There is a moment, easy to miss, in the classic Western movie High Noon when Gary Cooper has a chance to shoot one of the bad guys in the back, but he does not. That was part of the Code of the Old West. No matter what, you never shoot a man in the back.
After the firestorms of Ferguson, the killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island, and the final determination by Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post and others that Michael Brown was justifiably killed, there has been a greater awareness developing of the complexities of the issues surrounding police killings and race in the United States.
The collection of statistics is not good, but almost all the people killed by police are men, and apparently a large majority of them are White. But about a quarter are Black, and that is double the representation in the population at large. Why is this?
Is it that there are more young Black men involved in crime, or is it racism, perhaps subconscious, among mostly White police officers? My guess is that the complicated truth is that the answer is “Both.”
There are ridiculous theories that Barack Obama and Al Sharpton have somehow orchestrated these killings of young Black men, or that this is all about “counting coup.” Leaving the delusional perceptions of crackpots aside, a rational approach to these issues requires that we take a hard look, not only at the problems of police violence and racism, but also the prejudices of liberals like myself.
Our president Chris Kaman will address racism in this presentation to the EHST planned for the 26th of this month, and I expect he will address the recent death of Walter Scott, a Black man, by Michael Slager, a White police officer in North Charleston, S.C. This was captured on video by Feiden Santana, who said “I knew the cop didn’t do the right thing.”
Sharpton may have chosen his examples poorly in the past, but to see an unarmed man shot in the back as he runs away, and to see a policeman fire at him instead of chasing him, brings back to the fore all the issues of police violence and race that plague our society and raise difficult ethical and policy questions that deserve our attention.
Officer Slager did not honor the Code of the Old West. He shot Scott in the back, and he killed him in cold blood.
The response in this case, as compared to Ferguson, MO and New York City, has been different. Slager is in jail and charged with murder, as he should be. (As a proud Southerner, I must point out that the folks in South Carolina have handled this in the right way.)
As in the Brown and Garner cases, and others, my reaction as a White liberal was “This would not have happened to a White man.” But do I know that to actually be the case? Better statistics need to be gathered and analyzed to determine whether all of this is ultimately a matter of police misconduct or racism, although perhaps the best course is to see it as sometimes a deadly combination of both of these moral problems.
Among the difficult questions are basic ones about how much force is justifiable in law enforcement, how much racism – including subconscious racist reactions – is involved in these incidents, and how the media can better handle these issues.
I look forward to comments from EHST members and others about all this, as well as whatever else you believe is relevant here.
