in The Atlantic, in a piece titled Blue Lives Matter with a subtitle in bold of
Talking about "police reform" obscures the task. Today's policies are, at the very least, the product of democratic will.
As is often the case with Coates, his observations are very much to the point, and may well make some readers uncomfortable.
And lest you think he has changed his mind on anything, that title is ironic, because... well, let me get you there.
Let's start with his 2nd paragraph:
For activists and protesters radicalized by the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, this weekend's killing may seem to pose a great obstacle. In fact, it merely points to the monumental task in front of them. The response to Garner's death, particularly, seemed to offer some hope. But the very fact that this opening originated in the most extreme case—the on-camera choking of a man for a minor offense—points to the shaky ground on which such hope took root. It was only a matter of time before some criminal shot a police officer in New York. If that's all it takes to turn Americans away from police reform, the efforts were likely doomed from the start.
It was only a matter of time before some criminal shot a police officer in New York. If that's all it takes to turn Americans away from police reform, the efforts were likely doomed from the start. Chilling words, but they should not be surprising. First, eventually in a city the size of New York a criminal is going to shoot a cop. That s/he might claim responding to the incidents of police brutality as a cover is no more surprising than those police who claim "justifiable" fear for their use of deadly force, as seen especially in the Michael Brown case. But that things like the internet postings of this shooter are used as "proof" by those who both want to attack political figures who advocate oversight of the police (Mayor De Blasio, Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, etc.) is symptomatic of why we have a problem with out of control police in the first place.
Please keep reading.
Today is the last day of school before break. My 3 government classes will be watching 12 Angry Men, the original version with Oscar winners Hank Fonda, Martin Balsam, and Ed Begley Senior. I think of words of the latter, who plays a racist in the film. The ethnicity of the accused is never identified, but these words stick in my mind:
You're not gonna tell me that we're supposed to believe this kid, knowing what he is. Listen, I've lived among them all my life - you can't believe a word they say, you know that. I mean they're born liars.
Somehow when I heard rationalizations of police violence by the like of Giuliani arguing we should be more focused on black on black crime, I think of those words, of the ignorance and prejudice demonstrate.
Returning to Coates. The two long paragraphs that immediately follow what I quoted at the beginning are too rich for me to fully address. Without including his hotlinks, here is the beginning of the first of those:
The idea of "police reform" obscures the task. Whatever one thinks of the past half-century of criminal-justice policy, it was not imposed on Americans by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are, at the very least, byproducts of democratic will.
Likewise, here is the beginning of the next:
To challenge the police is to challenge the American people, and the problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that we are majoritarian pigs. When the police are brutalized by people, we are outraged because we are brutalized. By the same turn, when the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves. Power, decoupled from responsibility, is what we seek.
Then I go to the end of the next paragraph:
The killings of Officers Liu and Ramos prompt national comment. The killings of black civilians do not. When it is convenient to award qualitative value to murder, we do so. When it isn't, we do not. We are outraged by violence done to police, because it is violence done to all of us as a society. In the same measure, we look away from violence done by the police, because the police are not the true agents of the violence. We are.
The "we" in this case is not specifically the people who live in the ghettos, but the society as a whole that allows the creation and the continuation of those ghettos, a society that not only allows the continuation of racism and prejudice but has major political and cultural figures who actively encourage it.
You will see where Coates is heading by reading the paragraph immediately following what I have just quoted, a peroration of the word "we" beginning with
We are the ones who designed the criminogenic ghettos. We are the ones who barred black people from leaving those ghettos.
Two snips from the penultimate paragraph of this incredibly forceful piece:
The criminal-justice system has been the most consistent tool for making American will manifest in black communities.
The citizen who needs to look away generally finds a reason.
Here my mind is filled with rushing thoughts. The use of citations and stop-andp-frisk; the history of racially-based traffic stops. Then my mind returns to the powerful paragraph with its repetitions of "we" to the line that encapsulates it all, certainly from the perspective of black me:
We are the ones who treat black men without criminal records as though they are white men with criminal records.
Here I am reminded of what was for a while a pattern in the otherwise outstanding high school in which I taught for 13 years. If you were a White or Asian (East or South) kid from the Science and Tech program and you were caught in the hall without a pass you were told simply to get to class. If you were a Black kid without a pass, you got at the minimum a detention. When a new, Black principal started to send all the kids back to class some White teachers complained that discipline was breaking down.
Coates has a warning for the wider American society, the "we" that he addresses. He sets it up and expresses it so well that I will conclude this piece, after urging you to read and pass on his writing, merely by quoting his final paragraph:
I wonder if there is some price attached to this looking away. When the elected mayor of my city arrived at the hospital, the police officers who presumably serve at the public's leisure turned away in a display that should chill the blood of any interested citizen. The police are not the only embodiment of democratic society. And one does not have to work hard to imagine a future when the agents of our will, the agents whom we created, are in fact our masters. On that day one can expect that the tactics intended for the ghettos will enjoy wider usage.