Police Violence in a Racist, Frightened, Armed to the Teeth America

The conviction last week of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, 46, in Minneapolis on Memorial Day 2020 was deep relief for many Americans. Had we finally turned a corner with police reform and racial injustice, with giving new life to the sacred concept of equal justice under law? Had racist America been confronted successfully at last? Or was it just a matter of one and done. During the trial another African American man, Daunte Wright, 20, was shot to death in Brooklyn by a police officer who claimed she mistook her pistol for a taser. Officer Kim Potter has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and has resigned from the force. Is that another sign that efforts at police reform are moving in the right direction?

George Floyd’s death, after nine and a half minutes of being suffocated by a Officer Chauvin’s knee on his neck and videoed by a brave 17-year old girl using her phone, brought back traumatizing memories of Rodney King’s horrendous beating in Los Angeles in 1992. Americans watched a video of cops kicking and beating King repeatedly for weeks. Yet the four officers were acquitted of all charges and south central L.A. went up in flames. Video culture make it possible for Americans to watch over and over again as Rodney King and George Floyd were brutalized by police. It’s taken 29 years, but finally a jury, under the influence of a different kind of America, dare I say an anti-Trump America, has finally believed its own eyes.

Why are the police so dangerous in our country? How is it possible that since 2015, police killings are a leading cause of death for men aged 25-29 here, averaging some 1,240 killings a year, 24 percent of them Black, 17 percent Hispanic and 45 percent white?

Police violence in America must have something to do with a lethal mix of paranoia brought on by the economy of fear that makes vast profits hyping crime and racial prejudice; a society awash in weapons of human destruction; a society swamped in drugs and drug culture, and drug-selling gangs and cartels; a society in which a major political party has turned overtly racist, delusional and conspiratorial, stoked by rapid radio, social media, and TV and commanding nearly half of the electorate; a society with a history of racism that has evolved into a systemic and horrific structural reality across the country; and a country in which localized police predominate and largely overrule national sentiments and consensus ethics. It must also have something to do with police feeling they are under the constant threat of being killed in the line of duty. Police departments have responded to our increasingly violent drug culture by operating on policies that condone lethal violence, or even prescribe it under the guise of self-defense.

It seems irrefutable to me that the some 42 shootings by police (27 of them fatal) in Albuquerque from 2010 through 2014 were a matter of policy as well as circumstance. The rampage was curtailed only after a 2014 Department of Justice investigation found that City police engage “in a pattern or practice of use of excessive force, including deadly force,” and that the department had turned violent because of “structural and systemic deficiencies — including insufficient oversight, inadequate training, and ineffective policies.” After that pronouncement, police killings in Albuquerque dropped to two in the next four years, picking up slightly again in 2019 and 2020, with seven deaths. Clearly, the policy of shoot first, ask questions later had been countermanded in some way when political realities mitigated against it.

As a police reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune in the 1960s, I knew and liked many officers. And I was aware of the profound impact that a death in the line of duty of a police colleague had on the morale of the department. New Mexico has seen the deaths of 160 policemen since the late 1950s, including 22 in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County and 28 State police officers. Virtually every town in the state has at least one line of duty death in its history. And the overwhelming majority of them have been killed by gunfire.

I don’t think it’s a fabrication to say that lethal police violence, or at least those incidences we know of, began to grow in number with the political and financial success of the gun industry in America. Not unlike the tobacco industry and its lobbying, gun makers have consistently denied any complicity in the rising toll of human deaths by firearms in America, some 38,390 in 2018, almost 14,000 of which were homicides.

The nation is drowning in guns, with some 72 million handguns, 76 million rifles, and 64 million shotguns and some 20 million assault rifles in circulation. The ban on assault rifles that was signed into law in l994 lasted only a decade. They are weapons of choice in mass killings such as those in Aurora, Colorado and at Sandy Hook Elementary school in 2012. But when Senator Dianne Feinstein sponsored an “assault weapons ban” in 2013, the bill was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 60-40.

There’s no question in my mind that police violence in America is the direct result of racism, easy access to killing devices, the unwillingness to take the money out of drugs by legalization and taxation, and prejudice against the mentally ill. The combination of conformity, white supremacy and pervasive fear has been exploited by a right-wing political party, the GOP, since the 1963 presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, a Republican libertarian senator who opposed civil rights legislation, abandoning the precedent of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, who championed desegregation, sending troops to support students attempting to integrate Little Rock High School in 1957.

For well more than 50 years the Republican Party has been working to defend economic and environmental injustice and the racist status quo in America, and to promote a kind of permissive violence that arises out of a free-market philosophy that denies any and all consequences — even murder, even the vilest hatred, classism and enforced poverty — that might compromise rampaging profits.

Will the fear of aggressive prosecution help to curtail police violence in America? Given the virtual impossibility of getting guns and drugs and racism out of our lives, it seems to me that’s the best hope we’ve got at the moment.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it