Why police shootings in the U.S. keep occurring
VIDEO WAS SUPPOSED TO ERADICATE BRUTALITY AND CORRUPTION BUT LITTLE HAS CHANGED
It’s reassuring to imagine that injustice thrives only in the shadows. Brutality and corruption, discrimination and deceit: we know these things happen — and we know how tenaciously they’re concealed. We lament the dishonest politician, the bigoted authority figure, the maniac cop. We lament that their crimes are invisible. And we like to think we’d do something about them if only they could be seen.
Increasingly they can be. Smartphones have afforded victims and bystanders the means to document crimes as they happen. Broadcast apps such as Periscope have even connected them to an audience live. Suddenly a great deal of injustice has been wrenched from the shadows and thrust into the light — the light of the Internet, where everyone can see the flare-up, the excessive force, the itchy trigger finger. More and more these invisible crimes are made visible to us. And more and more it’s made clear that nothing will change.
Philando Castile was killed Wednesday night in Falcon Heights, Minn., when a police officer shot him several times at close range. Castile, 32, had been pulled over for a broken tail light; when he reached for his wallet to present the licence he’d been asked for, the officer opened fire. There was no apparent threat of retaliation. There was no compelling cause for alarm. More saliently, it seems, was the racial distinction. Castile was black.
In a sensible world this kind of terrible lunacy — the idiotic violence, the meteoric escalation, the laughably transparent prejudice on display — would seem a jaw-dropping aberration. In the U.S., it hardly even seems odd. It was only one day before that another black American, Alton Sterling, was shot and killed by police officers in Baton Rouge, La., after being roughly pinned and Tasered.
Nor are these what you’d call isolated incidents. Cops across the United States are extinguishing black lives with the impunity of a plague.
We understand this with more clarity than ever because the phenomenon has been documented — extensively and soberingly by the many smartphone-equipped witnesses whose cameras have chronicled injustice for the world to see.
We saw Eric Garner choked to death by New York City Police Department officers impatient to immobilize him. We saw 12-year-old Tamir Rice shot by overzealous cops in a Cleveland park. We saw Walter Scott and Kajieme Powell and Eric Courtney Harris gunned down. They just keep coming, these videos. The horror that animates them — the tyranny they contain — is always the same.
This week we saw Castile bleed out in his car, as his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, broadcast his death to the world over Facebook Live. The video is a remarkable document of terror.
Reynolds narrates the violence with a disquieting calm: “They killed my boyfriend,” she says. “He just shot his arm off.”
Meanwhile the officer screams and moans — cursing, shrieking with infantile fright. Nearly five million people have streamed the original video on Facebook at the time of this writing. It’s difficult to imagine any of them weren’t appalled.
Yet what has been proven to us repeatedly is how ineffectual a document such as this can be.
Charges never seem to follow the crimes to which video evidence plainly attests. Rice’s shooter emerged from an investigation officially exonerated. The officers who took Garner’s life walked away without penalty. After investigating Powell’s death, prosecutors determined that no criminal charges should be filed. In each case a video dispelled any ambiguity.
In each case it was decided — maddeningly — there was no crime.
If people have been galvanized to action by these videos — or inspired to protest — it isn’t because they make it clear how often black lives are imperilled by police. That was already clear. It’s what these videos reveal about the U.S. that arouses anger and hurt: that black lives matter so little to the people in authority that even seeing them murdered on video isn’t enough to bring them justice.
The promise of so much of this technology was accountability. Smartphones and GoPros, body cameras and YouTube: their panoptic vision would eradicate all that brutality and corruption, all that discrimination and deceit.
What we failed to account for is how little accountability matters in the face of power. If you insist the police can do no wrong, a video suggesting otherwise won’t persuade you. People will continue to manufacture justifications: “we don’t know all the facts,” “the victim should have acted differently.”
Even right now — in the face of the most self-evidently damning video imaginable — there are thousands on social media hastening to defend the officers responsible for Castile’s death. What would it take to change their minds? A full video confession?
“I don’t think any of us could have imagined how tiny cameras would allow us to see, time and again, injustices perpetrated, mostly against black people, by police officers,” Roxane Gay wrote this week in the New York Times, in response to Sterling’s killing. “I don’t think we could have imagined that video of police brutality would not translate into justice.”
And yet lost in translation it remains. That’s what continues to shock and frighten: not the violence or the cruelty or the discrimination so much as the normality of it all. These things keep happening. And the cops keep getting away with it.
On Thursday afternoon, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton called for an investigation into Castile’s death by the U.S. Justice Department — as everyone from Hillary Clinton to President Barack Obama spoke out against the actions of the police.
It’s tempting to believe that this time justice may be served. Perhaps it will — though no evidence is a guarantee.
The real question isn’t how the Justice Department will respond to this tragedy but how the country will respond to the crisis this tragedy further portends. This crime — and all of the crimes it stands for — was perfectly visible. What will we do about it now that it has been seen?