One of the most damnable parts of being black in America is living in a state of constant doubt and questioning. “Was that white person dissin’ me, or do I just have an overactive defense mechanism?” The plain fact is, as a race we have historically and consistently been treated with such disrespect that we can sometimes imagine such ill-treatment where none exists.
Such was the case in the arrest of Shawnte Lewis Gibson by the Euclid Police Department. Now the plain fact is, racial integration has gone so poorly in Euclid, with city officials doing everything they can to make blacks feel unwelcome, that it’s easy for blacks to believe anything negative about Euclid’s police department. But in the case of Lewis Gibson, the cops were not out of bounds, as a video of the arrest clearly indicates.
Ms. Lewis Gibson stuck her head in the lion’s mouth when she began yelling at the cops as they were discharging their duties. A cop had stopped an SUV on East 222nd Street because the driver had hopped a curb and went left-of-center twice, as the dashboard camera video proved. The driver was either drunk or distracted and could have hurt some innocent person.
But when Lewis Gibson pulled up on the scene in her Jeep and slowed to a stop, she yelled at the officers to “stop being fucking pigs.” The fact is, she didn’t know why the officers had the driver of the SUV pulled over, but obviously, being an angry black woman, she automatically assumed that the stop was racially inspired. Now, given the history of race relations in Euclid, I can’t say that she was wrong to jump to a conclusion. Where she was wrong was acting on said conclusion.
Actually, the cops let her get the first comment off (which was probably more than I would have done, but then I’m not trained to take insults from some crazed person). But then she kept at it, yelling at the cops to stop “harassing kids” and then cussing at them a second time. By cursing at the cops the second time, as the saying goes, she “took the joke past Broadway.”
Now you don’t have to agree with laws or those who enforce them, but if society can’t maintain respect for law enforcement, then, before long we’ll be back in the days where cavemen bonked each other upside the head with impunity. What we have to do to make things more equitable is to attempt to get more women and minorities to join police departments, particularly in majority/minority communities.
Anyway, the cops gave chase and found the woman’s vehicle in a parking lot of a facility nearby, and when the woman came out of the building, all hell broke loose. As the cops tried to cuff the woman, a violent scuffle ensued, and Lewis Gibson cussed, kicked, scratched, bit and spit at the cops. That last move would have caused me to slap all of the taste out of her mouth.
But then, even after the video of Lewis Gibson’s behavior surfaces, here comes a group of black clergy and other groups whose stated mission is protecting black folk from mistreatment, but in this case trying to turn wrong into right. As I stated earlier, race relations in Euclid have been horrible, and I don’t doubt that some white officers in that suburb bring their racist attitudes to work with them. That’s a given.
But the video in the case at hand clearly indicates the cops were not in the wrong, at least not this time. The black groups that want to make this incident an issue should have shut the hell up and waited for a legitimate racially inspired issue to take place, as one surely will in a place like Euclid. But to protest on behalf of some black person that is in the wrong diminishes the power of protest when some black person is in the right.
Here’s the problem now that Lewis Gibson has been indicted: The louder the protests on her behalf, the longer the sentence she is liable to get. One of the protestors, who at one point in his life worked as an assistant county prosecutor, should know this. I guarantee you that the only thing that going to beat this angry woman to Marysville Woman’s Prison is going to be the headlights on the bus taking her there — the only question is, for how long. And just let her try to spit on someone — staff or fellow prisoner — while she’s in the joint. They’ll have her wearing her ass for an Easter Bonnet.
From CoolCleveland 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.