By Richard Ray
The recent police shootings and deaths of unarmed Black males Stephon Clark in Sacramento and Saheed Vassell in Brooklyn highlight the issue of law enforcement shooting and killing unarmed People Of Color (POC) in the United States.
The facts of both cases are different and still being sorted out, but what is definitively clear is that neither male possessed a firearm of any kind as the police alleged they believed when they opened fired. In Stephon Clark’s case he was in his grandmother’s backyard when seven bullets, (six to his back) were discharged. The bullets to the back make the police claim that he was somehow charging them seem that much more implausible.
Excuse my pessimism, but I have little faith that either of these police shootings will result in any type of justice for the respective families, besides a potential monetary civil settlement. The facts are that irrespective of circumstances, including race, there are nearly one thousand police shootings of civilians that result in death in the United States each year. Some of those may actually be justifiable and the statistic includes armed as well as unarmed victims. Regardless of how clear the police culpability may be, it is extremely rare for any of these law enforcement officers to ever actually be convicted of a crime in the shooting deaths of civilians. If one cop is convicted of a crime in shooting a civilian in a calendar year when there are nearly a thousand, that is in fact a lot.
One unarmed civilian losing their life at the hands of law enforcement is too much, but for Black males and POC those numbers and odds seem to disproportionately increase with police interactions. For years, Blacks, Latin and other minority males have served as the stereotypical poster children for everything wrong with crime in America. We are demonized and feared and I argue that those centuries of ingrained prejudices and paranoia play a part in how much quicker police are to use deadly force, particularly when encountering Blacks and other POC.
Arguing about the race element is futile with those close minded, un-empathetic politicians, cops and legislators who refuse to even acknowledge there is even a problem. Instead of expending the time and energy on the historical elements behind why Blacks and other minorities may be disproportionally killed by the police when unarmed, I rather focus on a potential solution.
The police, across every jurisdiction in the United States, need to receive more comprehensive racial sensitivity training. That training needs to focus on humanizing POC to all law enforcement. The fear and prejudices that so many of us have been raised with need to be identified and dealt with in an open and honest way through this training. The goal is for law enforcement to police all people the same. Blacks and POC need to be given the same abilities that Whites are to disarm themselves or just be given enough of the benefit of the doubt to not be shot first at the slightest hint of non-compliance without clear and present danger of an actual weapon being used to threaten an officer’s safety.
Law enforcement face inherent dangers as part of their job. However, those dangers are not an excuse to not be better and properly trained, especially in their encounters with others that they may already have even subconscious prejudices and fears. Blacks and POC deserve the same benefit of the doubt that their White counter parts get. We may only be talking about seconds, but the fear and adrenaline officers experience needs to be accompanied by more and intensive training to look at all the people they encounter with the same degree of restraint to bring in alive unless they are under clear and present danger. Unfortunately, in far too many cases that restraint is not being exercised.
#StephonClark, #SaheedVassell, #policeshootings, #policetraining, #Brooklyn, #Sacramento
