Rayshard Brooks will be buried tomorrow because he was thought of as a commodity in our society. A couple of white cops showed up in the parking lot of a fast-food joint because Mr. Brooks was asleep at the wheel of his car, seemingly inebriated. He wasn’t combative with the cops who held him in the parking lot for a half hour before deciding to arrest him.
The question on many minds is, “Why didn’t the cop(s) simply allow him to lock his car and walk to his sister’s house, which was nearby, as he asked to be allowed to do?” This being America it’s easy to suspect that if Mr. Brooks had been white (and particularly a white woman) he would have been cut some slack. But since he was black the cops saw dollar signs.
Allow me to explain; think back to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. The fact eventually came out that the cops in that Missouri town routinely stopped blacks to give them tickets for even the smallest of infractions. Michael Brown was walking in the middle of the street instead of on the sidewalk in a deserted area. The cop who killed him, Darren Wilson, knew that he could earn some overtime by issuing a ticket to the young black man, a ticket that would require him to go to court to testify and complete the shakedown. And of course the judge — who was in on the scheme — would saddle young Mr. Brown with a fine for committing the infraction. So everyone wins, except for the black victim.
There are literally thousands of such stops made by police everyday across America, using persons of color to boost their income by charging them with petty “crimes” which require them to go to court and suck up some overtime. And when young blacks wake up and are outraged over the injustice of it all, they sometimes resist, and sometimes they are callously gunned down.
Few of the people reading this have ever been placed in handcuffs — and no, kinky sex games with a willing partner do not count. I’m talking about being taken into custody by law enforcement. When that happens, control of your body is essentially being taken over by someone else, an outside force, a situation that humans can find disconcerting, so oftentimes they will resist. It’s human nature.
But cops (who know via their training that this kind of resistance sometimes occurs) still demand instant and complete submission, under threat of losing limb, life or both. My guess is, that had at least one of the cops in that parking lot had been a female Mr. Brooks would still be alive today.
Back before the Civil War and Emancipation, there was a bounty on black bodies that were out of compliance with whatever racist whites said the law was at the time. Evidently that bounty system still exists, simply under another guise. Often these cases — these police stops that lead to violent interactions — are not about fairness, justice or keeping the public safe; sometimes they’re all about the Benjamins, nothing else.
