Sometimes you hate to be right. However, in my first posting on the Tamir Rice killing, I started off by stating the video, when released, would settle nothing. And, sadly, I was correct: Those who see the police as being in the right every time they fire their weapons will see what they want to see on the surveillance video, just as those who view the police as prone to being trigger happy will also see what they want to see.
The problem, of course, is that we all tend to comprehend virtually everything we see through the distorted lens of our own personal life experiences … the verbal and visual histories that shape our perspectives and color our judgments. And the recently released video will prove no different — in the end we’ll all see what we want to see, nothing more, nothing less.
Did the 12-year-old threaten rookie officer Timothy Loehman, thereby putting the cop in fear of his life, and thereby causing his own untimely death, or did the officer overreact, firing his weapon much too quickly, perhaps based on the skin color of the person he was confronted with? Had Tamir been white, would he now be alive? Those questions will be debated vociferously throughout the community in the coming months — and perhaps even longer — ad infinitium … and, in the end, still without satisfactory resolution.
As we’ve come to collectively realize, rarely will consensus be reached on these types of tragic incidents anywhere in America simply because we view them across the wide chasm of racial animosity. The void in this country has grown so wide — the rupture between the police and the communities of color they patrol so complete — that breaching it at this juncture is well neigh impossible, absent help. The only — the ultimate — solution will have to come from outside of these troubled communities around the country, and Cleveland is no exception.
While not attempting to cast blame on the black citizens of Ferguson, MO, the situation there is somewhat of their own making. How do residents of a 70 percent black city allow themselves to be governed by a City Council where five of the six members are white … which played a huge role in the streets being patrolled by a police force comprised of almost all white officers? As black residents there now complain, the cops were there not so much to protect and serve, but to operate as an army of occupation.
Given that reality, Michael Brown was more a casualty of war than a victim of an overly aggressive police officer. And to some extent so too was Tamir Rice, but with one glaring exception: Citizens of Cleveland have been up in arms regarding police tactics in the black community for years … and the proof lies in the fact the U.S. Department of Justice has had our police department in its crosshairs for almost a year, and the feds are not going anywhere anytime soon. Change is coming.
However, the feds — who have great experience in this field — know that changing the culture of police departments is not easy … second only to changing the culture of incarceration, how prisons are run in America. Prisons are run out of sight and out of mind (which makes bringing about reform difficult) while police departments are paramilitary organizations and therefore resistant to change … but change they must.
The most heartening sight associated with the recent demonstrations in Cleveland after the Ferguson verdict was the number of white youth who took part in blocking Public Square and later the Shoreway in both directions. These youth, many from the campus of Oberlin College, could have said “I don’t have a dog in this fight” but they didn’t … they stood up for what they believed to be right. The imagery was so powerful it brought tears to my eyes.
You see, in spite of the backward steps of police around the country as they struggle to maintain the status quo, things are changing in America … the old guard simply hasn’t gotten the memo yet, and if they have, they’re digging their heels in and refusing to read it.
But as Bob Dylan sang: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
It may come along kicking and screaming, fussing and fighting, dragging its heels every step of the way … but make no mistake, the Cleveland Division of Police is going to change the way it does business, the way it interacts with the citizenry. Shooting first and asking questions later will one day be a thing of the past. Cities like Seattle, Portland, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles are among the 15 cities across the country that, in recent years, been forced into culture-changing consent decrees by the Department of Justice.
And through the clearer, more refined lens of history, Tamir Rice will one day be seen as a martyr… a martyr in the mold of Emmett Till, the 14-year boy who was brutally killed in a rural Mississippi town in August of 1955. When Till’s mother insisted that his casket remain open so the world would be forced to look at what rabid racists had done to her child, the fuse of the civil rights movement was ignited.
Tamir’s funeral might have a similar effect.
Sadly, it probably will take more unnecessary deaths in Cleveland before reform comes; more martyrs … but come it surely will. The blue wall of silence that protects police officers and excuses their behavior (no matter how egregious their actions happen to be) will eventually crumble under the quiet but relentless onslaught — the sledgehammer blows — of the feds. They never … and I do mean never … lose.
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 again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Change Is Coming #TamirRice #Ferguson”
Bob
“Had Tamir been white, would he now be alive?”
Had he been white, maybe his parents wouldn’t have been convicted criminals and might have had enough interest in him to teach him not to point guns at armed police officers who ask him to raise his hands.
“How do residents of a 70 percent black city (Ferguson, MO) allow themselves to be governed by a City Council where five of the six council members are white?”
Somewhere I read that only 20% of the residents there are registered to vote and, of that, only 20% actually voted. So apparently only .20*.20 = 4% even care.
Why not have a voter registration drive instead of encouraging or excusing criminal arson activities?
The black reaction to a criminal thug in Missouri trying to kill a police officer and the officer protecting himself has done more to set back race relations than anything I could imagine. Who’s responsible for Big Mike’s death? Big Mike, that’s who.
How about doing something to prevent the overwhelming number of murders of blacks by young blacks? That dwarfs any unjustified killings by police officers. Yet, the black community, or at least its spokesmen, must think blacks killing blacks is just peachy. In the 502 days between Treyvon Martin’s death and the acquittal of Zimmerman, for instance, 10,665 blacks were murdered by other blacks. Do you know any of THEIR names?
And to be taken seriously, get a decent spokesman, someone with decency and honor like Martin Luther King. Al Sharpton is nothing but an opportunistic tax cheat–currently failing to pay $4,500,000 of his taxes. After all, the civil rights movement of the 1960s succeeded only because Mr. King and others convinced the majority of Americans that blacks were decent people and deserved better treatment, not because of threats and riots egged on by some rabble-rouser like Sharpton. And Holder, with hundreds of Mexicans dead from his illegal Fast and Furious gun running scam, basically comes across the same way.