Harris County sheriff's deputy Darren Goforth was killed last week. All indications suggest that the gunman approached the uniformed officer and fired on him without provocation, at least in that instant. He shot Goforth in the back and again while the officer laid on the ground. It's a senseless tragedy that's rightly been condemned from every corner of society, including voices like President Obama and those who've been active in the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Already, this event has prompted many to question, and even blame the BlackLivesMatter movement, accusing that movement of stirring up resentment toward police officers. This scapegoating of BlackLivesMatter is problematic for a number of reasons, and in fact, it's dead wrong. The killing of a Houston police officer and the subsequent response to that killing is not an indictment of the movement in any legitimate sense. When you really dig into how the shooting's been framed by the public and dealt with by authorities in question, you get an understanding of why the #BlackLivesMatter movement is necessary in the first place.
Blaming BLM for the shooting of a police officer is akin to blaming a doctor for a broken leg. The movement functions like an X-ray and orthopedic surgeon combined, shining an ultraviolet light to the core of the problems faced by black people in America, and laying those issues bare for the public to see. This is to say that BlackLivesMatter did not create resentment among some element of the public. Rather, it exposed the reasons why that resentment exists, pointing out the myriad instances where black people have been treated by the justice system like second-class citizens.
Beyond that, BlackLivesMatter functions as a tour de force in channeling resentment in positive ways. If unsettled anger over the chronic killing of black Americans by police is a big enough problem that it might lead to the targeting of police officers, then all of thinking society should want an organization like BLM around. It provides people with a way of demonstrating their anger and frustration without taking the law into their own hands. Certainly there will be people who go off on their own. There will be individuals with very little to lose who think the best way to respond to police shootings of unarmed black men is to kill unsuspecting officers. Those acts are wrong, but the frustration behind those acts is legitimate. The BLM movement provides a productive outlet that marshals mounting frustration into political activism. In short, it is, as one famous Australian put it, "Democracy manifest."
There has been, to this point, a major point of confusion on just why people are frustrated. It's not the killing of black men by police and vigilantes that brings on the frustration. As adults who participate in society, we all understand that people will occasionally die. We understand, too, that even violent crime has happened since the beginning of time. Police will act according to their biases, they will make mistakes, and sometimes, hateful people will commit crimes against black people that could scarcely be called a "mistake" in the eyes of the assailant. BlackLivesMatters, like many organizations before it, is less interested in the nearly unthinkable task of changing the hearts of would-be dangerous Americans. The organization is interested in ensuring that the law acts to protect black Americans from those who might do them harm.
And there's the rub. It's in the response to the killings of black and white people that we see why BLM must exist in the first place. The average killing of an unarmed black man plays out in a fairly typical way. The person is shot, with police releasing a statement explaining the exaggerated circumstances of the death. The media reports on those circumstances before splicing in a bit of background on the things that the victim may have done wrong in the past. An angry-looking picture of the victim is added for good measure. Weeks go on without an arrest, and a large percentage of white America offers the tried truism of "If he'd just listened to the officer, he wouldn't be dead." Anger flows when a grand jury, selected in some system designed during Reconstruction or Jim Crow, lets the officer walk without so much as a trial.
In the unlikely case that the shooter goes to trial, sympathetic juries can understand why the officer or vigilante was scared. After all, Michael Brown was big, and he had that all-too-common big black guy syndrome - the ability to fight his way through bullets to maul a man with his two hands. The encounters are framed to the mostly white jury like some scene out of National Geographic, where a hiker describes coming around a curve in Glacier National Park just a little too fast, only to see a grizzly bear. What option did that hiker have, than to take down the bear? That's the image the jury sees as it votes to acquit the officer, who was, you know, just doing a very difficult job.
We've seen roughly this version of the facts play out in states across America, in the deaths of Michael Brown, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, Rumain Brisbon, Jerame Reid, Phillip White, and Jonathan Ferrell, among many others.
