Supporting Both Black Lives Matter & Cops: Moving Forward
Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. Jessica Nelson-Williams. Mario Woods. How many more before we can unite to make the changes needed to ensure in equal measure the safety of police and the safety of the people they are policing? There is copious evidence that people of color are disproportionately killed, let alone arrested, by law enforcement in comparison to whites. This despite the fact that 71% of police officers killed in 2016 alone were killed by white men. (Even before the tragic murders in Baton Rouge and Dallas, there has been a 59% increase in murders of police, the majority by white men).
We very clearly have a massive crisis on our hands. If the video footage of unnecessary deaths shows us nothing else, it shows us the root of this crisis.
But we are faced with a huge challenge: There are many who demonize law enforcement in its entirety and deem all police officers guilty of white supremacy. This rhetoric radicalizes individuals with devastating consequences — just look at the horrific attacks.
Like most Americans, I reject these false characterizations and strongly believe they only serve to prevent us from building the political will to fix the real problems.
I’m heartened by Campaign Zero, a Black Lives Matter advocacy effort to bring reform to law enforcement. Many of Campaign Zero’s objectives are found in numerous police departments, including community oversight, limiting the use of force, and incorporation of body cameras. These are all proposals that view law enforcement as a permanent part of our society, not as a system that needs to be destroyed and removed. I hope that efforts like Campaign Zero’s can take the conversation beyond the false dichotomy where supporting black lives means being against cops — and vice versa.
Law enforcement is not, will not, and cannot go away. I’m grateful that so many women and men put themselves on the front lines to protect us every day. Most of them are fine individuals, increasingly from virtually every demographic group, who are willing to risk their lives to serve and protect everyone, not just white people. And there are people in law enforcement who are a part of the solution. Their actions and words need to be elevated, not silenced, in our quest to change the political dynamic shaping law enforcement today.
Just look at Nakia Jones of Cleveland, who strongly condemned those who killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile for violating their oath to protect everyone. Her message is unmistakably clear: To murder people so clearly on the basis of their race is in direct violation of the oath taken by officers to go on duty.
And there’s the tragedy of Dallas PD itself. In many ways they were a model police department, having implemented groundbreaking de-escalation programs that have drastically lowered the numbers of arrests and deaths across racial lines. Their police chief, David Brown, had tweeted in support of the Black Lives Matter protestors and they immediately protected them when the sniper fired on the crowd.
In the days after the attacks, Chief Brown told protestors: “We’re hiring!” — he invited Black Lives Matter to be a part of the solution. Chief Brown is no stranger to our national crisis, his own deeply troubled son was killed in a confrontation with police in 2010.
Chief Brown recently called for other government agencies to step up in social services instead of leaving the jobs of social worker, therapist, and housing provider to the cops. If we ever want our police forces to overcome their own inherent biases, we have to work with them to lighten the load on jobs that most of us would likely agree shouldn’t be under the auspices of law enforcement. While holding them accountable, let’s give the police the space to reform so that the law can be enforced equally.
The other big challenge is that this crisis is a national problem, but our law enforcement is broken down into thousands of local departments. Solutions are diffuse and difficult to find, and will not be universally implementable. Yet, our nation’s current experience shows that these systems need national reform if we are ever to have the trust between the police and the policed.
Like Dallas, I live in a city with an African American chief of police. Our mayor, district attorney, public defender, and the majority of our Board of Supervisors are people of color. We live in a country where we have an African American president and attorney general. These are all individuals who have the opportunity to fix systems from within based on their lived experiences and force those with white privilege to wake up and care. And while they are indeed in positions of power, the vast majority of them serve in roles that were only legally accessible to non-white males for half a century (and politically accessible for even less time). Our governing systems so clearly have expanded to include many more Americans than ever before, but right now we live in a society where it frequently still feels as if black (and brown) lives are valued less.
All lives can’t matter until black lives matter.
