Cops are Murders and Failure to Comply (op-ed)

Recently filmmaker Quentin Tarantino called police officers “murderers” at a rally against police brutality in New York, and in South Carolina a deputy sheriff flipped a black schoolgirl from her desk and arrested her for failure to comply.

Tarantino’s remarks riled up police unions because his comments came just days after a fatal shooting of a New York police officer in East Harlem.

But Tarantino’s claim brought back a memory.

After I graduated high school someone I knew was shot and killed by the police.

The police swore the suspect made a threatening gesture and a gun fell from his book bag. But rebuttal testimony on the street said he was murdered. The police were cleared by the courts. But the shooting wasn’t justified to me or my peers.

Like Tarantino we declared the police murderers.

We were also heavily influenced by the militant strand of “black leadership” that told us we were public enemy number one. So we had to conduct ourselves with extreme caution when confronted by the police.

I remembered this belief I held after I wondered why the schoolgirl didn’t comply, and it reminded me of a time I failed to comply with a police officer. It was after the police shooting I described.

I was with a rowdy bunch. It was late at night and we disturbed every bit of peace on the block. It’s understandable why residents called the police, if that was the reason for their sudden arrival. When the police cars sped toward us and stopped some people ran. The police jumped out and chased the runners. The rest of us watched, but the other officers jumped out with their guns drawn. We put our hands up and the police ordered us to the ground.

Everyone complied except me.

I kept my hands up but I didn’t move because one officer had his gun pointed at my head. (He was a few yards back. But from my point of view I didn’t think he was pointing at the crowd in general.) Of course the officer repeated the order but I wasn’t going to give him a reason to say I made a threatening gesture and shoot.

Police are murderers, right?

So I failed to comply. And the police handled me just like the schoolgirl in South Carolina, but there was no desk I just got slammed and tossed in the back of a squad car. (This normally happens when you fail to comply. It wasn’t a matter of unnecessary force or excessive force it’s just how an arrest is made.)

In front of the magistrate I explained my actions and my belief in extreme caution, but the magistrate thought my actions were unjustified based on her understanding of the psychology of fear.

The magistrate asserted that most people that feared for their life at gun point do exactly what the gun holder said and my explanation was an excuse for a deliberate act of defiance. She said my noncompliance made me a threat to the police officers which put my life in the exact danger I was trying to avoid.

I ignored the magistrate. How was I a threat? I wasn’t a murderer.

Then it dawned on me if I failed to comply based on the belief that police were murderers what belief do the police base their actions on, especially when they patrol areas with high murder rates?

Who’s afraid of whom? And is the fear based off of personal experience or a misguided belief based on what happened to someone else?

Thoreau once wrote, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each others eyes for an instant.”

But even that won’t help if both sides dehumanize the other.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 11/11/15