Having just finished reading, "I Can't Breathe" by Matt Taibbi, which goes
into all of this in great detail, and which also talks about how most white
people would prefer to keep poor black people out of sight, I doubt that
we'll ever have mass protests against police killings of black people, at
least not until white people are in the minority and have lost their power
and wealth.
Miriam
On Police Shootings, Time to Take to the Streets
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
09 April 18
Police in Brooklyn, New York, last week killed a mentally-ill man named
Saheed Vassell. The story won't shock you. A variation of it happens all the
time in America. Somebody calls 911, says that a black man may or may not
have a gun. The cops arrive. And 10 seconds later the man is dead.
That's what happened in Brooklyn. Saheed Vassell was mentally ill. That fact
was known by practically everybody in the neighborhood, including the
neighborhood beat cops. Vassell was a broom handler at a local barbershop.
He liked to drink outside. The local beat cops routinely stopped to talk to
him. They occasionally bought him Jamaican food and once took him to the
hospital when he went off his anti-psychotic medications.
Last Wednesday, somebody called 911 and said that a man in a brown jacket
was pointing "what was described as a silver firearm" at people on the
street. One caller said, "There's a guy walking around the street. He looks
like he's crazy, but he's pointing something at people that looks like a gun
and he's, like, popping it as if, like, if he's pulling a trigger." Indeed,
surveillance video showed Vassell aggressively going from person to person
on the street, pointing what was clearly not a firearm at them. None of his
"victims" called the police.
Three plainclothes and two uniformed officers arrived on the scene. They
said that Vassell "took a two-handed shooting stance and pointed an object
at the officers." Six seconds later, he was dead. The cops had fired 10
shots. Vassell wasn't holding a gun, of course. He was holding what has
alternately been described as a pipe, a piece of a welding tool, and a
showerhead.
This scene repeats itself all over America, every few days. Vassell's death
came only a week or so after police in Sacramento, California, shot and
killed Stephon Clark in his grandmother's backyard. The police said that
Clark, too, was holding a gun. He wasn't. Two cops had answered a call that
somebody was breaking windows in the neighborhood. Clark was walking to his
grandmother's house at the same time. A police helicopter saw him and
notified the cops on the ground. Clark, fearing for his safety, ran from the
front yard to the back. When he was cornered there, one of the cops shouted
"Gun! Gun! Gun!" Both opened fire, hitting Clark eight times. Six bullets
hit him in the back. The forensic evidence contradicts the police version of
events. The cops said initially that when they arrived at the front yard and
commanded Clark to show his hands, he fled to the backyard. They pursued
him. At that point, "the man turned and advanced toward the officers while
holding an object extended in front of him. The officers believed the
suspect was pointing a firearm at them. Fearing for their safety, the
officers fired their duty weapons, striking the suspect multiple times."
But that story wasn't true. What the Sacramento Police didn't say in their
original statement to the press was that Clark had a white iPhone in his
hands. When additional cops arrived on the scene, one is heard on a body
camera asking, "What did he have on him?" Another responded, "Like this,
something in his hands. It looked like a gun from our perspective." Minutes
later, another voice is heard to say, "Hey, mute that." The audio on the
body camera then cuts off.
I can tell you that when I went through weapons training at the CIA, not all
of that class had to do with what guns to use, how to use them, and how to
clean them. Some of the class had to do with what to do when you actually
shot someone. We were told first never to draw the weapon unless we intended
to kill someone. We were to never draw the weapon to frighten someone, to
fire a warning shot, or to intimidate. The weapon was meant solely to kill
someone. I remember one instructor saying, "You wouldn't believe the
paperwork involved when you draw a weapon. So if you draw it, make sure it's
worth drawing."
The second part of that lesson was something that I'm sure cops around the
country are taught every day. My instructor said, "Remember, if you have to
kill somebody in the line of duty, it's because you feared for your safety.
Always say you feared for your safety." I thought that was something of a
bad joke at the time. But we see it play out all across the country all the
time.
Just look at the statement from the Sacramento Police Department: "The
officers believed the suspect was pointing a firearm at them. Fearing for
their safety, the officers fired their duty weapons, striking the suspect
multiple times." This statement could be copied and pasted into every police
report in America that involves a fatal shooting.
I don't have the space here to debate the pros and cons of police policy. It
is the place, though, to say that the police kill far, far more people of
color than they do whites. They are far quicker to resort to violence
without even understanding the basics of what is happening; indeed, they
usually fire at a suspect within seconds of their arrival on scene.
But when the police kill 10.1 Native Americans per million residents and 6.7
African-Americans per million residents versus only 2.9 per million
residents, you have a problem. Are the cops racists? Are they afraid? Are
they poorly trained? Are they unqualified? The answer may be yes to all of
these questions. So long as the system - police departments, local and state
governments, and courts - cover for them, though, we'll never know the
answers. In the meantime, innocent people of color will continue to die at
the hands of the police. And nobody is doing anything about it.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I believe that our only
alternative is to take to the streets. In the past few years, I've become
personally acquainted with leaders and participants in the Black Lives
Matter movement, the ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, and other organizations.
I'm going to follow their lead. We accomplish nothing by sitting quietly and
hoping that the politicians do something. We have to force them to.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage
Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a
result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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