Don’t let the message of George Floyd be co-opted. It’s about police brutality
We have reached the appropriation portion of the George Floyd tragedy.
People and institutions who have been complicit in past incidents of police brutality are now expressing words of faux outrage over the killing of Floyd by Minneapolis Police. The killing has sparked a nationwide uprising of people fed up with police brutality.
And now some attempt to change the narrative of what is really driving people into the streets because this narrative involves the powerful structures and alliances that aid and abet police brutality every day.
They don’t want us to question them and how they work. They don’t want us to say the truth directly. So the Floyd killing is conveniently painted as something else.
In a statement released Sunday, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said: “Racism and bigotry have no place in our country...Each of us, irrespective of the color of our skin, the neighborhood we live in, the person we love or the job we hold, should be treated with fairness and equality.”
OK, but in six years as DA, Schubert has never filed charges against law enforcement officers who killed people in the line of duty.
And that includes a string of highly controversial and egregious examples of deadly force used by Sacramento-area law enforcement on black men. These include the 2018 killing of an unarmed Stephon Clark by Sacramento Police. The 2017 killing of Mike McIntyre by Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies. And the 2016 killing of Joseph Mann by Sacramento Police.
Clark and McIntyre were unarmed when they were gunned down. McIntyre was running away when he was chased down and shot to death on the shoulder of Highway 50. Mann was carrying a knife, and emotionally disturbed, when he was swarmed upon by officers in North Sacramento. Some Sacramento cops tried to do the right thing, were trying to take peacefully, when two others roared up – after first trying to run Mann down with their car – and then emptied their chambers.
Each case caused a bigger civil disturbance than the one before. In each case, Schubert’s office reviewed the shootings, found them legally justified, and said so in reports that seem to have been written by police union lawyers and not supposedly dispassionate investigators.
The point being: People were angry about police brutality. They were angry about the lack of accountability and transparency in the aftermath of the shootings. They were angry at Schubert’s close ties to the agencies her investigators cleared, including campaign contributions from police unions for her election campaigns.
To be fair, Schubert said: “Much more should be done to level the playing field within our society and our system of justice.”
But that’s like saying people should be nice to each other. Yeah, they should. But people aren’t taking to the streets because the Minneapolis police weren’t nice to Floyd. They are taking to the streets because they killed Floyd and because his killing is only the latest in a string of killings going back generations that never seem to end.
You can’t side-step police brutality
To come out against racism is to side-step the specific form of racism that has our country on fire right now.
Say it’s name: Police brutality. Say it’s name: Police brutality.
Each killing of black men before Floyd has left a trail of victims who didn’t need to die and cops who, almost always, got away with it. We’ve seen it nationwide. We’ve seen it in Sacramento.
When these killings continue to occur and they result in the same outcome – the deceased posthumously become the suspects in our criminal justice system and the killers go free, no matter how excessively they wielded fatal force.
You know what happens?
People take to the streets. People put themselves in the position of the deceased and they say, “That could have been me.” People feel trampled. They feel victimized by their own government, their own community.
We’ve seen it the last three nights in Sacramento. I saw it all day Saturday, in the heat and humidity at the east steps of the Capitol and on a freeway off ramp on Interstate 80. My fellow citizens, commenting from the safe distance of privilege, critique the manner in which people are expressing themselves.
The protesters are too coarse. They shouldn’t throw water bottles. And then there is the violence and looting that occurs after the protests, as if that somehow diminishes the point when it doesn’t.
These aren’t armies of programmed robots marching together under the same banner. These are groups of people trying to protest who are joined by others who come out of the woodwork. And when a crowd gets big enough it splinters into pieces, spawning dozens of generals with competing interests.
If you are focused on the property and not on the reason people are in the streets in the first place, then you, too, are trying to change the subject because you can’t handle it. It’s real simple: If people are looting or stealing, they deserve to be arrested or prosecuted.
But I saw armies of people on Saturday whose goal was not stealing – it was speaking out against an injustice called police brutality.
Even anti-Kaepernick NFL joins in
Saturday was the day the NFL jumped on the change the subject bandwagon by releasing this statement: “These tragedies inform the NFL’s commitment and our ongoing efforts. There remains an urgent need for action. We recognize the power of our platform in communities and as part of the fabric of American society. “
What could you do but laugh at that? This is the same league that blackballed Colin Kaepernick because he dared to kneel during the “Star Spangled Banner” in a quiet protest. Over what? Police brutality.
Kaepernick has been proved right, but the NFL tries to change the subject away from him and toward their alleged belief in “justice.”
So what happens now?
The attempts to change the subject will continue because it’s a lot easier to decry “racism” than to root out police brutality. It takes real political courage for state legislators to take on the police unions. It would take real political courage that he has not shown for California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to use his bully pulpit to call out lawmen who abuse their authority.
Remember how quiet Becerra has been through the many transgressions of Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones?
It would take real political courage for the Sacramento City Council or the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors to install real police accountability commissions that held rogue officers accountable.
The same goes for Schubert, Becerra and other DAs, for them to admit they have conflicts of interest and to create a statewide unit of prosecutors which investigates police involved shootings.
It would take real political courage to re-write laws that make it too easy for cops to kill.
See what I mean? All those things are hard. All those things would be like sticking 17 sticks in 17 hornet nests.
That’s why those complicit in police brutality are firing off flowery words that yearn for a utopia in which “the color of our skin” shouldn’t matter.
Yeah, tell us another story as our cities burn.
This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 1:09 PM.
