Justifiable genocide
10th April 2017 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
A story on “60 Minutes” that aired April 2 about the fatal shooting of an unarmed, innocent Black man by a Tulsa, OK police officer underscores how little regard law enforcement officers have for Black lives.
In the interview, Tulsa Officer Betty Shelby, who has been charged with manslaughter in the 2015 fatal shooting of Terence Crutcher and will stand trial next month, defends herself, telling Bill Whitaker among other things that the neighborhood where the shooting took place is a high-crime area, that she thought Crutcher had a gun and was targeting her and that she is not a racist.
“What I based everything on was his actions, his behaviors. Race had nothing to do with my decision-making,” Shelby told Whitaker.
She was hardly convincing and did little to make Black America believe that law enforcement agencies treat people of color fairly or that police officers are committed to protecting and serving all segments of the population.
Shelby, whose husband was in a police helicopter above the shooting, also compared criticism of the shooting and her indictment to being harassed and victimized by a lynch mob.
“I’m feeling that his intent is to do me harm and I keep thinking, ‘Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Don’t make this happen,’” Shelby said of the moments before she fired at Crutcher. She told Whitaker that Crutcher kept reaching into his pocket suggesting to her, based on her experience, that he had a gun. When he got to the car window, Shelby remembers the moment he reached in. “And it’s fast. Just that would tell any officer that man’s going for a weapon… I say with a louder, more intense voice, ‘Stop. Stop! Stop!’ and he didn’t. And that’s when I took aim.”
When asked if she felt any regret about fatally shooting Terence Crutcher, Officer Shelby said she felt sorrow that Crutcher’s actions caused her to shoot him.
Again, throughout the interview, Officer Shelby insists that she’s not a racist — even as she tells Whitaker that she works in a high-crime area, which essentially means that everybody is a dangerous suspect — and paints herself as a victim of a “lynch mob” mentality that got her indicted for the killing of Crutcher and forced her and her family to move out of their home and into a new safe space.
She doesn’t come off as contrite or as someone who has given even a second thought to the toll the fatal shooting took on Crutcher’s twin sister, his four children and other members of his family.
Nor does she seem like someone who thinks that ALL lives matter.
All that matters is the way her life has been turned upside down because she gunned down an innocent, unarmed Black man who had done nothing wrong.
Terence Crutcher is dead because he had the misfortune of living in a community considered dangerous by law enforcement officers, because somebody who knew nothing about him decided he was “a bad dude” and because someone with the power of life and death over civilians decided that he looked like he had a gun, was thinking about shooting her and was trying to get back to his car where a gun was never found.
To his credit, the Rev. Ray Owens, who pastors one of the largest Black congregations in Tulsa, OK, didn’t allow himself to be used by those who tried to compel him to quell the anger in the Black community about the deadly shooting of another innocent, unarmed Black man.
Rather than seek to divert the attention and outrage of the masses, he opted instead to host a vigil to bring attention to the unjustifiable shooting and to harness that energy to let the district attorney know that Black residents and others were serious about holding Officer Shelby accountable for taking an innocent life.
If only there were more ministers across who were more interested in standing up for justice, truth and fairness than in appeasing the powers that be or doing the bidding of the white business community.
For the record, cops who are afraid of Black or Brown people or are uncomfortable in low-income communities do not have the right to take innocent people’s lives because they are afraid or uncomfortable.
They also don’t have the right to take an innocent human being’s life because they thought they saw a gun or thought someone “looked like the devil,” as Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson described Michael Brown, or was “zombie-like,” as Tulsa Officer Betty Shelby described Terence Crutcher.
We need professional, law-abiding cops who do not think less of Black, Brown or poor people than they think of themselves to patrol communities of color, not terminators or exterminators.
Even as Black, Brown and poor people continue to struggle to secure justice and equal protection under the law for their communities, there is a foreboding sign that things are about to get worse.
The Washington Post recently reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has earned quite a reputation as an opponent of voting rights, civil rights and efforts to ensure that law enforcement agencies practice constitutional policing, is ordering the U.S. Department of Justice to review consent decrees and to likely move away from taking steps to hold local police departments accountable to the federal government.
“Local control and local accountability are necessary for effective local policing,” Sessions wrote in a memo dated March 31. “It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.”
That sounds an awful lot like another major move back to states’ rights, where Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and poor people are at the mercy of local white sheriffs, police chiefs, prosecutors, judges and jailers without any protection or relief from the U.S. Department of Justice.
If you think things are bad now, think about how bad things have been in the past and what it has taken to move away from the sense of powerlessness, hopelessness and despair that has defined life in America before the Historic Civil Rights Movement.
While some things have gotten better, others have not.
The blatant and callous disregard for the constitutional rights, human rights. dignity and lives of Black people have diminished somewhat since the Jim Crow era, but there are still far too many examples of law enforcement agencies in every part of the United States continuing to trample upon the rights and lives of people of color.
Even under a Black president and attorney general, we continued to see people like Eric Garner, Terence Crutcher, Walter Scott, Michael Brown, Justin Sipp, Wendell Allen, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling and the many others who lost their lives because they were Driving While Black, Breathing While Black, Shopping While Black. Walking While Black or Simply Being Black.
It can be argued that these consent decrees have not been able to prevent the slaughter of innocent Black, Brown and poor men, women and children but at least they have shined a light on these unjust practices and forced those who run law enforcement agencies to answer to someone on the highest level of government for these violations of the U.S. Constitution and miscarriages of justice.
As was the case in the 19th century when a war was being fought to determine this nation’s future and in the middle of the 20th century when a movement was birthed to secure the blessings of liberty for people of color, it is time for us to stand up and be counted and heard as full-fledged, card-carrying citizens of this nation who are willing to lay it all on the line in pursuit of justice, equity and self-determination.
That’s what free people do.
This article originally published in the April 10, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
