OPINION:
Just take a look at my profile picture — I’m white girl who was born and raised in a small-town in upstate New York. Last week, during the Fourth of July weekend, I took my three boys to my hometown to watch a parade downtown — it was kicked off by policeman in a police car with all their sirens and lights flashing — to the delight of my 2- and 4-year-old boys.
I was raised with a sense that the police would protect me, that if a crime was committed against me, they’d do what they could to bring the criminal to justice. I was always told to cooperate with the police, to do what they said — no matter what — to follow their orders and be respectful, even if you feel that you’ve been treated unfairly.
There’s only one officer per every 266 citizens in this nation. That’s scary — not for me, but for them. If everyone respected cops, then law and order can be upheld, and the cops can feel safe in doing their very dangerous jobs. But, if there’s resistance, things can go downhill very fast.
I have trouble understanding why anyone would resist a cop. I simply wasn’t brought up that way. But then again, I’m also not a black American living in the inner-city. I wasn’t raised by parents who grew up in the very divisive ’50s and ’60s when racism was real and tangible, and who don’t inherently trust law-enforcement from those experiences.
Sometimes, it’s just the sense of over-policing in their neighborhoods which leads many of these young black men to suspect the worst in cops — that they’re their enemy, not friend.
And so many times, they resist arrest.
“Why are you telling me to comply if I am not doing anything wrong,?” Shanel Berry questioned in an interview with The New York Times about the rub her and her family has with law enforcement.
Of her sons: “I am trying to teach them to be men, but at the same time I am telling them to back down and not be who they are,” she said of their interactions with law enforcement.
There’s a subtle undertone here — that you should only comply with law enforcement if you believe you’ve done something wrong. Additionally, if you don’t stand up to them, you’re less of a man.
This sort of attitude is making its way into the streets of urban cities — where cops are increasingly being resisted just for doing their jobs. It’s through this resistance that many cases — like Eric Garner’s in New York, or Michael Brown’s in Ferguson — get escalated. In the split-second the officer has to react (in many times to defend himself), often then leads to second-guessing: Was the use of force too much; should more officers been called in; how could the situation been diffused before it even started?
The experienced cops, with more time on the beat and better training, generally handle the situations better. A young, green cop, may often overreact. He’s scared too, after all.
Heather Mac Donald, who wrote of the crime in the streets of Chicago in the Wall Street Journal, said: “Police officers who try to intervene in this disorder [gang, street crime] often face virulent pushback.
” ’People are a hundred times more likely to resist arrest,’ a police officer who has worked a decade and a half on the South Side told me. ’People want to fight you; they swear at you. ’F—- the police, we don’t have to listen,’ they say. I haven’t seen this kind of hatred towards the police in my career,’ ” Ms. Mac Donald reported.
And since Ferguson, the anti-police animus has only grown, Ms. Mac Donald wrote.
“But the post-Ferguson Black Lives Matter narrative about endemically racist cops has made the street dynamic much worse. A detective told me: ’From patrol to investigation, it’s almost an undoable job now. If I get out of my car, the guys get hostile right away.’ Bystanders sometimes aggressively interfere, requiring more officers to control the scene.”
By Ms. Mac Donald’s own estimates, over the last decade, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be shot by a black man, than an unarmed black man is to be shot by a cop. Cop lives are on the line everyday, all the time.
The work they do is dangerous and only getting more so by groups like Black Lives Matter.
BLM advocates its followers to agitate, to use in-your-face tactics that are meant to provoke. This is not a peaceful group that sings songs while sitting in a park or sidewalks outside the police station.
No, they like to rush stages at political events like Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders in Seattle, they yell slurs like “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” at police officers, and stage “die-ins” that play-out different death scenes at the hands of law-enforcement.
They also look to shut-down major highways by walking across them en-mass, putting thousands of lives in jeopardy. In St. Paul over the weekend, at least five officers were injured by protestors, one hit with a glass bottle, others by fireworks. One officer was hit in the head by a large piece of concrete, which was dropped from a bridge overhead.
The BLM group is meant to provoke, and what it does beyond that, is give black men the courage and ammunition needed to continue to resist arrest.
In order for divisions to be healed, BLM needs to stop promoting provocative violence aimed at police officers and instead try to look for solutions. How better policing could work in their areas, how relationships can be restored, how to hold the bad-actors (on both sides) more accountable.
I do believe racism still exists. There’s no doubt to me. But resisting arrest — no matter who you are — always leads to an escalation that can otherwise be avoided. How do we work with the black communities to let them know it’s not prideful to take on a cop, it’s foolish, while at the same time acknowledging their hurt?
The answers are going to be tough. But the conversation needs to happen.
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