You may have heard about the recent murder of Keenan Anderson by police officers in Los Angeles. Some of the headlines made reference to the fact that he was a cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, which is a tragic and painful irony. But that isn’t what needs to be focused on. At all.
Keenan Anderson was tased to death by members of the LAPD after flagging them down for assistance because he had been in an automobile accident. Keenan Anderson was a 31-year-old high school teacher in L.A. visiting from Washington D.C. He wasn’t carrying a weapon. He wasn’t acting crazy. He didn’t call the nice officers mean names.
But he made the very serious mistake of assuming that the job of the police was actually to serve and protect him. Most Black folks eventually are forced to arrive at the understanding that you have to be really careful when dealing with the police and not call them if you don’t have to. Because you just don’t know what might happen.
Keenan decided to roll the dice, maybe because he knew he was a decent human being who, in a perfect world, should have no reason to fear the police. He was a teacher, for crying out loud. A Black male high school teacher in a world where so many more Black male schoolteachers are needed, but where so few respond because who needs the headaches of being a public school teacher these days, especially when you can’t even get paid a decent salary? But Keenan Anderson decided this was where he was needed.
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And I already know there are those - perhaps some of you reading this post - who are so anxious to point out how police officers, especially in big urban areas like Los Angeles, Detroit, or Washington D.C., are routinely overworked and underpaid. That they risk their lives each and every day to keep the rest of us safe. That no one but another police officer, and perhaps members of an officer’s family, can truly understand the stress of the job, which is only made worse because they are so unappreciated - and sometimes hated - for all that they do. Who in their right mind would volunteer to be a police officer in today’s climate in someplace like Los Angeles?
All true. But…
How does that explain why so many more Black people, particularly Black men, find themselves dead after a police encounter? Aren’t white people policed by these same overworked, overstressed, unappreciated, and underpaid police officers?
As of January 19 of this year, 2023, the Washington Post has tracked 8,147 fatal police shootings since 2015. The very detailed tracking of these killings shows that the overwhelming majority of those killed were young Black men. By now that shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has been paying attention, and many more have been paying attention since the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, an event that sparked the largest civil rights protest in U.S. history with somewhere between an estimated 15 -26 million who participated in some way. And that doesn’t even include the related protests that were also sparked worldwide.
It was the murder of Trayvon Martin by a self-appointed vigilante that brought more attention to the murderous profiling of young Black men simply for the apparent crime in America of being a young Black man. It was the murders of Philando Castile, Eric Garner (“I can’t breathe”), Michael Brown, and others that focused more attention on the seemingly random and cold-blooded killings of young Black men by white police officers.
But it was the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis that prompted the “defund the police” movement that for a while seemed to be attracting a decent amount of attention and consideration. For a while, there was at least some thought being given to the fact that maybe some radical changes in policing needed to be made, and that simple reform wasn’t enough. Because if a particular community is more afraid of what its local police force is likely to do to them rather than for them - including murder and extreme harassment - then it’s rather evident that the police are ineffective in those communities, and that those communities are paying taxes to, in effect, support their own oppression.
So people started to suggest that perhaps it might be a good idea to re-allocate at least some of the funds going to police departments that were hell-bent on beating the shit out of and killing Black people toward things like social services and other uses that might actually develop a better record of dealing with a problem in a way that doesn’t always involve violence.
But true to form, the defund the police movement was rather quickly dismissed as impractical and not serious because the police departments are already underfunded and suffering from bad morale and now you want to take more money out of their pockets and give it to some touchy-feely social programs? But how will we ever live without the police?
Good question. Let’s ask George Floyd. And Eric Garner. And Philando Castile. And Abner Louima. And…
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