Black lives matter.
Opinion in new york daily news!
Obvious as that should be, it’s needed saying. And saying it and hearing it said has been cathartic. Because too often, the choices Americans have made — and those of the leaders they elect and the police chiefs those leaders appoint — say otherwise. When you force Americans, especially white ones, to choose between safety and fairness, safety wins.
As potent as the Black Lives Matter movement has been in driving the media conversation, preaching to and amplifying the voices of the converted, it’s done little to convince Americans not already on board of the need for change.
The latest Rasmussen poll numbers: Just 24% of whites think white police officers shooting innocent black people is a bigger problem than black people shooting black people, while 62% of blacks think white cops shooting innocent black people is the bigger problem.
That’s a false choice. But if the goal is to make change, not just point to how much change is needed, those numbers still need to be reckoned with.
More from Rasmussen: 61% of Americans say the media overhypes incidents in which black people are shot by white police officers, and 63% say that coverage makes things more dangerous for cops.
Also: 78% of whites say inner-city crime is a bigger problem than police discrimination against minorities, while 56% of blacks say discrimination. And 82% of black voters think black Americans receive unfair treatment from police . Just 30% of whites see it that way.
There’s no chance of electing leaders who will fundamentally reform American policing without those numbers shifting.
All of which takes us to Ferguson, where the town’s appalling policing practices were the subject of a damning Justice Department report finding cops, almost all of them white, lawlessly arrested people — most of them black — without cause, routinely used unnecessary force and treated black residents as a revenue source rather than citizens to protect and serve.
A second Justice report, though, put the lie to the narrative that triggered the feds stepping in. It established that 18-year-old Michael Brown had robbed a convenience store and that Officer Darren Wilson knew about that robbery when he confronted Brown. That Brown went into Wilson’s car to try and seize his gun. That Brown was advancing back toward Wilson when he was fatally shot. That Brown never said don’t shoot, that his hands weren’t up .
More: That Brown’s body remained in the street for hours because gunshots, including automatic-weapons fire, kept ringing out from around the scene of the shooting. And that witnesses felt intense pressure in the days and weeks that followed to change their stories to conform with the “hands up, don’t shoot†story that became a symbol of everything wrong with how law enforcement treats blacks.
So Brown was a deeply flawed symbol for the very real lack of trust between blacks and police.
Fine. If the “right†death, caught on camera, was going to convince Americans of the need for change, the footage of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, gunned down while playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park, would have been it.
Still, seeing writers and activists hold on to the Brown myth has been distressing. My friend Steven Thrasher, who’s done some excellent reporting from Ferguson for the Guardian, pointed this week to Brown’s body left outside as a symbol of “white supremacy.†Donovan X. Ramsey wrote at Medium that “hands up, don’t shoot†was never about what happened so much as the greater truth it represented.
That’s wrong. Go back to the Rasmussen numbers. Standing by discredited accounts is no way to convince whites not already invested in the issue that their safety can’t morally come from over-policing blacks.
And getting whites to buy in is essential. What have the protests, press coverage and political promises sparked by police-involved killings in recent years produced?
The Obama administration released a tepid report on policing and trust that was almost entirely ignored. The FBI director gave a speech about race. Grand juries keep returning no bills and juries, acquittals. If the goal was cleaning up one Missouri town, maybe the Justice Department will do that in the years to come. Maybe.
Yet with crime low, bipartisan frustration with mass incarceration building and attention focused on policing issues — in no small part because of the protest movement — there’s a window at least cracked open now. Before it closes, I hope those investing time, sweat and tears can find a way to convince Americans on the sidelines to join them.
Otherwise, we’ll go through these paces again after the next killing adds one more name to the long roll of martyrs.
