I’m going to venture into territory I’ve never written about publicly. I haven’t gone there because I haven’t known what to say. I have no tidy solution to offer. I'm not qualified or in any way equipped to fully address such an enormous and complex issue. I cannot even begin to scratch the surface of something like this in one little blog post. There are many others who can and have and will say it better, but I am writing because I can no longer keep silent on this topic.
I have written about the practice of mindfulness—a kind of paying attention. If one is committed to paying attention, there comes a point when you simply cannot ignore what is in front of you, no matter how uncomfortable it is. I have watched (admittedly from a considerable distance) over and over, as people—usually young men, often in African American communities--have been subjected to completely unacceptable treatment by law enforcement officers.
I don’t just mean someone put on handcuffs a little too tight. I’m talking about brutal beatings. Men shot in the back and killed. A man who died in a police choke hold while his final cries of “I can’t breathe!” were interpreted as resisting arrest. Most recently, a man’s spine was severed while in police custody. The list is far longer than this. Unless you live under a rock, you have seen the stories. Unfathomably, in many cases the response to incriminating video of police brutality has been to outlaw the video.
What finally makes it to our television screens is only the tip of the iceberg. Imagine the number of cases that are not captured on video and never make it to the national news. What do you think the impact of such relentless abuse of power would be on a community over time?
Yes, I know. We’d rather not imagine it. No one enjoys thinking about any of this. We’d rather assume they must be rare and isolated events. Those “bad apples” you hear about. Besides, the odds of that happening in our own front yard are remote, right? Maybe. Especially if you are white and live in a relatively affluent area. But maybe not as remote as you think. In any case, how can we justify looking the other way? How can we not speak up about it?
Many years ago, my own (white, middle class) family had a wake-up call. An eye-opening experience in our own friendly well-educated neighborhood abruptly put police brutality on our personal radar screen for the very first time, in a way my family could not ignore. Until that day, I could assume--on at least some level--that most people who were treated badly by the police were probably “asking for it” in some way.
After all, I was raised on Dragnet and Adam-12, where police were always scrupulously polite and followed policy to the letter. Sure, I knew they were only TV shows and that reality wasn’t so neat and clean, but I still believed that dealing with the police would come closer to a TV experience than the nightmare it turned out to be, in which an incriminating videotaped violent police interrogation mysteriously disappeared before it could be used in court.
My Facebook feed provides an interesting, if unscientific, snapshot of societal reaction to stories like the most recent news in Baltimore. Of course, there are people posting news stories and a wide range of commentary. Social media is how many of us get a significant portion of our news these days. There are friends who live in or near Baltimore working to help clean up the mess and who despair not only over the violence that threatens their community, but over the media and public reaction to it and the way it so often misses the deeper underlying issues by dismissing violent protests as simply foolish, crazy, or “thuggish” behavior. There are clergy organizing peaceful protests and pointing to the thousands of peaceful protesters in Baltimore who were not widely featured in the news. There are even people who complain bitterly that they have to even see such unpleasantness in their news feeds. How do you suppose that compares to the unpleasantness of seeing your friend murdered in the streets by policemen or your business destroyed in riots?
It is unspeakably tragic that violent protests do far more violence to the already afflicted communities in which they occur than to the subject of those protests. One thing that made the non-violent civil rights movement led by Dr. King and others in the 60s so powerful was how their leaders understood the way violence reaches even beyond the already considerable damage to property and personal injury within the community. It also destroys the fabric and reputations of those communities in a way that makes it easier for those at a distance to dismiss them as problem areas where police may be justified in acting in a military rather than law-enforcement capacity. It further reinforces racial stereotypes. And it gives everyone an excuse to take our eyes off the ball and NOT address the systemic issues that underlie the whole mess - the cancer that has been eating away at these communities for far too long, weakening community immune systems to the point that triggering their inflammatory defenses ends up doing even more harm.
It’s easy to condemn breaking windows, looting, or setting a car or pharmacy ablaze. It’s easy to shame people who are behaving violently and yet minimize the context of that violence. It’s not easy to figure out what to tell the children at school in those neighborhoods the next day (or whenever they are allowed to return to school) about what is going on in their communities—children who learn at an early age that there is no safe place they can go and no one they can trust—especially the police. Unless the cycle is interrupted, many of these very children will grow up to be men and women who experience mistreatment firsthand and whom the justice system will again fail miserably. Some percentage of them will not handle that impossible situation well. We need a better strategy than commiserating on social media about what horrible "thugs" we think they are.
How to channel anger and frustration into constructive expression? How to deal with legitimate fear? How to communicate with people who seem to be our polar opposites yet with whom we must share this planet? How to deal with a badly biased or corrupt system? These questions at least begin to touch on the heart of the issue--the source of an infection which, unattended for too long, has brought forth an overzealous inflammatory response.
While I have no one-size-fits-all solution to propose, many of us could start by taking an unflinching and non-defensive look at the problem and then at least one small additional step in a useful direction. There are people who have been studying these issues and collecting data and real life stories for a long time. Read some of them—find more than a sound-byte of information to consider. Speak with (and actively listen to) people who have a different window into the situation than you do, especially if they are closer to it by virtue of their actual lived experience. Notice when you reflexively feel the impulse to defend, and examine that. It’s easy to spot in others but can be harder to face in ourselves, yet defensiveness or redirection (such as name calling) is not a path to understanding or truly improving any situation.
There’s a huge temptation to be an armchair quarterback and pontificate about what those people over there need to do or stop doing. A more useful question might be, What can I do to help? What conversations can I have or stop having (on social media or elsewhere)? Are there relevant facts I haven’t considered? Have I made assumptions without considering important information? What can I learn more about? How are these issues being addressed in our schools and how might I help with that? What legislation might I support or oppose or let others know about?
My own family encounter with law enforcement overreach years ago forced me to take another look at the previously distant and somewhat vague reports I had heard of police crossing the line. Much like childbirth horror stories, as soon as you have one yourself, a million others come out of the woodwork, and you realize just how real and disconcertingly common they are. Even when you allow for a little fisherman’s tale exaggeration, clearly there is more going on than you were previously tapped into.
It’s time to tap in, whether we think we have been personally affected or not. It’s time to get at the roots and not just the tops of the weeds. It’s time to recognize how our own assumptions or attitudes or inaction may be making matters worse--or at least not making them any better. It’s time to STOP letting our own discomfort or politics or anything else get in the way of addressing a completely unacceptable situation.
What small (or not-so-small) step can you take? Can you read a relevant article which you usually wouldn’t? …have a conversation or make a phone call you would typically avoid? …listen where you might ordinarily tune out, dismiss, or become defensive? …volunteer in a school or community center? …check into legislation about (and the pros and cons of) body-worn cameras for police or citizens using cell phones to record events? …read some of Michelle Alexander’s work on the far-reaching and downright shocking affects mass incarceration is having on black communities in particular?
What ideas can you add to these? If this problem became a nation-wide priority for EVERYONE, approached with more than band-aids, we could absolutely put a stop to it. ALL of our communities would be safer and better communities, as a result. But it’s not going to happen by itself. We have to stem the tide. If you have been sitting on the sidelines on this one (as I confess I sometimes have), it’s time to get in the game. Real human lives are at stake.
