge and five in Dallas in 2016.
The way I see it, Jeff Landry is not fit to hold an elected office, any elected office.
He needs to know that we will not forget his refusal to secure justice for Alton Sterling and that we will do everything in our power to make sure that his current term as state AG is his final one and that he never becomes governor of Louisiana.
In addition to supporting the family of Alton Sterling as it sues the City of Baton Rouge and the BRPD for Alton Sterling’s Fourth of July Weekend lynching, we need to be vigilant about demanding that police reforms are implemented at the BRPD and all law enforcement agencies.
Rather than simply shake our heads, wring our hands or post comments on social media, we should be out there making sure that everyone in our families and community who is eligible to vote is signed up and ready to cast a vote for justice the next time Jeff Landry enters a political race. Make no mistake about it, Landry is a politician and politicians lose lots of sleep over well-informed voters with a sense of purpose and the ability to remember elected officials who cross them.
It is way past time for 40-, 50- and 60-year-old Black folks to spend less time, energy and money on parties, weekend getaways, music festivals and cruises and use our discretionary income to build and fund institutions to fight for us on Capitol Hill, at the highest court in the land and in the global community.
We must also identify and support political candidates who don’t support the notion that law enforcement officers have the right to unconstitutionally violate someone’s rights or take his or her life because they were frightened or thought they saw a gun where there was none.
Finally, we need to continue to document these egregious acts of white supremacy, cowardice and unconstitutional policing and build a case for genocide against the U.S. in the United Nations. All power to the people.
This article originally published in the April 2, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