The frustration that emanates from BLM comes not because these men were killed, though we'd all prefer if they'd been treated like human beings in their encounters with police. It comes because the law, and those designated to uphold the law, don't seem to care. One way to view the response of our criminal justice system is through the frame of value. When someone is killed, how much does their death move the needle? If a person's value in society is high, then the system responds swiftly using its full force to send a clear message that the crime is not acceptable. The flip side must also be true. When the system drags its feet, gives non-answers, no-bills officers in the grand jury stage, and outright acquits them sometime later, the message is loud and clear - your death didn't move the needle. Move along.
This brings us to the unfortunate death of a Houston police officer. A death as unfortunate as any of those mentioned above. Where the stories diverge is in how we've responded to each death.
When Shannon Miles killed Darren Goforth, he was arrested less than a day later. He was charged with the most serious of Texas crimes - capital murder. The Harris County DA will almost assuredly seek to satiate the masses by seeking the death penalty. The crime has been roundly condemned by figures such as President Obama, who felt the need to affirm for the country what it already knew - that killing a police officer is "totally unacceptable." He went so far as to call the widow of the officer. The response on all forms of media, from mainstream to social, has been swift. Knowing the courts in Houston, I'd guess that I have a better chance of winning Superbowl MVP as he does of hearing anything other than "Guilty" if the cases happens to go to trial.
Every single thing done in response to this murder has affirmed, and will continue to affirm, that when the life of a police officer is taken in America, we care about that crime. I've yet to read a suggestion that the officer might have moved too quickly, thus scaring the shooter. I've yet to read suggestions about the officer's super-human strength. I've yet to hear reports about the officer's past, nor see a picture of him from that one time he got really mad at someone. And all of that is good and right. This wasn't the victim's fault. The problem is not that the system is working well on behalf of this victim of a violent murder. It's that the system fails to work well on behalf of other victims when the size-12 police boot is on the other foot.
To understand the frustration of BLM, and to know why it must exist, you have to dig deeper than just this one incident, or even the latest collection of times when police killed civilians in America. Black frustration exists largely because there's a long and unbroken chain leading straight from 1600 to this moment in time. The taking of the black body, as Ta-Nehisi Coates so eloquently notes in his new book, has only shape-shifted over time. And killing a black man with impunity is something that recalls for the black community the horrific crimes of the post-Reconstruction era of terror, leading right up to those instances during Jim Crow when dead black men (and boys) just didn't move the needle.
Last week brought the 60th anniversary of the killing of Emmett Till, a young black boy who was lynched for the "crime" of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. His killers were set free after mutilating him. When civil rights activist Medgar Evers was killed in 1963, the man who took his life escaped a guilty verdict twice while standing trial in front of juries that comprised nothing but white men. He lived three decades free before he was finally convicted of the crime in the 1990s.
The segregation academy that I attended has been transformed into a reform school called "Alfred Rush Academy." Alfred Rush was a South Carolina slave who, after emancipation, rose up to own several businesses and serve multiple terms in the state legislature. In 1876, he was murdered by a white man who couldn't stand to see Rush have any power during a time when black power was scarce. That killer walked free, as so many others have around the country since the first time we envisioned the criminal trial.
Many books could be written and have been written about the justice system's inability to demonstrate society's outrage when a black life is taken. While BLM has focused its intensity on the murder of black men by those in authority, the numbers show that black men and women killed in any form are just far less likely to generate the type of rage that it takes for society to act in its basest form. As wrong as the death penalty is, it's long been society's tool for showing its outright disgust with a murder. Studies done in Maryland suggest that those who kill white people are far more likely to receive the death penalty than those who kill black people, regardless of the race of the killer. One recent study suggested that killers of white victims are roughly three times as likely to get the death penalty as killers of black victims.
This is the America that gives rise to the BLM movement - an America where our deepest institutions are ingrained with notions of value that discredit black lives much like they've been discredited over history. The methodology has changed, but the outcome has not.
Those misguided souls who blame BlackLivesMatter for this crime are intentionally obtuse. They're blaming the doctor who diagnoses the disease for the symptoms caused by the disease. There's nothing to justify the targeting of police officers for assassination. It's counter-productive and grotesque. But perhaps our swift response to this crime, and the criminal justice system's ability to marshal its tools in defense of the officer when it fails to defend black victims of police crime, demonstrates why very maxim "Black Lives Matter" is needed in a country where everything suggests otherwise.