The following is an excerpt from a public letter written and posted by John C. Blackmon, the president of the Tri-County Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 3 in South Carolina. It was posted after the killing of Walter Scott by a North Charleston officer. (See Al Baker's NYT article of April 18, 2015).
"Do not allow the professional race agitators to seize this moment to advance their often self-serving opinions of what is wrong in South Carolina. Do not allow them to bemoan the lack of trust of police by the minority community. Do not allow them to beat down the hardworking men and women of the Lowcountry’s Law Enforcement."
According John Blackmon's letter, the real problem in North Charleston is those "professional race agitators." The five bullets in Mr. Scott's back are treated as an awkward detail. The letter contains not a single note of sympathy; it contains no recognition of the humanity of the victim and his family's grief; it contains no recognition of a potential or likely systemic problem; it offers no path to a better future. It identifies the "real" problem as the unfair beat down of South Carolina law enforcement officers by "professional race agitators," no doubt most of whom are a subset of those usual suspects, "outside agitators."
The whispered, or shouted, subtext in police discussions of these recent episodes of publicized police violence similar to that in North Charleston (see Baker article) is that they all occurred because "those" people, the dead or the beaten, didn't obey the commands of police officers. The unacknowledged absurdity in such thinking becomes clear when one recognizes that we have police on the street exactly for the purpose of dealing with people who don't obey the rules. That is precisely why they are there, and the problem that is their major responsibility. How well and lawfully they meet that responsibility is the real measure of police performance in our society.
In a more general sense, the police union official's letter bizarrely and horribly serves as a disturbing modern example of the southern myth of victimization that was woven during the post Civil War Reconstruction era. During that violent era (see S. Bodiansky's book, The Bloody Shirt, for detail on South Carolina), southerners successfully pushed the narrative that they were the victims of unscrupulous northerners and irresponsible ex-slaves.
All the considerable and appalling White violence against Republican governmental officials and ex-slaves was not the issue. If it did become the issue, that violence was justified and was forced on the perpetrators as the only reasonable response to these groups behavior toward the White population.
John Blackmon's letter rings that same broken, blood-encrusted bell 150 years later. According to him, the real problem is those "professional race agitators." This is simply the Reconstruction myth of southern victimization with a modern twist. It was a grossly misleading when applied to Reconstruction. It is self-serving and ultimately self-defeating in this modern version. The focus on outside "agitators" means that the problem somehow has its genesis outside the world in which it occurred. Therefore, all that is needed to resolve the problem is for people to forget that it occurred. Successful resolution requires nothing else.
The "blaming the victim" rationale for violence so popular in law enforcement circles (e.g., he ran) literally smacks of Reconstruction rationales for White violence. The classic refrain in that era was that there would have been no violence if "those people" would have just accepted the right of White Democrats to dominate their behavior, their movements, and their lives.
The letter in question draws from both the worn southern rhetoric of victimization, which police in other regions have enthusiastically embraced, and the out-dated norms of a deeply troubled occupation, street policing. Neither this rhetoric nor these norms offer anyone even the slenderest ray of hope for reform or progress.
The horrors and failures of Reconstruction would only have been avoided by the influence of external national forces. In the same sense, policing in America will only be reformed by the intervention of actors beyond the scope of local law enforcement with its rigid norms of mutual support. Individual citizen videos, CCTV, civilian review boards, the national reporting of violent police encounters, independent prosecutors, and special grand juries serve as our best hopes for change. Events like those in North Charleston too often occur in corners darkened to the rest of the world. No internal light will be sufficient to illuminate and help our society eliminate them.