No doubt many of my readers are as tired of reading about police killings as I am of writing about them, but like a dog with a soup bone, I have to keep worrying it. Someone has to.
Not to compare miseries — since many in the country (members of the LGBTQ community, abortion rights activists, the undocumented, environmentalists, and those who champion the arts) are catching hell right now — but as per usual, we people of color continue to get the shittiest end of the stick: While others lose some of their rights, our young men lose their lives.
It recently happened again, this time in a small Texas town outside of Dallas, where a white cop, Roy Oliver, fired an AR15 assault rifle into a car full of black teenagers that was driving away from him, killing 15-year-old, straight A student/athlete Jordan Edwards. The cops at the scene originally concocted a story that the car was moving towards them “in an aggressive manner,” leaving no other option but to fire upon the vehicle.
However, police body cameras proved that was a lie, and Oliver was quickly fired and now is indicted. Why the other cops weren’t sanctioned for lying is beyond me.
But if this case runs true to form, the cop’s indictment is the only justice the family of Jordan will receive. White juries very rarely convict white cops, not even when there’s hard video evidence, such as the case of a black man being shot in the back five times down in South Carolina. Michael Slager was acquitted after the jury could not reach a verdict, although he did eventually plead guilty and is awaiting sentencing. It will be very interesting to see what kind of sentence is handed down.
But the point is, in the Age of Trump these kinds of killings are only going to increase, just as sure as Oliver will be given another cop job in another department once he beats this current case.
While it’s natural to pay attention to these kinds of injustices and to attempt to rectify them, I do think our focus is to some degree misplaced. The fact is, borderline racist cops are still going to get off via jury nullification no matter how much we rail against such verdicts. This, after all, is still America. What we have to do is to focus our efforts elsewhere if we want to solve the problem.
Take the town of Blach Springs, where young Jordan was killed. The town is made up of 49 percent Hispanics, 29 percent blacks and 21 percent whites … yet the police chief is white, as is Oliver. I called Blach Springs’ police department and asked what percentage of the force there were minorities and/or women, but was told that information wasn’t available … but I can only guess. The vast majority of cops, even in virtually all communities of color, happens to be white, and as such are armies of occupation.
Of course we should demand justice for Jordan, but more importantly we need to demand more diversity on our nation’s police forces if we want to prevent more deaths like Jordan’s. In the end the surest way to reduce the number of black youth dying at the hands of white cops is to have less white cops patrolling black and brown communities.
But for that increase to happen, we need to convince more women and persons of color to join police forces. There has to be a national effort, one lead by someone like Barack Obama. I know that he’s busy with the planning of his Presidential Library, but this is critical. Young black and brown men’s lives depend on it.
President Obama needs to do a “Gimme Five” tour of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He should ask the graduating classes to give him five years of their lives; to return to their home communities after graduation and join the police force for at least five years. After that service to the community they will still have plenty of time to go ahead with whatever career they have planned.
Having a more diverse police force is the surest (and perhaps only) way to prevent more black youth from being cut down in the street since more training clearly isn’t working. Neither is trying to hold cops accountable via the criminal justice system.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.