Like most of us, I’ve been watching the nation respond and react to the most recent set of police murders with a heavy heart. There are no spaces left untouched by the weight of all we are going through as a nation. And yet, as mourners and allies cry out for justice, there is a line of thinking entrenching itself with more conservative members of our society that, somehow, justice was not earned by the victims; that making demands of those more powerful than our individual selves is utter hubris; that this is not murder.
But here’s the thing: If police could act like they respect the lives of others, they would then deserve the respect they demand from others. Until then, they are murderers and accomplices to murder.
They continue to defend murderous actions while threatening communities who speak truth to power. Our role as a society is to stop expecting them to murder as a way of keeping affluent white people safe, or get rid of them and start fresh: most of us are not rich white people in the country, after all, and there is a huge difference between how cops treat black people and people of color, compared to white or white-passing individuals… one that is criminal to look past.
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Patricia Slater, Aaron Campbell, and SO MANY OTHERS didn’t have to die by police hands: none of them were a threat to the lives of any police officers. Tamir Rice was 12 years old with a toy! Breonna Taylor was asleep in bed! These are human lives that were lost, and no justification or humanization of the cops who killed them (and the cops who didn’t intervene on their behalf when they were being killed) is going to make that okay. It certainly isn’t going to bring back those we lost, or give their families any comfort to hear every sordid detail of their family member’s life used as justification for their deaths.
None of this is new information. But, despite the freely available information on why murdering other people is bad news, all this blue lives matter bullshit brought us another murderer.
Not one person who attempts to defend the 17-year-old who took two lives and destroyed his own will get a slice of time from me. He broke the law, with the help of his mother, in every way one can hope to break it, and so very completely that there can be no debate as to his intent that night. His privilege told him he was bigger and better than anyone demanding justice for lives lost. His exposure to toxic masculinity told him having a gun made him powerful, a warrior for a righteous cause. He is a patsy for police misconduct, and now he’s a murderer. Twice a murderer. His soul is stained because he believed that there were good cops in this corrupt system, and that he could be one of them if he acted outside the law, as they do.
And yet again, still, despite the available information, another murderer is being lauded as a savior for a particular set of people. People who hold the American dream dear to their hearts, but ignore the history of how it was given to them. People who see themselves in the police, but not in the victims, whose lives are possibly more similar to their own than they’re willing to admit. People who believe they have something to lose when the subject of equality hits the table.
We are all suffering in this moment. We have lost more than the lives of innocent humans: our trust has been shaken, by this virus, by this presidency, by friends and relatives spouting rhetoric, by racist cops who don’t feel they have done anything wrong as another innocent life is snuffed out. Until we come together around our humanity and recognize ourselves in each other, there is little hope for freedom — from suffering or anything else — for anyone.
Photo by Tito Texidor III on Unsplash
