By Khalil
Gibran Muhammad
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Darren
Wilson at the hospital following the August 9 shooting of Michael Brown (St.
Louis County Attorney's Office)
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Even as activists are
organizing against police violence, many Americans continue to see blacks as
criminals—and want our police to act accordingly.
Truth
is stranger than fiction; it is also most certainly harder to accept.
In
a nearly hour-long interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday, a day
after thousands of protesters took to the streets from coast to coast,
expressing outrage that yet another white police officer got away with the
murder of another unarmed black person, Wilson stuck to his story: “I just did
my job. I did what I was paid to do. I followed my training…. That’s it.”
Sure,
there are plenty of reasons to doubt his account. If he knew Michael Brown was
a robbery suspect, why did he politely stop him and Dorian Johnson for
jaywalking only to “have a conversation,” as he described to Stephanopoulos? If
the West Florissant section of Ferguson is “really a great community,” why did
he testify that it was a not very “well-liked community” and a hotbed of
anti-police sentiment?
And
yet, despite all the equivocations, the shooting death of the teenager on
August 9 and Monday’s grand jury decision not to indict Wilson were entirely
unsurprising. They are the predictable outcomes of a criminal justice system
doing exactly what it was meant to do. For all the dissecting and debating of
the veracity of Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony this week, one thing seems
crystal clear. He was in fact doing his job.
Indeed,
by this standard, isn’t Darren Wilson actually a model police officer?
He
certainly thinks so. When asked by Stephanopoulos if he could make “something
good” come of this experience, he said he would “love to teach people” and give
them “more insight in uses of force.” That he may have logged more time on
first-person shooters—emptying clip after clip to take down demonic
super-villains who “run through shots”—than actual police work is beside the
point. Darren Wilson has the kind of experience that many Americans value.
Evidence
abounds that the United States is the world’s most punitive nation. More people
are behind bars and incarcerated at higher per capita rates here than anywhere
in the world. African-Americans are the nation’s prime suspects and prisoners.
White police officers are our chosen protectors, enforcing the law in the name
of public safety.
In
a Pew research poll conducted shortly after Ferguson made national headlines
this summer, researchers found that most Americans have a “fair amount of
confidence in local police.” Eighty-five percent of respondents, white and
black, gave a fair to excellent rating on police “protecting people from
crime.”
And on “using the right amount of force,” 66 percent of respondents
gave a fair to excellent rating; white support stood at 73 percent and blacks
at 42 percent. Though a clear racial divide exists, African-Americans are only
13 percent of the population nationally. Everyone is therefore implicated in
police performance writ large, if not by choice, certainly through political
representatives.
Critics
and protesters of police violence among African-Americans and on the political
left, as polling data suggests, see things differently. They are organizing
against the routine killing of unarmed men and beating of helpless women on an
unprecedented scale not seen since the anti-lynching movement of the last
century.
Even with such evidence in hand that black men are twenty-one times as
likely to be killed by law enforcement than white men, as analyzed in a recent
report by ProPublica, today’s movement like the one before it might fail to
overcome deeply entrenched fears of black criminality without a massive shift
in white public opinion and a new model for law enforcement.
Most
whites do not realize they are reading from very old racial scripts. When Ida
B. Wells, the world’s leading anti-lynching activist and black social worker of
the early twentieth century, tried to explain to a wealthy suffragist in
Chicago that anti-black violence in the nation must end, Mary Plummer replied:
blacks need to “drive the criminals out” of the community. “Have you forgotten
that 10 percent of all the crimes that were committed in Chicago last year were
by colored men [less than 3 percent of the population]?”
Like
Mary Plummer, Darren Wilson is emphatic that the issue is not racism. Brown’s
African-American neighborhood is “one of our high-crime areas for the city,” he
said during the interview. “You can’t perform the duties of a police officer
and have racism in you. I help people. That’s my job.” On that day, “the only emotion
I ever felt was fear,” before my training took over. “We are taught to deal
with the threat at hand.”
Implicit
bias research tells us that most Americans are afraid of black people and
subconsciously associate dangerous weapons and animals with them. They see
things often that are not there. Stanford psychologists Rebecca Haley and
Jennifer Eberhardt note in a study last month that the more people perceive
blacks as criminals or prisoners, “the more people fear crime, which then
increases their acceptance of punitive policies.”
The
truth is that Wilson has no regrets. He wouldn’t do things differently. He’s
looking forward to a new chapter in his professional journey as a teacher,
trainer or a consultant. He’s our representative figure—a model policeman—acting
on our collective fears.
Source: http://www.thenation.com
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