May Their Memories Be A Revolution: A Reflection on My White Aunt, Police Violence, and Black Lives Matter

The tweet exchange above stopped me in my tracks. My family lost a loved one when police failed to protect her from domestic violence. Every time I hear of an unarmed black person murdered by police, I’m deeply saddened that yet another family must endure the inconceivable pain brought upon them by the very people who are supposed to keep all of us safe. These unforgivable, violent deaths have awakened a need within me to advocate for a revolutionary change in our understanding of creating and maintaining public safety, and I see it among many fellow white Americans today.

My Aunt Michelle, an accomplished paralegal and beloved mother of two, went to LAPD to seek protection from her estranged husband. Like many white residents of Los Angeles, she believed that LAPD would do whatever possible to keep her safe.

In the final 48 hours of her life, Michelle reported to LAPD that her husband went to her house and broke every window on the first floor in violation of the restraining order she filed against him. The police did nothing, claiming that he had a right to destroy his own property.

The next day, she provided LAPD with a voicemail from him saying, “I need to feed the beast. I made my peace with God. Today may be your day.”

LAPD didn’t even bother to visit his apartment. There were zero efforts to de-escalate the situation. On June 15, 2013, he found Michelle hiding from him at her friend’s home, chased her into the street, and fatally stabbed her 41 times.

Local law enforcement agencies’ success at preventing homicides from domestic violence remains wanting. While domestic violence plagues people across all socioeconomic strata, law enforcement is less likely to step in to help people of color, especially Black women. At the federal level, President Trump issued an executive order in 2017 that would put undocumented domestic violence victims at risk of deportation if they reported abuse to authorities, further eroding trust in police to actually reduce crime in predominantly Latino/a/x communities.

Meanwhile, studies show that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence in comparison to 10% of the general population. It makes sense that cops are less likely to take crimes seriously that they may be perpetrating at home themselves. Multiple police departments have allowed officers to keep their jobs and their guns despite domestic violence charges. Many plead “down” to misdemeanors to keep their jobs and earn the right to keep their cases from the public.

And under the Trump Administration, police departments across the country have an increasingly patchy track record of removing white supremacists from their midst, despite record racial integration of law enforcement agencies.

Unlike the thousands who have lost loved ones to police violence, my family at least got justice when the murderer was sentenced to prison for life without parole. But we’ll never be able to hold LAPD accountable for its actions (or in this case, complete inaction) because of qualified immunity and the police unions’ unparalleled political clout. Because LAPD is a government entity, we only had six months to file a wrongful death claim, instead of the usual 2-year statute of limitations to file a lawsuit applicable to private individuals and companies. We needed LAPD to work in good faith with the prosecutors in the murder trial, and the trial wouldn’t occur for another two years.

Let that thought sink in for a minute: We couldn’t trust LAPD to be held accountable for its actions and still do its job with the District Attorney if it was under scrutiny for the same case.

On June 15, 2020, exactly seven years after Michelle’s murder, the Supreme Court declined to take on qualified immunity for police.

The Black Lives Matter movement helped expose to me and many other white people just how fundamentally broken our system is. After all, modern law enforcement has its roots in slave patrols (some will argue that it’s working exactly as intended because of that history).

Modern law enforcement doesn’t just fail Black and Brown people; it fails all of us.

What is LAPD supposed to do, anyway? Let’s take a look at its mission:

“It is the mission of the Los Angeles Police Department to safeguard the lives and property of the people we serve, to reduce the incidence and fear of crime, and to enhance public safety while working with the diverse communities to improve their quality of life. Our mandate is to do so with honor and integrity, while at all times conducting ourselves with the highest ethical standards to maintain public confidence.”

LAPD didn’t safeguard Michelle’s life. There’s no honor or integrity in leaving Michelle to die. With their grotesque indifference to Michelle’s life, the cops did not conduct themselves with the “highest ethical standards to maintain public confidence.”

Before, during, and after Michelle’s murder, LAPD has failed to live up to its mission. It’s responsible for a great majority of the 886 people killed by police in LA County since 2000; 80% of them Black and Latino/a/x.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, only 5% of all arrests nationwide are made for violent crimes, with 1% for murder.

Why on earth are 95% of arrests nationwide for nonviolent crimes? Doesn’t it seem like common sense to have social workers, homeless outreach staff, and other unarmed professionals with specialized training respond to non-violent, non-criminal situations?

Cops should be busy enforcing restraining orders like the one intended to keep Michelle safe, not murdering people accused of using a forged 20 dollar bill, sparking violence against peaceful protesters, packing those they arrested into confined spaces for hours that can spread COVID-19, and subjecting female and gender non-binary people they arrested to mental, physical, and sexual abuse.

But I do believe we have reason for hope and to believe in the power we all have to make change.

In San Francisco, where I used to live, Mayor London Breed announced a plan to remove all police officers from non-criminal calls. (It’s worth noting that she has the unique advantage of serving as the executive of both a city and a county, and thus can exert more control over the social service spending to lead those changes.)

