The June 27 police murder of
Jayland Walker in Akron, Ohio proved yet
again what many of us already knew: In the
United States, even the most mundane
encounter with the police can be deadly for
you if you are Black.
The lawyer representing his family
said Walker was shot “approximately 90
times”. Body-cam footage released by the
police confirmed the count. An initial
autopsy showed that the Black man had 60
gunshot wounds on his body at the time of
his death.
Walker fled a “routine” traffic
stop, authorities said in response. He would
be alive today, and his encounter with the
police would be truly “routine” if only he
did not run.
Of course, these claims do not hold
water – for several reasons.
First,
there is no guarantee that Walker would be
alive if he did not run. Sure, as a Black
man, I also tell my son that he should
“comply” if he is ever stopped by the
police - even when there is no legitimate
justification for the stop (as it was
allegedly the case with Walker). But I
know that compliance does not always save Black
people from
police brutality.
Second, despite what the police
tried to imply, Walker’s encounter with the
police was already pretty “routine” for
America – indeed, “routine” traffic stops
and other “routine” interactions between
Black people and security forces routinely
end with murder in this country.
But why are Black people still
being brutally killed under a hail of
bullets for fleeing “routine” traffic stops
some two years after the brutal police
murder of George Floyd led to global
protests demanding this deadly “routine” to
come to an end?
The answer, sadly, is simple.
Despite all the protests, this tragic
routine is showing no signs of changing
because by routinely intimidating, harassing
and killing people of color, the American
police are doing what it was originally
designed to do: Upholding white supremacy.
Indeed, the American police are a
product of American enslavement – it was
created to address the need to halt slave
rebellions. Not too long ago, so-called
“slave patrols” were criminalizing,
brutalizing and killing Black people across
this country in the name of maintaining
order. Today, American police officers are
keeping this legacy alive as they
criminalize, brutalize and kill Black and
other marginalized people.
Today, America is still being
policed with a warrior mentality – law
enforcement forces are still acting like
occupiers and enslavers rather than
guardians of communal well-being when they
are dealing with communities of color.
That white supremacy has always
been and still very much is at the core of
American policing is hardly a secret.
There is
a fast-growing
body
of evidence that “a
significant number of US police
instructors have ties to a constellation
of armed right-wing militias and white
supremacist hate groups.”
It is
therefore not really surprising that Black
Americans are more likely to die at the
hands of police than others.
According to a study published by medical
journal Lancet in 2021, between 1980-2019
the highest rate of deaths from police
violence occurred for Black Americans, who
were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely
to experience fatal police violence than
white Americans.
And white supremacy is such a core
characteristic of law enforcement in America
that police officers rarely face any
punishment for hurting Black people or
taking Black lives.
Timothy
Loehmann, the former Cleveland police
officer who killed a 14-year-old Black boy
named Tamir Rice in 2014,
for example, was recently rehired as an
officer in the borough of Tioga,
Pennsylvania. Loehmann was previously
fired from the Cleveland police force, but
not for killing Rice. He was dismissed
merely for failing to disclose that he was
told to resign or face termination for
incompetence from a position he previously
held with Independence, Ohio police
department.
While police officers kill unarmed
Black people with impunity – for reasons
ranging from fleeing a traffic stop to
holding a toy gun – they often manage to
arrest white people without much incident or
injury even after they commit mass murder.
Indeed,
even after he killed seven people and
wounded dozens of others during the
Independence Day Parade in Highland Park,
Illinois earlier this week police officers
did not shoot Robert Crimo III, a white
man. Instead, they politely asked the
assailant, “Do me
a favor, get on your knees, get on your
knees lay down flat on your stomach.”
Similarly, they arrested without incident
Payton Gendron, a white supremacist
teenager who shot 10 people to death in Buffalo, New York to
“prevent Black people from replacing White
people”.
The white supremacy of the American
police is of course a reflection of white
supremacy that is at the core of American
society.
Due to
America’s racist history, the perception
that Black men are “threatening and
dangerous” is ingrained in the collective
American unconscious. This is undoubtedly
contributing to the police’s tendency to
be violent towards Black members of the
public. In addition, studies have shown
Black children – both girls and boys – are
perceived as older and less innocent than
their white peers, making them more prone
to police violence and punishment.
The media also works to criminalize
blackness and Black faces and helps create
conditions that perpetuate police violence
against Black people.
Black
Americans, and Black men, in particular,
are over-represented as perpetrators of crime
in US news media. Meanwhile, the same
media outlets tend to use images and
narratives that make white perpetrators of
most violent crimes look innocent or at
least incapable of taking responsibility
for their actions. This feeds into
existing stereotypes that people of
African American descent are threatening
and overall more dangerous than white
people.
“The white
press, inflames the white public against
Black people. The police are able to use
it to paint the Black community as a
criminal element. The police are able to
use the press to make the white public
think that 90 percent or 99 percent of the
people in the Black community are
criminals,” Malcolm X said in
1962, but his words still sound eerily
relevant today. “And once the white public
is convinced that most of the Black
community is a criminal element, then this
automatically paves the way for the police
to move into the negro community,
exercising Gestapo tactics, stopping any
Black man on the sidewalk… As long as he
is Black and a member of the Black
community, the white public thinks that
the white policeman is justified in going
in there and trampling on that man’s civil
rights and on that man’s human rights,” he
added.
The
murder
of Jayland Walker is further proof that the
main function and aim of American policing
today, as it has been throughout history, is
upholding white supremacy. The unprecedented
protests against racialized police brutality
that followed the murder of George Floyd did
not change this fact because they failed the
bring about a complete overhauling of
existing structures. Only a complete
re-imagining of public safety in America and
the building of a law enforcement network
that is tasked with protecting all Americans
equally can bring an end to the violence
routinely faced by all communities of color
and especially Black people in this country.
This commentary is also posted on Aljazeera.com.
