How many times have we seen this movie? Or better yet, how many times do we need to see it in order to reach the conclusion that it’s not normal?
Stephon Clark was the 22-year-old unarmed black man fatally shot several weeks ago by Sacramento police officers. According to an independent autopsy, Clark was struck eight times, mostly in his back.
Sacramento police initially responded to reports of broken windows. They see Clark in the driveway, and yell, “Hey! Show me your hands! Stop! Stop!” Clark flees to the back of the house. Shortly after they reach the back of the house in pursuit, one officer yelled, “Show me your hands! Gun, gun, gun!” and they start firing.
Twenty shots later, Clark lies dead on the ground. No gun was in his possession; Clark was holding an IPhone.
Stephon Clark is now the nom de jour in a continuing tragic drama. Since 2014, of the 15 high-profile cases involving the death of people of color at the hands of law enforcement, two officers were found guilty, while local authorities have paid in excess of $45 million to the victims’ families.
The status quo offers Clark should not have run from the police. I agree, but should the logical outcome of alleged vandalism result in an unarmed man shot eight times mostly in the back by law enforcement? Clark is but the latest reminder that the human condition is once again mired in absurdity.
In philosophy, absurdity refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to realize it. In the American narrative, absurdity can be seen as the distance between the perfection of the idea of liberty and equality and the imperfection associated with its execution. Within the status quo, absurdity may simply be defined as the inability to comprehend why others outside its parameters see the world differently.
The status quo was besieged by discomfort when the Sacramento city council meeting was disrupted by protestors led by Clark’s brother, Stevante Clark, who jumped on the dais, reportedly hurling an expletive at Mayor Darrell Steinberg. The NBA’s Sacramento Kings also had their game postponed by protestors. Uncomfortable as it may be, these are the tools at the disposal of the unheard.
It is therefore easier for the status quo to debate the methodology of the protestors than it is to grapple with the reason for their discontent. We don’t like it when the Bob Dylan demographic flexes its otherwise nihilistic muscles.
As I have opined in prior columns, singer Bob Dylan penned the lyrics, “when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” This reflects the feeling of a growing number of millennials that have no particular allegiance to the status quo.
To assuage discomfort, the status quo wants to assure the protestors that this matter will be handled, using the language from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, “with all deliberate speed.” In the annals of history, the aforementioned quote has proven to be a euphemism for maintaining the existing structure.
Many reflexively base their opposition to the current tactics because they are perceived as unlike those utilized by the Rev. Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement. They bemoan the Sacramento protestors blocking the freeway as if Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge was an open field in 1965.
The King they reference is the nonabrasive post-assassination version, conveniently sanitized by history. This particular King is universally loved, does not create discomfort, but bears scant similarity to the man who actually lived.
As the authentic King demonstrated, if everyone is comfortable, change is unlikely. In this scenario, change is further hampered by attempts to nationalize local issues. With some 18,000 police departments nationwide, it is a Herculean effort, if not impossible, to craft a one-size-fits-all policy.
As former King County, Washington sheriff Sue Rahr stated recently on NPR, roughly half of those departments have less than 10 officers. Moreover, many of those departments possess inadequate training budgets. Might this be an area where the federal government can play a role?
That does not absolve, nor should it, local government of its responsibilities. Though police shootings of unarmed young males of color is a national phenomenon, it remains a local issue. Yet, the emphasis placed on race seductively mitigates the impact class also has on these occurrences.
We seem to be at an impasse, change vs. comfort. How can there be change that is not clearly defined? How can there be expectations of comfort when what ought to be defined as absurd is increasingly commonplace?
Rev. Byron Williams is one of the leading public theologians in the nation. He is a columnist, author, and adjunct professor at Wake Forest University. He is also host of the NPR-affiliated broadcast The Public Morality. He is the author of Strip Mall Patriotism, 1963: The Year of Hope and Hostility, and the forthcoming The Radical Declaration: An Enlightened Ideal Learn more >
My own pistol is the same as was first standard issue for the NYC police department, patent 1905. When I was Security for Rochdale College Toronto the only guns in the college were with the top guy guarding the pot for the poker game.
Professor Williams, you get me going when I just see the phrase “The Human Condition”. Thanks for the definition in regards to absurdity.
I started to say that my .32 revolver is a right weak little gun. How powerful a pistol are these guys really supposed to have? Since they are so shocked that people don’t instantly obey whatever it is they say, they are forced to shoot them as they are simply incredulous that anyone would not know they will shoot them.