Here in Los Angeles, it’s truly extraordinary that nine days after George Floyd’s murder in which hundreds of thousands of Angelenos have taken to the streets, Mayor Eric Garcetti became the first mayor of any big city to announce proposed *cuts* on law enforcement in order to invest $250 million in youth jobs, health initiatives and “peace centers” to heal trauma, and will allow those who have suffered discrimination to collect damages.

Of the $250 million, $150 million will come from the LAPD’s projected discretionary budget. Do I think it’s enough? No, but it’s a significant first step because like San Francisco, it’s a political earthquake not to be understated.

The protests clearly did something. We’ve experienced a radical shift in our culture in a few short weeks, but we have to remember the 400 years of overt and systemic racism behind the political inertia that existed before May 25, 2020. After all, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) have been demanding change for years long before George Floyd’s brutal murder.

For example, the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL), LAPD’s police union, has treated this small cut to their massive budget with poisonous opprobrium. Straight out of Trump’s playbook, the LAPPL claimed that it was “worried about Garcetti’s mental health” after the mayor announced his reinvestment plan. The LAPPL has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on local races to get their way. Politicians who cross them are immediately called “soft on crime” and face million-dollar independent expenditure campaigns against them.

While many cities across America have long elected pro-reform mayors who appoint pro-reform police chiefs (including Minneapolis), as well as elected pro-reform district attorneys, police unions have been at the forefront of resisting and outright stopping progress.

Our elected officials hear us, but if we don’t build a sustained movement to counter police unions’ clout, and do the hard work to get our neighbors to join us in no longer falling for police union tactics (especially in predominantly white “law and order” communities like West Hills, where my aunt was murdered), we’ll never see the revolutionary change we’re fighting for.

Politicians at state and local levels of government who I’ve known for years never dared to challenge qualified immunity to hold law enforcement accountable after what happened to Michelle, despite their eloquent, heartfelt condolences. They’re terrified of police unions. Only now do we see a handful of brave elected officials rejecting police union endorsements and funding.

Unless there’s sudden substantial change, I hope to see Democratic voters view police union support as toxic as that of the NRA.

Even though there are parallels with what my aunt endured at the hands of a failing police system, it’s certainly not the same. Despite enduring the brutal death of a loved one, not once have our anxious thoughts gone to violence brought upon us by our own government because of our skin color. We are able to live everyday lives that allow us to focus on moving on from our devastation when many BIPOC cannot.

There is so much that I, my family, and millions of other white people will never fully understand, but that doesn’t mean that we stop doing the work.

As polling shows a dramatic shift in support for Black Lives Matter, it’s not just about police violence. We’re living in the worst economy since the Great Depression, with COVID-19 exposing the deep economic divides that have long persisted between whites and everyone else.

When we say Black Lives Matter, it has to mean that black lives matter in every facet of American life. It requires us white people to change.

To heal from this moment and 400 years of destructive racist systems, law professor and The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander put it perfectly:

We must work to create an economic system that benefits us all, not just the wealthy. If our nation was not so deeply divided along racial lines — and if so many white people were not revolted by the idea of their tax dollars helping poor people of color obtain education, housing and social benefits — we would most likely have a social democracy like Norway or Canada. Achieving economic justice requires we work for racial justice, and vice versa. There is no way around it.

I also appreciate the words of Senator Chris Murphy, a white man representing lily-white Connecticut, whose concise tweets model what Michelle Alexander is calling for:

Ending structural racism is actually good for our economy. Just ask Raphael Bostic, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s CEO. And thanks to Dr. Lisa Cook, we know that when laws aren’t applied equally on all citizens, we lose out on economic growth and innovation.

(True story: patents filed by African Americans peaked in 1899, just years after the “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson ruling and cratered after the Tulsa Race Massacre in which the wildly successful “Black Wall Street” was destroyed by white mobs who firebombed neighborhoods with airplanes while authorities did nothing in 1921. Dr. Cook discovered that the entire U.S. economy lost the wealth and GDP equivalent of a mid-sized European country— say, The Netherlands — because of our systemic racism.)

The green shoots for change are beginning to sprout. It’s not just how San Francisco and Los Angeles are moving funding from law enforcement, but by the swiftness in which the demands for racial justice are touching virtually every aspect of American life.

In Jewish tradition, there’s the phrase, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” These words fuel my passion to turn my aunt’s memory, and the memories of the thousands of unarmed black people brutally murdered by law enforcement, to be that revolution.

Until we white people acknowledge and advocate that BIPOC are as deserving as ourselves in policy and action, the revolution we demand will remain unfulfilled.

After reading this column, please consider taking action for racial justice with Color of Change, Campaign Zero, Reform Alliance, Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, and the ACLU. And volunteer or donate to Joe Biden’s campaign to defeat Donald Trump, a racist dedicated to keeping the Confederacy alive. Biden’s record on racial justice is not perfect, but he’s rising to the occasion with criminal justice and economic empowerment plans considered politically impossible not long ago.