It’s not the protesters who should be herded off the streets. It’s the cops.
A tall, slim elderly man takes a few steps toward the phalanx of Buffalo cops in riot gear, approaching en masse. One of the police officers shoves the man, sending him straight backward to the ground. His head cracks against the pavement. Blood pools.
That man is 75 years old. While a single cop pauses for a moment, as if concerned, his colleagues press him to keep moving.
The Buffalo police department issued a statement shortly afterward, on Thursday, claiming the man “was injured when he tripped and fell.”
He did not trip, as the video shot by a local news crew makes perfectly clear.
The police closed ranks and lied.
Two hours later, the department announced two of the officers had been suspended without pay.
On Friday, 57 members of Buffalo’s Emergency Response Team resigned in protest.
In Fort Lauderdale, a 19-yearold female on her knees is struck in the head by a cop. Captured on video. The officer has been suspended with pay as the police chief announced an investigation has been opened. A local news station has reported that officer has 71 use-of-force complaints on his personnel file — in less than four years with the police department.
In Philadelphia, a Black university student is whacked across the head by a police officer wielding a baton. Another cop uses his knee to press the young man’s face against the ground.
But it was the student who was charged with assaulting an officer, knocking him off his bicycle.
That charge was withdrawn on Wednesday after the DA viewed videos of the event. Internal Affairs is investigating.
It was in Philadelphia, as well, where a group of white men — between 50 and 70 of them — carrying bats, golf clubs and other improvised weapons, heckled and threatened a small assembly of demonstrators this week, ripping up a protester’s Black Lives Matter sign while yelling homophobic slurs. A producer with the local public TV station tweeted that he was beaten up while trying to film the men.
Because it’s not just cops, of course, marauding. In Salt Lake City, a white man has been charged with three counts, including threatening to use a weapon in a fight. He’d pointed a bow and arrow at protesters, afterward telling the Fox affiliate he was there to protect cops, because “all lives matter.”
In Atlanta, a female protester is slammed to the ground by a cop, breaking her collarbone.
In Indianapolis, several officers are under investigation after video caught them using batons and pepper balls to subdue a female protester.
When she tried to wriggle out of one cop’s grasp — he appears to have grabbed her by the breast — she’s hit by batons while falling to the ground.
Those are just some of the despicable episodes that have surfaced on social media in recent days.
Because there’s video evidence. (Although caught-inthe-act video footage has certainly been discounted or freeze-frame parsed out of all significance by defence lawyers before, successfully.)
You’d think, with the eyes of the world upon them, brutalizing cops in the United States would know they’re being watched, documented. And that there would be consequences. Maybe. Maybe not. Too often not.
Yet, in these days of rage across America, now into a second week over the murder by cop — or so the officer is charged — of George Floyd, the wanton misuse of force, of bludgeoning, of knees pressed to the back, of tear gas and flash bangs and martial tactics continues.
The miscreants in uniform, behind their shields, with guns in their belt, have provoked where there’s been demonstration calm.
They’ve waded into marches attended by Black people, white people, brown people — allegedly to impose order and disperse, but instead triggering mayhem.
It’s not the protesters who should be herded off the streets for expressing their First Amendment rights.
It’s the cops who should be kettled and the National Guard that should be restricted to barracks.
Again and again, police officers caught out inflicting pain, manhandling, abusing their authority, even killing, fall back on the pro forma exculpation. The one-size-fits-all subjective standard. “I felt threatened … I thought my life was in danger … I believed public safety was at risk.”
Because it works. Juries are loath to convict a cop. In judgeonly trials, those judges are part of the very same law, order and justice system.
While Floyd has been buried, the injustice of his killing — it’s a flashpoint after decades, centuries, of injustice — won’t be quelled and certainly not by law enforcement knocking heads.
Every fresh incident, every new civilian video posted, feeds the wrath.