When I was in Canada, Toronto, a city of 2 or three million the idea of cops and criminals was that they had to be able to take it from either side of the line. Since the fist fight was more likely than the shooting the monopoly on violence was challenged.
In the US there is to be no challenge to that monopoly at all. So then whomever is the bad actor in the cop drama must always be overwhelmed completely by a fast moving multiplicity of bullets from a high capacity mag.
White people get shot a lot by cops in the United States too. Black Lives Matter is in the title of the organization stating the difference. When white people get shot by the cops there is more regret of it. Or it feels as if there is more regret of it.
On the east coast in NYC where the system oppresses and ghettoizes by race and wealth seems like the cops are at least more willing to get up close and personal, and choke you to death. It is less the threat to civilization. When bullets start flying at high speed and lots of them at a time more people get killed, and they are often innocent, uninvolved.
Random violence is not civilized. In the civilized societies aimed at moderating the worst of human nature, giving us time to think of the Human Condition and absurdities, random violence is absurd because it is absurd for the barbarians to beat the civil.
In the civilized society all are raised in class. The US society now is not as civilized as it must become to be a matured civilization.
Most people in power seem to be comfortable with the expectation of collapse more than committed to advancing equality, equality of the cops and the criminals, civilians, must be achieved before the US becomes less violent.
That the cops are made into special people, in a class all their own, empowered to shoot down about anybody, but by percentages Black people and young Black men contributes to the likelihood because they are not like everybody else, to murder them is more of a crime now.
That the cops are not like anybody else in a class of their own makes them really dangerous for most anyone to interact with.
As far as aspects of human nature go it is impractical for cops to be special class people with the guns they have moving around in gangs of 5.
Hey Disgusted, this is not the first time that you’ve insulted me and turned off your reply button. Were you even alive during the LA riots?, because you seem to lack basic knowledge of what actually happened.
Do a little fact-checking – start with the complaints from the Korean-Americans about the LAPD during the riots. Then move on to the standard practices of the LAPD under Gates (i.e. the Management).
My comments were factual (according to eyewitnesses), and neither rude nor offensive. Unless you’re an idiot that lives in an imaginary world where “America is the bestest country in the whole wide world because mommy told me so, and mommy is always right”.
Grow up Dude – the real world is not a frickin’ fairy tale where all the cops are honest and everyone in America wants peace and justice for all.
Street justice in 1993:
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-04-21/news/1993111219_1_street-justice-criminal-justice-system-excessive-force
Running from an armed police officer in America may be the most intelligent thing a black person could do.
The world got a glimpse into how differently black people and white people are treated by the police on March 3, 1991, after a group of LAPD officers stopped a speeding motorist named Rodney King and administered a violent beating using billy clubs.
A nearby resident, by happenstance, had a new video camera which he was testing. He captured the beating and it went the equivalent of viral. It was picked up by every news station in the country. Extreme police brutality was, at last, caught on tape.
The recent spectacle of police officers or security personnel murdering unarmed black people who were either committing no crime or involved in, at most, misdemeanor conduct, has become a staple of American life since cell phones became equipped with video equipment. We have learned that the police lie about the danger the victim posed to them. Sometimes, the officer gets confused and shoots the victim with a gun rather than using a taser.
We have seen black people killed because they were armed with a package of Skittles, a telephone, a child with a plastic gun, and nothing at all.
Nothing illustrates the division between the races more than how we look at evidence of beatings, brutality or murder by law enforcement. It is a vestige of slavery that black people are relegated to a lower rung on the social scale when they come face to face with police officers. The “Stop and Frisk” campaign in New York City became a daily assault on the civil liberties of minorities.
Was Stephon Clark, the unarmed black man, who was shot in the back 8 times just another victim of racism or was it a mistake by the police? I disagree with my brother Disgusted that the police should not be suspected of committing a racial crime. Why eight bullets? Why not one? Why not two? Why not shoot him in the foot?
There is an epidemic of homicide in this country committed by law enforcement officers. After the killing of an unarmed person, the officers should not get the benefit of the doubt, especially when there is video or circumstantial evidence that eliminates all doubt,
Mistakes will be made, for sure. But when a doctor accidentally kills a patient on the operating table, we hold them accountable for negligence and sometimes for crimes. We call it malpractice. Sometimes the cops commit malpractice.