Another Day, Another Killing
Violence by the police was in the spotlight again this week, when will things finally change?
Hey there and welcome to another edition of Moronitude! Sorry that we ended up missing the newsletter last week. Sometimes the day job ends up zapping every iota of my creativity. Writing for a job and writing for fun can be weird that way, normally when you get out of work your hobby is right there for you. But when you’re struggling to write for work, well, writing for fun ain’t going to happen either. I just end up staring at the blank document and the cursor flashing at me, making a mockery of my inability to get the words down. Cursors can be real jerks.
Anyway, this week is going to be a little different (I seem to say this every other week, don’t I?), as I don’t really have anything fun to write about. There aren’t going to be flippant jokes about boats stuck in the Suez or LOLs aimed at some inept archduke from the 1300s. We’re going to get a little serious because it’s been a hell of a week and I just can’t stop thinking about cops killing people.
As the highly publicized murder trial of Derek Chauvin took place in Minneapolis, Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a cop six miles away. The official statement from police was that the officer mistook their pistol for their taser, which is either a case of the most extreme incompetence I’ve ever heard or the most poorly considered excuse imaginable. Then a mere day or two later, a bodycam video is released showing Chicago police murder a seventh grader as he followed police instructions to turn with his hands up.
Each individual incident should be enough to force our nation into a reckoning about the power we give to the police force and the way that power is often misused against people of color. But I’ve seen this enough times to know this likely won’t occur, we’ll get angry about it for a little bit, that anger will fade and once again we’ll come to accept the status quo. Last summer I thought we might be on the precipice of actually enacting some change to how policing happens in this country, but here we are.
I’m absolutely seething about every instance of police brutality I hear about, but more than that, I have spent the past week thinking about how lucky I am to have been born a white man. To be more blunt—if I acted the way I have in my life towards the police as a person of color I am certain the outcomes would have been far different.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve confronted and realized my privilege, but it is one of the very few times the thought has completely dominated my brainspace for a prolonged period of time. When I watched Adam Toledo do exactly as he was told before being shot to death, I can’t help but think of all of the times I’ve disobeyed a police order and not only lived to tell the tale, but suffered no lasting consequences whatsoever.
When I was 16, I got pulled over for running a stop sign that wasn’t there. As in, the sign was missing but I had always known there to be a stop sign there, but when I didn’t see the sign I coasted through the intersection. Immediately upon being pulled over I jumped out of my car to go argue with the cop, not unlike a manager charging out of the dugout to argue balls and strikes. I didn’t get shot. I didn’t get yelled at. I didn’t even get a ticket. I was fine.
When I was 19, I was pulled over by police for not having my headlights on at dusk. It was a new car and while the daylight running lights were on, I hadn’t turned on the headlights, it was simply a quirk of not being fully comfortable with the car yet. The officer came alongside me and told me to step out of the car so he could search it. I refused. We argued, I continued to refuse to let him search my car. We waited for the K9 unit to show up, they tried to let the dog in the car as part of the search, I yelled at them that they were violating my rights, the cop backed off. At no point was I anything but extremely confrontational with the officer. Nothing happened, I didn’t get a ticket, I didn’t get arrested. I drove home.
Daunte Wright was pulled over for having expired registration tags. That’s it. He didn’t run a stop sign, he didn’t drive in an unsafe manner by forgetting to turn on his headlights. He didn’t do a single thing that warranted the police using deadly force against him. You can even argue whether or not the police should be able to pull him over for such an offense (I strongly believe that they should not be). Yet, he was shot and killed by police. What’s the difference between us? I’m white.
I’ve had dozens of interactions with police where I have been, generously speaking, less than cordial. And I know that if I wasn’t a white man things would have gone very differently. I would have been arrested, I would have been detained or I would have been shot.
I didn’t need to come to this realization to be angry about police killings, but once I made it there is absolutely no going back. No matter how hard we try to be otherwise, even the best of us are selfish at our core. By reframing the discussion in a way where it is no longer something that happened to somebody else, but instead it is something that could have happened to you, the situation takes on an added gravity. Once I fully grasped how incredibly lucky I am to have the privilege that allowed me to act in the way that I have, well there is no way I can possibly accept the status quo of cops killing people of color, maybe having a couple months off and eventually being cleared of all wrongdoing (if they’re even charged in the first place).
The tricky question, as always, is how exactly do we change a system that is ingrained into our society, particularly when there is a large segment of the population who don’t believe there is anything wrong with it. Even a concept that seems simple like slowing down the militarization of the police and limiting their funding gets less simple when you factor in the seemingly daily mass shootings around the nation (there have been two that have occurred since I started writing this piece on Saturday).
I don’t have the answers, I don’t know how to fix any of this. The only thing I do know is that I can’t accept this as an ongoing aspect of our daily lives. We need drastic changes and we need them now. I’m so tired of reading the same headlines, with only the location and name of the victim changed, every single day in the paper. This needs to stop.
That’s it for this week. Thank you for subscribing to Moronitude.