OPINION:
Ferguson. Baltimore. Minneapolis. Baton Rouge. What these cities, separated by thousands of miles of the American landscape, have in common is that they have become shorthand for police brutality, persuading many Americans that the nation’s police are out of control.
Black lives matter, like lives of other colors (and of no color at all), and hysterical narratives of what happened serve no one well. The first narrative of what happened in Ferguson and in Baltimore didn’t hold up once everyone calmed down and the public could look at what actually happened. The jury in the court of public opinion is still out in Baton Rouge, though the video evidence is remarkable.
Those who would use accusations and unweighed and unproved evidence have already gone to work. Roxanne Gay writes of the Baton Rouge incident in The New York Times that “this brand of tragedy has become routine … law enforcement that sees black people as criminals rather than human beings with full and deserving lives is the problem.”
Not quite. There are more than 900,000 law enforcement officers, male and female, on duty every day in the United States, and a recent analysis of police shootings found that last year 93 victims of shootings were unarmed; of those, 38 were black. When anyone, black or white, is shot by a law enforcement officer an investigation must be opened immediately to determine whether it was legally justified.
Often it is, sad to say. Sometimes excessive force is used to make arrests, but not often. Most officers never draw their weapons from the day they take their oath until they retire. The idea that your neighborhood policemen is itching to shoot or kill someone is both wrong and foolish.
These facts do not exonerate the guilty, but they do offer sober context for what’s going on in the rough neighborhoods across the land. Not so ironically, a phenomenon called “the Ferguson effect” is real, despite the convenient denials at the White House. Cops are leaving law enforcement agencies in big numbers and leaving their cities to manage without them. After the death of Freddie Gray and the riots that followed, the murder rate in Baltimore soared by more than 63 percent, good news only for thugs, hooligans, ruffians and gangbangers who have made certain neighborhoods all but uninhabitable.
Reuters news agency reports that last year Baltimore lost more police officers than any other city its size. By the end of the year, 6.1 percent of the Baltimore force had retired, quit or taken jobs elsewhere. A similar number have abandoned Baltimore already this year, and it’s harder than ever to recruit replacements.
The death of a suspect of any color at the hands of a policeman is a tragedy, and it may well be a crime, and if so it must be punished quickly and severely. But making a policeman of any color a scapegoat is a tragedy and a crime, too, and everyone suffers.
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