For the past week I have seen a country torn by the violent killing of police officers and black men. I am not writing to defend the killing of police officers: there is no defense. I have not heard anyone who would defend that. Police officers put their lives at risk giving their best effort to make everyone safer. No reason could be good enough to massacre the innocent men laid to rest in Dallas. The nation mourns.
But over the past week I have heard many of my conservative friends, some of the people I love most, defend the killing of young black men by Police. Some feel that if they do not defend these shootings they are betraying police. They try to convince me the media narrative is incorrect; that these men were criminals who disobeyed authority. I have seen stories passed around social media claiming that all the victims in these high profile killings are actually criminals. They are abusers. They are gangsters. If they wouldn’t resist arrest they would not be shot.
For the sake of argument, I’ll assume all of the above is true (even though it’s usually not). Regardless of who these men are the Sixth Amendment is under assault. The right to trial by jury has become for so many a privilege granted at the discretion of a police officer, not promise guaranteed every American by the Constitution. If law enforcement has the ability to face a man who murders in a hateful rage, a man like Dylan Roof, and arrest him for his day at a trial by his peers, justice is offended that these men are routinely denied that same right. The Sixth Amendment is living in Agony.
Maybe these men were bad people. Maybe these men had caused nothing but trouble in their lives. But in every one of these high profile cases, with the exception of Michael Brown, it is clear that these officers’ lives were not in danger. This deadly use of force spits on the face of liberty, then kicks dust on it to be sure it cakes.
In the United States we are presumed innocent unless proven otherwise through due process of law. Maybe you think Philando Castile is the man who robbed a convenience store. To that I genuinely say “Good, maybe you are right.” Maybe you would have been on his jury to voice the notion; but he didn’t get a jury. He got four cold bullets. In this narrative Castile will never get to face that jury because the crime that killed him was “maybe looking like some guy somewhere.” In this narrative the Fifth Amendment right to due process is merely a suggestion.
Why, my conservative friends, were many of you more upset when Cliven Bundy lost a cow than when Diamond Reynolds lost her boyfriend? Yet, in Bundy’s case, his cattle had been trespassing for over two decades, and despite many conservatives bringing an armed standoff to the law enforcement officers, not a single person was killed. Those same conservatives then say that if black people do not resist, officers will not kill them. Given the circumstances, when a black man is shot, no matter their criminal past, assuming that there is even one to speak of, while committing no crime, and posing no threat, it is not wholly irrational to conclude that black lives don’t matter.
Had a group of armed black men approached a group of police officers clearing trespassed land it does not seem implausible that many would be dead on both sides. This is a double standard I cannot grasp; and for what? A man who thinks “the Negro” was better off in slavery?
If you think that selling loose cigarettes or bootlegging CDs is a crime worthy of death, then you might consider a body armor investment before the next time you J-walk or dare to let your speedometer creep up above the limit.
These protestors are assembling to defend the very constitution that has failed them; the same constitution that you so revere, and claim to defend with your ideology. Jon Stewart said it best.
“You can truly grieve for every officer who's been lost in the line of duty in this country, and still be troubled by cases of police overreach, those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can have great regard for law enforcement and still want them to be held to high standards.”
What has kept me up at night more than anything is this attitude; that if somehow public opinion can be swayed to believe that these people have done something to grieve society, then the bullets put into these men were a responsible use of taxpayer dollars, and the men who put them there are righteous stewards. You do not have to be a conservative to have a burning desire for liberty. That fire within me refuses to let go of the words spoken by Diamond Reynolds after she helplessly watched her boyfriend die. Words which did not register to many people:
“Please, he’s a good man. He works for St. Paul Public Schools. He doesn’t have a record of anything. He’s never been in jail, anything. He’s not a gang member, anything.”
Even the woman who sat in a car with her four year old daughter and watched her boyfriend be shot to death has been conditioned to think that if Castile had done something wrong his death may have been justified. It haunts me that victims of the violence also implicitly feel that Life and Liberty are not guaranteed if someone has broken a law; that the very people who have sworn to uphold those rights until proven guilty are the ones taking them away.
If the rights bestowed upon us from On High and framed in the Constitution are only rights for the innocent, then we have no rights at all. When and where did we become complacent enough to forget this? If you have heard the desperation in my voice as you read these words, this is why. If we are not all free, we are not free at all.