Tag: Black Lives Matter

#JacobBlake

Jacob Blake should not have been shot.

Jacob Blake should not be laying in a hospital bed in Kenosha, with the prospect that he may never walk again.

“and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?””
Revelation 6:10

Jacob was not presenting an active threat to police officer or the public. He had his three small children in his car. He was on the scene to break up a fight, not start one. If police officers really needed to detain him that badly, they should have instead deescalated, and if necessary, let him drive off. He was not a threat. He was not hurting people. His license plate could have been taken. He could have been brought in later, once tempers were cooled. Again, just like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and so, so, so many others, this did not need to happen.

Jacob Blake should not have been shot. Period.

Have police officers and public safety officials learned nothing in 2020? Have the protests that have been rolling across our nation against police brutality and the unnecessary deaths of so many really fallen on ears this deaf?

We have to demand better of those we entrust our public safety too. Our public is not more safe if our cops are so willing to pull guns and fire them at people not presenting an active threat to a situation.

If you watched the video of Jacob Blake, or read the story, or saw the outcry, and your first thoughts weren’t centered around sadness and horror and disgust and anger, but instead were centered around thoughts like, “He got what he had coming to him,” or “He should have complied with police,” then I think you need to do some deep introspection. Your soul is sick in some way, if you can’t see a father get shot by agents of the state and not feel something other than blind affinity for the power structures that let this keep happening. Please, spend some time reflecting, and praying, and thinking deeply about what kind of world you want to live in.

From a Christian perspective, as I’ve said time and time and time again here, our allegiance and sympathy should not be with those wielding the power of the nation over others. Our sympathy, in the words of Christ, should always be with the least, with the oppressed, with the wronged, with those outside of power. We should see incidents like this with a great sense of sadness for our world, and an attendant moral outrage over the use of violence over and over against our fellow human beings. If you claim the title of Christian but you feel people like Jacob Blake somehow got what they had coming to them, then you are doing this whole Christian thing wrong. Go gaze on our Crucified Lord, who was a victim of overwhelming and unjust state police power.

Jacob Blake should not have been shot. #BlackLivesMatter

Policing in America By the Numbers

Let’s talk about statistics. Cold, hard, indisputable numbers. Last year, in Germany, an unusually large number of people for that nation were killed by police: 17. In the UK, last year’s number was 3. In Australia in 2016 and 2017 total (the most recent year we have data for), it was 4. In Japan in 2018, it was 2.

Last year, in the United States, the number of people killed by the police was 1,099. Let that sink in for a moment.

Now, I know what you are thinking: the United States just has so many more people than Germany, the UK, Australia, and Japan. And you are right! So, let’s look at per capita. In Germany, .2 people in every 1 million were killed. In the UK, it was .05 in every 1 million. In Australia, it was .16. In Japan, is was .02.

In the United States, 3.4 people in every million were killed by police.

I know those numbers can be hard to gauge. That disparity between the US and those major nations is HUGE. The orders of magnitude difference is crazy. And the point is this: the number of people – of any race, age, gender, or socio-economic status – killed by police is unimaginably high. It is the kind of number you expect to see in third word authoritarian and dictatorial states. To add some perspective, think about this: in 2016, the Philippines elected an authoritarian dictator named Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte ran as a strong man, promising during this campaign that he would kill drug sellers and users across the nation, and urging his supporters to commit extrajudicial killings themselves. Upon election, Duterte in essence launched a war on his own citizens, unleashing the police to commit untold extrajudicial murders of all sorts of “undesirable people.” The country in the four years since has been a human rights disaster. From June 2016 to July 2019, over 5,000 people were killed by the police without any kind of trial or due process.

Last year alone, the United States killed a fifth of as many people. Over a similar three year period, we put 2/3 as many people to death with due process as a despotic, authoritarian dictatorship.

If you value democracy, liberty, and being a beacon for morals and values in the world, this should bother you. If you are a decent human being, this should bother you.

Let’s dig deeper. Out of those 1,099 people killed by police last year, 259 of them were black. That’s about 24%. Meanwhile, the US population is about 12% black. In the same year, 406 white people were killed by police. That’s more people! And, as a percentage, 37% of all people killed were white. Still more! The nail in the coffin for Black Lives Matter, amirite?!

The US population is 72% white. We white folks make up ¾ of the people in this country, but only about a third of us were killed by police last year. What this means is, if you are black in the United States, you are 2.5x MORE LIKELY than a white person to be killed by the police.

