Frank's Musings

The Amy Cooper story gives the answer:  She knew that the police treat blacks differently than they treat whites. That was the leverage she thought she could use to rebut the dog-leaching suggestion she received from a black bird watcher in Central Park, New York.  Would George Floyd in Minneapolis or Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta have lived after their police encounters this month if they had been white? 

Many policemen in the country have been trained to believe that, beyond enforcing the law in their jurisdictions, they are stationed in society as the personification of the law.  They are the law, as the typical Western movie script usually referred to the sheriff.  Therefore, resisting arrest is considered by them to be a capital offense, rather than a matter subject to due process.  That means that they believe they can use deadly force to make the law prevail, and not rely on their own skills of apprehension to submit the perpetrator to adjudication. 

For Messrs. Brooks and Floyd an order from the police was tantamount to a fate as bad as death.  In their minds, submission to the likely judgment and penalty that acquiescence to the police would entail were just as likely to result in destroying their lives as running the risk of surviving gunfire or manhandling by the designated defenders of social order. 

This conclusion does not seem to be rational to a white member of society.  The society’s law enforcement and judicial systems work in favor of the erstwhile dominant racial group in the country.  Afterall, whites have crested that system in order to preserve their way of life.  Their way of life has always included discrimination against people of color, although that is not essential to the personal welfare of white members of society.  However, in order to better their well-being, white society has invited or enslaved persons of color to perform economic functions that they prefer not to do themselves. 

That has had unintended consequences.  Inevitably, the black, brown and yellow people brought into society have realized their disadvantaged status; many of the dominant white population also came to realize that inequity countered their own professed beliefs.  Education, communication, and risk—aversion have combined to make the preservation of a discriminatory social system unagreeable for a majority of what professes to be a liberal democracy.  However, there continue to be segments of that society who refuse to concede changes in the balance of social equity; alas the police forces of the country seem to be a last refuge of those traditionalists.

The police are armed in order to defend themselves against an armed foe.  If a physically harmless perpetrator is in flight, he is not deserving of deadly force.  He is normally left to be pursued and brought to justice as soon as possible, without the killing him.  However, the events of April, 2020, have shown that when the perpetrator is a person of color, the normal rules don’t apply.