20 September 2016

Terrorist lives matter, or: Take another knee, Kaepernick

This isn't the first blog to note the irony of the suspected Chelsea bomber being taken alive, despite exchanging fire with cops, while the news showed us footage of an unarmed Tulsa OK man being killed by police, apparently for touching his SUV the wrong way. But let's not overstate the irony. The suspected terrorist, after all, is a potential asset. Alive, he may tell the NYPD, FBI, etc. important things about jihadi networks and terror cells. By comparison, of what use was the "bad dude," as a helicopter cop called the Tulsa victim, to local law enforcement? Tulsa, it seems, is a bad place; one of their "finest" (a reserve deputy, actually) is already doing time for shooting an unarmed man with his revolver when he meant to taze the bro. Once again, of course, the latest Tulsa victim was condemned for failing to comply. In a possibly addled state, he seemed to think it okay not to obey instructions so long as he kept his hands in the air. He sealed his fate by moving as if to get something out of his car -- it wasn't a gun, we now know -- and was tazed and shot just about simultaneously. Someone did the right thing, at least, or at least relatively speaking.

So here we are again, just as a lot of Americans had convinced themselves that "privileged" football players had nothing to complain about. Of course, a lot of those Americans remain convinced even after the news from Tulsa. The nation arguably is more visibly divided between the "comply or die" party and those who refuse to accept such outcomes as the breaks of the game than it is along more conventional party lines. One side insists that you have to choose between maximum safety and discretion for police and the lives of self-evident troublemakers. They've already decided that "blue" lives matter more than others in this country. The rest of us believe that it's not for the cops on the street to decide whether any lives matter less than others, unless someone is indisputably threatening other lives. Shooting-involved officers are defended invariably in the name of their own self-preservation -- the idea being they should not be punished for making mistakes lest they err the opposite way before a real threat -- and not the protection of others. Yet if we accept that police risk their lives to protect the innocent, doesn't it follow that police must accept risk in order to avoid injuring or killing people who are neither real threats nor (it must be conceded) real bright? This should not be too much to ask in a purportedly civilized society, yet look what happens when people ask. They're condemned as if they're complicit in the next such incident or the death of any police officer -- and lately they're condemned as if they're traitors to their country. I suppose they might be traitors if we lived in a police state, but despite some people's wishes we're not there yet.  I will note that so far I haven't heard as much rabid defense of the police from some of the usual channels that I usually hear on such occasions. There may even be a consensus that the police really did botch this one. Why don't we ask our presidential candidates about it?...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I no longer give a damn. Every one of these shootings becomes an excuse for rioting and looting. If BLM members were willing to police their own; to turn in those among them or in their neighborhoods using these shootings as an excuse to commit crimes, then maybe they'd earn my respect back. Until then, yes, race-based white cop on black civilian shootings will remain a real problem in this country until the Feds grow the balls to start hitting every cop involved in such a shooting with a civil rights violation and every police department that refuses to fire such cops with a civil lawsuit in the name of the people, then the police departments will have no motivation to root out the problem cops and assign them to permanent desk-duty.

Samuel Wilson said...

It's interesting that Tulsa has been calm since this news broke compared to what broke out in Charlotte NC last night, after an officer-involved shooting that is another botch on one hand (the man killed was not the one the cops were after in the first place) but on the other is more he said/they said as far as whether the man killed was armed or not. The dead man's relatives insist he was only carrying a book while the police (the shooting officer is black, BTW)say they've found a gun in the car and are pretty insistent that he was holding it and refusing to drop it. Charlotte had almost instant riots in response but Tulsa has seen nothing of the kind that I know of. The difference?...

Anonymous said...

Charlotte has nearly double the population of Tulsa (~750,000 vs ~400,000). The african-american population in Charlotte is more than double that of Tulsa (35% vs 15%). However, the violent crime rate in Tulsa is about double the national average, while the violent crime rate in Charlotte is only about 50% than national average(88.3, 64.8, and 41.4 respectively). Housing costs in Tulsa are appreciably lower than in Charlotte, even though both cities have a comparable cost-of-living.

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