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The Dallas Atrocity

Blue Lives Matter too
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Five dead police officers, six wounded, plus one wounded civilian. And one of two suspects dead. More:

Witness Ismael Dejesus shot video broadcast by FOX and CNN that shows the ambush of several officers. One of the shootings is just off camera.

“It looked like an execution honestly,” Dejesus said. “He stood over him after he was already down and shot him three or four more times.”

This country is having a very bad year.

Many of us have been criticizing the police over shooting civilians. The mass murder of Dallas police officers doesn’t nullify the importance and validity of that discussion. We must not become “eye for an eye” people. But it is important this morning to stop and think about what police officers do for all of us — I mean, the kind of dangers they face.

Last night in Baton Rouge, near the site of Alton Sterling’s shooting, there was a triple shooting. A woman who lives in that neighborhood and who fears for her 24-year-old son’s life, had a powerful, poignant quote:

“Until our lives matter to us, no one will understand what Black Lives Matter means.’

Earlier, in that same neighborhood, four people were shot in a fight at an apartment complex.

Sandra Sterling, the aunt who raised Alton Sterling, was at the scene. A local reporter tweeted:

So, in Alton Sterling’s neighborhood, in a 24 hour period, there were seven shootings. North Baton Rouge is a violent place. Here’s a link to a map of the 2016 homicides in the city. And here’s a map of 2015’s count. It surprises no one in BR that most of them are in the same part of the city: the poor, black one. Two or three years ago, the Baton Rouge Advocate did a story tallying up the year’s homicides in the city, putting a photo of every victim in the piece, and saying where they died. They were almost all young black men shot dead in north Baton Rouge, and almost all involved with drugs and gangs. No wonder Alton Sterling carried a pistol in his pocket.

Take a look at this video by the Baton Rouge-born hip-hop star Lil Boosie. The audio is NSFW, but you really don’t need to hear the music. Just watch the images, especially the fetishization of guns and violence:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_UXCJo18bM?rel=0]

That’s the community that Baton Rouge police patrolling north Baton Rouge have to deal with. If the shooting of Alton Sterling is found by the Justice Department to have been unjustified, then the officer who did it must be held accountable by the law. No qualification on that. My only point is that if a Baton Rouge cop is going to deal with gun violence on the job, it’s almost certainly going to be in the part of the city where most of the black folks live. If a black person in Baton Rouge is going to die violently, it is overwhelmingly likely to be at the hands of a black man.

Here is a short BBC clip profiling the 70805 ZIP code in Baton Rouge — the city’s most violent. Alton Sterling died in neighboring 70806, the second-most violent:

Now, Yale law professor Stephen Carter has a good piece explaining why it matters more to black people when a cop does the shooting than when someone from their own community does. Excerpt:

The alarming rate of black-on-black crime threatens our concrete security. The killing of blacks by whites, particularly police, touches something more elemental, a sense of fragility within a race still struggling to throw off the burdens, both psychic and economic, of the nation’s tortured history.

I don’t know that I would have been able to grasp this before working with Wendell Pierce on his memoir, and talking to his family members about their history. Wendell’s uncles and aunts remember in the 1940s how the Klan rode into their neighborhood — they were all poor farmers who lived along the bayou — one night, doused a black family’s new car with gasoline, and set it afire. “Let this be a lesson to you n—gers,” one said. The family that bought that car had scraped and saved for a long time. It was the only car in the whole neighborhood. They had told all their neighbors that they would use it to take them to the doctor, to the grocery store, and such.

The Klan members were hooded and robed, but everybody knew who they were. They included law enforcement. In my own town, within living memory of the oldest people living here, the sheriff gathered a lynching party, hunted down a black man he believed guilty of raping a white woman, and when they caught him, hanged him that night without trial. It quickly emerged that he was innocent, without a shadow of doubt. You think that corrupt sheriff had to pay for his crime, or any of the deputies who helped him?

Closer to our present time, a sitting judge in our judicial district was a member of the Klan. Most of the people who lived in this district at the time were black. What kind of justice do you think they could expect in that judge’s court? These are just two small stories from a small place, but those people — the lynching sheriff and the Klansman judge — were the face of law enforcement in my parish in the pre-Civil Rights era.

This is a history that white people don’t know. But black people do.

I tell you that not to diminish unjustified police shootings, but as part of a post that adds context to this hideous situation we are all facing as a country. Police officers in north Baton Rouge every single day have to contend with a world crawling with armed criminals who kill each other at alarming rates. I can’t imagine doing that for a living. Can you? At the same time, as Carter says, there is no denying the burden of historical memory in the black community, from a time when the law could do whatever it wanted to them with impunity.

Still, if civilians start killing cops, all bets are off. That is one thing that civilization absolutely cannot tolerate.

I’m starting to wonder if this is a taste of what it felt like to live through 1968.

UPDATE: According to the Dallas police chief this morning:

The suspect, who has not been named, was cornered for several hours by officers and was killed by an explosive device deployed by a police bomb robot after extensive negotiations failed, said Dallas police chief David Brown.

Brown told reporters at an early morning news conference: “The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” during negotiations. “He said he was upset about the recent shootings, he was upset at white people. The suspect said he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

“The suspect said that he was not affiliated with any groups and he stated that he did this alone. The suspect said other things that are part of this investigation,” Brown said.

A further three suspects are in police custody, but authorities declined to provide any further details.

Stone-cold racist mass murder of police officers.

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