Warranted fury that isn’t abating, because, before Floyd stopped breathing, cop’s knee to his throat, there was Breonna Taylor, the aspiring nurse who was shot to death in her Louisville, Kentucky, home — shot eight times — during a botched police raid, cops breaking down her door in the dead of night, believing a man was using the residence to traffic drugs. Taylor would have turned 27 on Friday.
Because, before Taylor, unarmed Ahmaud Arbery was shot dead by two white men — one of them was a retired detective — while jogging in Brunswick, Georgia.
On Thursday, a Georgia Bureau of Investigations special agent testified at a preliminary hearing for the three defendants charged with murder that one of them, son of the ex-detective, after shooting Arbery three times, looked down at fatally wounded Arbery and called him a “f-----g n-----.”
Because of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high school student, fatally shot by George Zimmerman, neighbourhood watch co-ordinator at his gated community in Sanford, Florida. The youth, unarmed, had been visiting relatives. Claiming self-defence, Zimmerman was acquitted at trial. Because of Sam DuBose … Terence Crutcher … Alton Sterling … William Chapman … Michael Brown, just a few from among the Black males shot dead by white police officers in the past five years. Unarmed, raising their hands, stopped while driving, while selling CDs outside a store, a cop in their face.
In Toronto, over the years: Lester Donaldson, Michael Wade Lawson, O’Brian Christopher-Reid, Duane Christian, Michael Eligon, Ian Pryce. Some were armed — with a paring knife, scissors, a hammer, a pellet gun. Several were in mental crisis.
It may be true, it is true, that most cops are decent human beings, appalled by the actions of some fellow officers.
On Friday, Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders and several of his senior commanders took a knee at Bloor and Yonge streets, start of “The March for Change” rally. The chief tweeted out: “We see you and we are listening.”
But how can you tell the fine from the malevolent, when you cross paths with a cop, especially if you’re Black?
How to know which are trustworthy when the not-so-thin blue line ascribes to see-no-evil silence?
If you can’t trust the one, how can you trust the many or any, especially when the colour of your skin brands you?
And when powerful police associations will defend just about any alleged villain.
In Minneapolis, where four officers were fired and charged in the killing of George Floyd, the union boss described the victim as a “violent criminal” and the protesters as “terrorists.”
Former Minneapolis mayor R.T. Ryback has accused Bob Kroll, leader of the police union, of being the single largest obstacle to any move away from a style of policing that treats minority community as if acting like “an occupying force.”
Former police chief Janee Harteau, who struggled to reform a police department with a long history of racial abuse, tweeted out: “A disgrace to the badge! This is the battle that myself and others have been fighting against. Bob Kroll turn in your badge!” New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, on Friday, said of the Buffalo incident: “Why is that necessary? Where was the threat?” And of the officers who just walked by the injured man: “Who are we? How did we get to this place? It’s fundamentally offensive and frightening. It’s just frightening.”
It may be a moment of selfreflection and suddenly discovered racial awareness for the U.S., but while millions have taken to the streets, hundreds of millions have stayed home.
Demonstrations have been held in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The National Guard, 30,000-strong, has been deployed in at least 25 states. Thirty curfews were imposed. As of Friday morning, more than 9,300 people had been arrested. Eleven people had been killed, including a 77-year-old retired police captain in St. Louis, shot by looters as he tried to defend a pawn shop.
While people of all races and ethnicities decry the senseless killing of George Floyd, the Black community buries another of their own.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, a polarizing figure, eulogized Floyd at the memorial.
“We were smarter than the underfunded schools you put us in, but you had your knee on our neck. We could run corporations and not hustle in the street, but you had your knee on our neck. We had creative skills, we could do whatever anybody else could do, but we couldn’t get your knee off our neck. What happened to Floyd happens every day in this county, in education, in health centres and in every area of American life. It’s time for us to stand up in George’s name and say ‘Get your knee off our necks!’ ”
The thunder and lightning of outrage.
But in the mornings after the mourning, what has changed?