There are certain phone calls I dread receiving. It’s the call of a crying mother or father pleading for help because their son or daughter has been killed by those who were supposed to serve and protect them. Several weeks ago, I received one such phone call when an unarmed father of six in Staten Island, New York, was placed in an apparently illegal police chokehold according to videotape capturing the horrific incident. He, Eric Garner, died after repeatedly stating “I can’t breathe”; the city medical examiner later ruled his death a homicide.
Last weekend, as I was preparing for an upcoming march to demand justice for Garner’s family, I received yet another disturbing call. This time, it was from a man in Ferguson, Missouri, who told me about his grandson, 18-year-old Michael Brown. Brown was supposed to begin college this week; instead, he was shot dead by police. He was also unarmed and, according to several eyewitness accounts, had his arms raised in the air to show that he had no weapon. Many news outlets have even stated that his body remained in the street for several hours after he was killed.
As a society, we’d like to think these incidents are few and far between, but as a black American who has worked to advance civil rights for all, I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. I can cite case after case of police brutality and excessive force resulting in the deaths of countless men and women. Most of these cases don’t gain prominence on a national level, let alone an international one.
It is 15 years since 23-year-old Amadou Diallo was killed outside his Bronx apartment building when four officers fired a total of 41 shots at him. He was unarmed. His mother and others reached out to my organisation, National Action Network (NAN), for assistance. Despite our efforts, and despite the efforts of many, the officers responsible were all acquitted. In 2006, another unarmed 23-year-old, Sean Bell, was killed the night before his wedding after NYPD officers fired 50 bullets at him and his friends. Timothy Stansbury, 19, was killed in 2004 in Brooklyn, New York, after an officer said he fired by accident. In 2009, a transit cop in Oakland shot and killed Oscar Grant, 22, as he lay face down on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back. The officer said he meant to use his Taser but reached for his gun by mistake.
Many of these cases I have been involved with personally. They highlight an ugly pattern from coast to coast. There are just far too many occurrences of mistakes, accidents and other excuses that have all resulted in one thing – dead unarmed people of colour.
We must address this crisis immediately. We cannot deem an entire segment of the population guilty until proven innocent.
Not all police officers are bad; in fact, the majority are not. But when the bad ones are not held accountable for their actions, it sends a chilling message to the communities they serve. We need our young black men and women to know that their lives matter, that they cannot be gunned down like animals. When cops don’t live in the neighbourhoods they serve, they don’t know how to properly police the area. They then dehumanise an entire group of people by harassing, profiling and, in terrible instances like that of Michael Brown, killing the unarmed.
In the town of Ferguson, most of the population is black, but almost all of its police department is white; 92% of searches and 86% of car stops in Ferguson in 2013 involved black people according to statistics in a recent piece in Mother Jones magazine.
We must stop criminalising minority groups. We must replace the bad apples with police who truly care about serving and protecting us. Knowing the name of an officer accused of killing an unarmed person is not enough; that officer must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
We have fought too long and too hard to eliminate the wounds of racism and prejudice just to watch things regress. Until black people no longer have to fear both the cops and robbers, until we reform policing tactics everywhere, we cannot stay silent. For if we do, we will continue to read headlines like this: Black, unarmed and dead.