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Why I changed my mind about Black Lives Matter
https://www.rocanews.com/blog-posts/how-i-came-to-oppose-black-lives-matter
Thaddeus Russell (31 August 2020)
Like many Americans, after August 9, 2014 I was convinced that the criminal justice system was fundamentally racist, and that police routinely murdered unarmed and innocent black people. That was the day that 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson, Missouri police force. It was also the day when major news outlets began reporting on the shooting without failing to name Brown as “black” and Wilson as “white,” underscoring the implicit assumption that the difference in their purported races was the most salient and newsworthy fact about the case.
Over time, I have realized two fundamental flaws with this understanding of events.
First, the facts of the Brown case have changed. [...]
Second are the broader trends I have learned about police violence and race.
Early in the morning on the same day Michael Brown was killed, on a road in Springfield Township, Pennsylvania, state police officers approached Joseph Penderghest III, who was cutting himself with a folding knife. According to a local news report, the police “attempted to stop Penderghest from harming himself using verbal commands, pepper spray and stun guns, but were unsuccessful.” The officers never saw any weapon on Penderghest other than the knife, and in the words of the York County district attorney who investigated the case, they perceived him to be a “paranoid, delusional and suicidal man.” And yet the fully armed troopers opened fire when Penderghest began walking toward them. At least one bullet hit Penderghest, who fell to the ground. He managed to rise to his feet, at which point the police fired multiple rounds and “fatally wounded” the suicidal man.
(A side note: Americans in psychological crisis are killed at alarmingly high rates compared to their counterparts elsewhere. Some advocates for police reform have noted that in most other civilized countries, armed police are not given the responsibility of handling such people. It is highly unlikely for suicidal people outside the U.S. to die at the hands of police, a fact that should lead to at least one major reform in America’s criminal justice system.)
I did not know about the killing of Joseph Penderghest until I began researching for this post. Nor did I know about the many other white people who had been killed by police for little or no justifiable reason. Only recently did I learn that since 2015 – soon after the day Michael Brown and Joseph Penderghest lost their lives – law enforcement has killed at least 356 completely unarmed people, of whom 146 were white and 125 were black. While these numbers are disproportionate (whites account for 63% of the population, blacks 13%), they actually indicate lower rates of police violence against black people than one would expect when controlling for violent crime rates and police interactions.
[...]
For those of us who find the killings of Michael Brown or Joseph Penderghest or George Floyd unacceptable; who believe that police in this country have far too many responsibilities; that those responsibilities result in frequent and often deadly interactions with civilians; and that the criminal justice system has killed or incarcerated far too many white people for us to believe that it is primarily driven by any kind of explicit or systemic racism, the narrative put forward by the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies in major news outlets is the main obstacle to meaningful police reform.
The fight isn’t between black and white. The fight is between the state and all of us.
https://www.rocanews.com/blog-posts/how-i-came-to-oppose-black-lives-matter
Thaddeus Russell (31 August 2020)
Like many Americans, after August 9, 2014 I was convinced that the criminal justice system was fundamentally racist, and that police routinely murdered unarmed and innocent black people. That was the day that 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson, Missouri police force. It was also the day when major news outlets began reporting on the shooting without failing to name Brown as “black” and Wilson as “white,” underscoring the implicit assumption that the difference in their purported races was the most salient and newsworthy fact about the case.
Over time, I have realized two fundamental flaws with this understanding of events.
First, the facts of the Brown case have changed. [...]
Second are the broader trends I have learned about police violence and race.
Early in the morning on the same day Michael Brown was killed, on a road in Springfield Township, Pennsylvania, state police officers approached Joseph Penderghest III, who was cutting himself with a folding knife. According to a local news report, the police “attempted to stop Penderghest from harming himself using verbal commands, pepper spray and stun guns, but were unsuccessful.” The officers never saw any weapon on Penderghest other than the knife, and in the words of the York County district attorney who investigated the case, they perceived him to be a “paranoid, delusional and suicidal man.” And yet the fully armed troopers opened fire when Penderghest began walking toward them. At least one bullet hit Penderghest, who fell to the ground. He managed to rise to his feet, at which point the police fired multiple rounds and “fatally wounded” the suicidal man.
(A side note: Americans in psychological crisis are killed at alarmingly high rates compared to their counterparts elsewhere. Some advocates for police reform have noted that in most other civilized countries, armed police are not given the responsibility of handling such people. It is highly unlikely for suicidal people outside the U.S. to die at the hands of police, a fact that should lead to at least one major reform in America’s criminal justice system.)
I did not know about the killing of Joseph Penderghest until I began researching for this post. Nor did I know about the many other white people who had been killed by police for little or no justifiable reason. Only recently did I learn that since 2015 – soon after the day Michael Brown and Joseph Penderghest lost their lives – law enforcement has killed at least 356 completely unarmed people, of whom 146 were white and 125 were black. While these numbers are disproportionate (whites account for 63% of the population, blacks 13%), they actually indicate lower rates of police violence against black people than one would expect when controlling for violent crime rates and police interactions.
[...]
For those of us who find the killings of Michael Brown or Joseph Penderghest or George Floyd unacceptable; who believe that police in this country have far too many responsibilities; that those responsibilities result in frequent and often deadly interactions with civilians; and that the criminal justice system has killed or incarcerated far too many white people for us to believe that it is primarily driven by any kind of explicit or systemic racism, the narrative put forward by the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies in major news outlets is the main obstacle to meaningful police reform.
The fight isn’t between black and white. The fight is between the state and all of us.
