Philando Castile would turn out to have been pulled over by police fifty-two times in the past fourteen years, so he knew how to respond to a police stop. He also had more than six thousand dollars outstanding in fines—the pressures of municipal revenue generation.
The Castile family was demanding that the police vehicle dashcam footage be released, as well as the name of the police officer—Jeronimo Yanez (“Chinese,” Reynolds called him)—who has been on the St. Anthony, Minnesota, police force for about four years. (Why does CNN correspondent Chris Cuomo address in public members of the Castile family older than he is by their first names? Young white people don’t always consider how disrespectful rather than friendly that can seem to older black people in his audience.)
In Reynolds’s broadcast on her Facebook page, the panic and unpreparedness are evident in the shrieking of Officer Yanez that can be overheard. He is still pointing his gun in the driver’s window as Castile, a popular school cafeteria supervisor, lies dying. He blames his victim. Reynolds knew instinctively what authority demanded, and she repeatedly addressed the white man who had just ruined her life as “sir.” “You shot four bullets into him, sir.” After Reynolds has been taken from the car in handcuffs, her phone on the ground, Yanez can be heard shouting, “Fuck!” Many of the killings in the past three years seem to have at their core the fury of these police officers that they have been defied by black men, that they have been challenged, not been obeyed.
Most police officers don’t want anything to go wrong, a retired New York City detective, a black officer, a former marine, explained to me last year on the anniversary of Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri. The first thing that happens, he said, is that they get taken off the streets, put on leave or put behind desks, and can’t make any overtime. Moreover, your colleagues don’t want to work with you, because you’ve become a problem. Most officers do not in their entire careers use their weapons in the line of duty. When they do, what happens is not a matter of the training that was often some years ago and even then only for a few weeks. It is a matter of the individual officer’s character, what he or she is like in an emergency.
Until recently, grand juries were reluctant to indict police officers for shootings, and when they did, trial juries tended to return dutiful not-guilty verdicts. Some black activists had hoped that white policemen going to jail for killing unarmed black men would act as a deterrent. In 2014, Sgt. Jason Blackwelder was convicted of manslaughter in the Conroe, Texas, death of Russell Rios, nineteen. Blackwelder was dismissed from the police force, because a felon can’t serve, but he was not imprisoned. He received a sentence of five years’ probation. There was no video of the crime he was tried for, but the forensic evidence—Rios had been shot in the back of his head—contradicted the policeman’s story.
Black Baltimore rioted following the death on April 19, 2015, of Freddie Gray, from spinal injuries sustained while in custody in a police van. Three of the six officers charged were white; three were black. One was acquitted of assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct; a mistrial was declared in the manslaughter trial of another officer. Four are awaiting trial. In the video of his violent arrest, Gray is screaming, and the man filming yells at the police for “Tasering him like that.” Officer Lisa Mearkle’s camera on her Taser recorded the shooting death in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, in 2015 of David Kassick, a white man, while he was facedown in the snow. Not every officer involved in police violence is male. She was acquitted.
In Chicago in 2014, the killing of Laquan McDonald, seventeen, captured on a squad car dashcam was so horrible that a court ordered the police to release the footage. The shooter is offscreen, but you can see puffs of smoke from some of the sixteen bullets striking McDonald and the street around him where he lies. After sixteen seconds, Officer Jason Van Dyke enters the frame and kicks away what is probably the knife that had been in McDonald’s hand. The case has been turned over to a special prosecutor. It is ironic that after so many years of hostility to the notion that we are under constant watch, not only do we now accept cameras, but we are in favor of the democratization of surveillance.
The police can be charged, yet the murder of black men, armed and unarmed, at police hands hasn’t stopped. Just as creepy people who want to mess with children try to get jobs that give them access to and authority over children, so, too, are losers who want to throw their weight around and intimidate others with impunity often drawn to a job like that of police officer. “The best way to deal with police misconduct is to prevent it by effective methods of personnel screening, training, and supervision,” the president’s Crime Commission report recommended—in 1967.
Jurisdictions like Ferguson, Missouri, know who their “trouble” officers are. They accumulate histories of racial incidents. They even arrive as known quantities. It’s time to make it harder to become a police officer. The ones ill-suited for the job are burdens for the ones who are good at it. The videos of police killings also help explain those doubtful cases for which there are no accidental witnesses. The footage shows not only bloodlust, state-sanctioned racism, or the culture of the lone gunman in many a police head, but also incompetence.
Nakia Jones, a mother and policewoman in Warrensville Heights, outside Cleveland, says in a moving Facebook post, “I wear blue,” telling other officers that if they are afraid of where they work, if they have a god complex, then they have no business trying to be the police in such neighborhoods. They need to take off the uniform: “If you’re white and you’re working in a black community and you’re racist, you need to be ashamed of yourself. You stood up there and took an oath. If this is not where you want to work at you need to take your behind somewhere else.”
Officer Jones’s passion recalls Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. Jones also asked black men to put down their guns, to stop killing one another, and to mentor young black males.
The camera has accelerated the decriminalization of the black image in American culture. The black men about to lose their lives in these videos don’t seem like threats or members of a criminal class, and we have been looking at and listening to President Obama every day. The Willie Horton ad isn’t coming back, and those who try to use the old racist slanders as political weapons only make themselves into caricatures. The racist is an unattractive figure in American culture, which is why people go to such lengths to achieve racist goals by stealth.
Then, too, just as black identity is found to contain layers, so the majority of young whites might be embarrassed by a racial identity that bestows privileges the protection of which has become harmful to the general welfare. They want a fluid identity as well, a new kind of being white. To intimidate and imprison an urban black male population is unacceptable to them as the task of our police forces. Before Black Lives Matter, there was Occupy Wall Street, which, in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, had a significant black presence because of union participation alongside the integrated camps of students. The great demonstrations against the Iraq War had had no effect, and many went home, discouraged, for years. But the Occupy movement reopened the street as the platform from which marginal issues could be launched into mainstream consciousness.