Well surely, I hear you ask, this was the case because those black people were committing more dangerous crimes, right? I mean, that’s a logical assumption to make, isn’t it? But its just not the case either: blacks victims of police death were 1 ½ times more likely than whites to be unarmed. Again, think about that: black victims were more likely than whites to be unarmed, but also more likely to be killed.

All in all, whites and blacks made up a similar amount of total crimes committed in the US last year. That tells us that, in a world free from racial prejudice, victims of police brutality should also be similar among whites and blacks. But they aren’t. Blacks are, again, 2.5% MORE LIKELY to be victimized, despite not committing crimes at a similarly higher rate than whites.

Oh, and one last thing on these numbers: in 99% of cases, the police officers committing murder against those in police custody were not charged with any crime. Let me say that again: 99% OF POLICE WHO MURDERED UNARMED SUSPECTS NEVER FACED A CHARGE OF WRONGDOING.

Again, these numbers should bother you. No, wait, they shouldn’t just bother you. They should terrify you. They should devastate you. They should piss you off, send you into the streets, make you demand better from those we charge with protecting, serving and leading our nation. These numbers are simply UNACCEPTABLE.

These numbers don’t exist in a vacuum, either. To understand why people are so angry, why #BlackLivesMatter is taking off, why people are demanding real change and meaningful police reform in this country, you have to view these statistics in the context of American history. These numbers are happening in a nation that once enslaved these same black bodies. We first created professional police forces to hunt and return runaway slaves. Then, after we were forced by four years of bloody war to no longer enslave them, our country spent the next one hundred years constructing and maintaining a state-sponsored, outright system of discrimination, segregation, and terror against these same black bodies. We lynched hundreds, destroyed the livelihoods of countless others, and refused to let them exercise the full rights, responsibilities and obligations that are their birthright as American citizens. We turned the police into the tool of public repression and discrimination, using dogs and batons and water hoses and jail cells and a convenient blind eye to keep blacks in line and in their place. Then, when we were forced to dismantle that as well, we turned around and built a New Jim Crow, to quote Michele Alexander, predicated on housing and financial discrimination and the use of judicial and police power to disproportionately punish, imprison, and kill black bodies. We have elected a series of “law and order” political leaders who used the levers of legislative and executive power to twist sentencing and judicial guidelines against black bodies. We have, in short, literally done just about every imaginable thing we could come up with throughout our history to oppress and kill black people. And, in a democracy, these things have been done in YOUR name.

And you can’t figure out why black people are done with this shit? You can’t fathom why they are so damn fed up?

These appalling numbers cannot be separated from this shameful history. And that vital link is why we are marching in the streets today. Enough is enough. 400 years of history is too much. These numbers – indisputable, scientific, hard facts – are too much. Things must change. They have to change. Our future as a nation depends on it. And frankly, these numbers tell me this: if we don’t do better, maybe we don’t deserve to stick around much longer. The injustice may just be too much for our nation, already so divided, to bear.

One last note:

I wanted to take a second to break some of these numbers down by state, too. I’m going to look at six states/territories that jump out on this map: Washington D.C., New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and my own home state, Oklahoma.In D.C., the population is 50% black, yet blacks make up 88% of those killed by police.In New York, the population is 16% black, with 37% of police deaths being black.In Illinois, those numbers are 14%, and 53%, respectively; in New Jersey, 13% and 46%; in Maryland, 30% and 50%. And finally, right here in Oklahoma, only 8% of our state’s population is black. Yet, blacks make up 40% of those killed by police in our state. FORTY PERCENT! That’s insane!

Resources

https://www.statista.com/chart/21872/map-of-police-violence-against-black-americans/

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2020/05/mapping-police-killings-black-americans-200531105741757.html

Presidential Arson

This is from a Facebook post I put up last night:

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” declared Christ, “for they will be called the children of God.”

Today, the man who has claimed the title of President, made a few different kinds of declaration. First, in a phone call with governors of states who are affected by the protests and demonstrations for justice, he urged them to “dominate” peaceful protesters, saying they would be seen as “weak” if they didn’t do so. Then, disregarding the entire judicial branch and any sentencing guidelines that may be on the books, he told them he favored 10-year prison sentences for anyone arrested while exercising their First Amendment right to protest.

Then, this afternoon in the Rose Garden, he declared his intention to use the power of the state against its own people exercising their rights, saying he would send the US military in to states that didn’t “dominate” protesters in the way he sees fit. Specifically, he said he would deploy “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” to bring order.

This, of course is illegal. It is also a declaration of civil war, and a scary step towards an authoritarian, totalitarian military state.

Finally, he ended his day, not by cowering like he did last night, but by having protesters forcefully removed with tear gas and rubber bullets and violence, and proceeded to walk to a local church (St. John’s Episcopal Church, where he brandished a Bible like some sort of totem, and proclaimed, “We have the greatest country in the world,” as if the Church somehow condones this form of national self-aggrandizement and narcissism, much less the disgusting and deplorable militarism and oppressed seen in our nation over the past days, weeks, months, years, and decades.

Our country is facing a moment unlike any other in history. We have a deadly pandemic sweeping the world, with 104,000 dead in the United States over the last three months (that’s more than double the total number of American deaths in Vietnam, if you need a little perspective.) Our unemployment rate is higher than ever. Millions of businesses are on the brink of collapse. Tensions with the rest of the world are higher than ever. And now, another unjust death of a black body at the hands of the state has set alight centuries of frustration, anger and despair, and our streets are seeing blood and violence like few other times in history.

This is the kind of time that a leader stands up, with the intention of unifying and calming. This is when we need a leader to declare that our pain is heard, that injustice is unacceptable, that the right of the people to gather and assemble, to make their voices heard, is an important Constitutional and human right, that things may look bleak and dark now, but that together we can make a better future for all people. It is a time for a leader to remind us that change is hard, that sacrifices are needed, that justice is a necessity, that this work is possible but far from assured. This is a time for leadership.

Instead, what we have is an abdication. Instead of a leader in a time of crisis, we have a man who has made a career and a life out of dividing and demonizing, a man who is so self-absorbed and dangerously narcissistic that he can’t even begin to discern how to do anything but try to twist every moment to his own sad, pathetic little view of the world. We have a man who only knows how to play to the worst of the worst in this country, whose only play is to bluster and scream and stomp and Tweet until he gets his way, or destroys everything around him trying.

Ezra Klein wrote eloquently this morning (link in comments):

“When we elected Donald Trump, we elected a political arsonist. The sole consolation of his presidency, in its early years, was that there was surprisingly little dry tinder. The economy hummed along, seemingly imperturbable. We faced few foreign crises. Domestic divisions remained mostly digital. This is not to dismiss real disasters or excuse cruel policies — from children thrown into cages to toxins dumped into our streams to the lethal mismanagement of Hurricane Maria — but it could have been worse.

Playacting civil war on Twitter, as the president often did, was never the nightmare scenario. The nightmare scenario was the social fracture and violent crises of the 1960s layered atop the political and media system of the 2020; the tests of presidential leadership that have defined past eras demanded of this leader, in this era. We weren’t there, and then, all of a sudden, we were.

We are.”

Our nation is at a turning point. There is no going back to normal after the events of the past weeks and months. A large group of Americans has reached a breaking point when it comes to injustice and oppression and the demons of this nation’s past and present. Another, very small group has decided that, as the country grows in a direction they don’t like, that they would rather burn it all to the ground, and in the words of Klein, managed to elect “a political arsonist” to do just that. And in doing so, he will use any weapon, any word, anything deemed important or sacred or holy to achieve the task, no matter the damage done.

This afternoon, when he stood in front a church wielding a Bible in an attempt to invoke the power of God behind his own actions and words, he revealed (again) how little he, or his followers, know of the demands of Christ. While he stood there, trying to gain holy approval for the terrorism of the state he has demanded, while he invoked the civil religion of this nation in an attempt to coerce God into supporting something as anti-Christian as you can imagine, the words of the prophet Amos came to mind. These are the words of a prophet of God, spoken to a leader who imagines himself and his state as all-powerful and all-knowing, on behalf of an oppressed and hurting people, reminding that leader just what it is this God is looking for from those who would declare themselves favored by God:

“I can’t stand your religious meetings.
I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions,
I want nothing to do with your religion projects,
your pretentious slogans and goals.
I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes,
your public relations and image making.
I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.
When was the last time you sang to me?
Do you know what I want?
I want justice—oceans of it.
I want fairness—rivers of it.
That’s what I want. That’s all I want.”

Lord let that justice and righteousness wash down on us now. We need a good cleansing. Amen