The Washington Post reported in June 2015 that 385 people had been killed by the police in the first five months of that year, mostly armed men, a number of them mentally ill. The Post further reported that two-thirds of the black and Hispanic victims were unarmed. A website, Mapping Police Violence, displays the photographs, stories, and legal disposition of the 102 cases during the five-month period in which the murdered were unarmed black people. Another site, The Counted, maintained by The Guardian, allows you to catch up by calendar day on the 569 people killed by police so far in 2016 and who they were.
Moreover, some urgent books in recent years have had considerable influence—works on racial profiling, stop and frisk, discriminatory sentencing practices, the disproportionately high black prison population, the
profitability of the prison industry, the hallucinatory disaster of the war on drugs, and the double standard when it comes to race and class and the law. A quarter of the world’s prisoners are held in the United States. Reform of the criminal justice system is a mainstream issue.
Political rhetoric of a certain kind—the absurd notion that protests against the police will lead somehow to higher crime rates—is predictably primitive, and maybe some of the backlash we are hearing comes from frustration, the cry of a dying order. On the other hand, recent Pew Center research suggests that a wide discrepancy between black and white respondents still exists when it comes to support of police. Work slowdowns, the displays of tribal solidarity at the funerals of officers killed in the line of duty—the police can come off as bullies who really mind being criticized, except that they have lethal weapons, the right to use deadly force. Police killings ought to be examined as part of the larger social menace of having too many guns around and far too many people who like guns.
Police practice has led to the violation of the Fourth Amendment and First Amendment rights of black people, but for black people a Second Amendment literalism invites persecution. In 1966, the sight of black men with rifles on the steps of the California capitol incited the state police and the FBI, and the destruction of the Black Panthers was assured. The black men in Dallas who came to the Black Lives Matter march on July 7 in camouflage uniforms, with their long guns, were risking their lives and maybe the lives of those around them. You think you’re a symbol, but you’re a target. When the shooting started, they ran like everyone else, and sightings of various black men with guns at first led the police to think that there was more than one gunman and that they were being fired upon from a tall building, not from inside a garage.
Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, and Lorne Ahrens were not the white police officers who killed Alton Sterling or Philando Castile; however, the killer of these five white policemen, Micah Johnson, a black man, assumed that they could have been, they and the seven other officers he wounded at that Black Lives Matter march in Dallas on July 7. Or he decided that they had to pay for the deaths anyway. He is the disgraced ex-soldier with a grievance, the suicidal opportunist. It is distasteful to reduce deaths to the level of strategy, but Micah Johnson gave some right-wing opponents of Black Lives Matter the chance to pretend that parity exists between black men and white policemen as potential victims of racial violence.
The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, a black man, the father of a son who killed a policeman and was killed in the ensuing shoot-out with police, explained at a press conference that Johnson had said he wanted to kill white officers. In fact, some white officers protected black marchers from him.
Some young black people say they can understand being fed up enough to pick up a gun. In “16 Shots,” his response to the police killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, the rapper Vic Mensa warns:
Ain’t no fun when the rabbit got the gun
When I cock back, police better run …
But we do not need agents of violent retribution.
The protests go on, without interruption. The response of Black Lives Matter to the Dallas killings was crucial and heartbreaking: “This is a tragedy—both for those who have been impacted by yesterday’s attack and for our democracy,” the movement’s Facebook page announced. Dignity, not death, as Bryan Stevenson affirms in Just Mercy (2014), his unforgettable account of his more than two decades trying to rescue death row inmates and children serving life sentences in the South. Stevenson recalls scenes of utter sorrow, yet his faith in the power of resistance asks us to have some humility about historical reality.
2016
IV
PILOT ME
Eldridge Cleaver said that when he saw Huey P. Newton with a pump shotgun, it was love at first sight. Cleaver became Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party in 1966 and published Soul on Ice in 1968, the year American history went completely wrong. Two days after Dr. King was killed, Cleaver had a shoot-out with Oakland police that left Bobby Hutton, a teenage member of the Black Panther Party, dead and two white officers wounded. Huey Newton was already on trial for the murder of a police officer.
Marlon Brando went to Hutton’s memorial service. James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ossie Davis, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Oscar Lewis, and Amiri Baraka, among others, signed a letter:
We find little fundamental difference between the assassin’s bullet which killed Dr. King on April 4th, and the police barrage which killed Bobby James Hutton two days later. Both were acts of racism against persons who had taken a militant stand on the right of black people to determine the condition of their own lives. Both were attacks aimed at the nation’s black leadership.
Their time had come, the militants said. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in 1966 and, armed with M1s, 9mms, .45mms, and .357 Magnums, followed police on patrols. California residents could carry guns as long as the weapons weren’t concealed. Panthers with rifles parked themselves on the steps of the state capitol when the California legislature decided that that gun law had better be changed. If police tools were intended to intimidate, then marching lines of militarized black men in black berets and black leather jackets were meant to do the same.
Students, professors, intellectuals, and famous people were into the Panthers. However, Newton and Seale mostly recruited brothers off the block. Cleaver would declare in a speech, “Power comes out of the lips of a pussy,” and then add, “Power comes out of the barrel of a dick,” as Seale remembered in Seize the Time (1970). Six feet five inches tall, weighing 250 pounds, free on bail, Cleaver was asked not to curse on live television. The Black Panther Party took over from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—spearhead of the lunch-counter sit-ins in the early sixties—as the most prominent black radical group. Four years younger than Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. seemed older than thirty-nine years of age when he was killed. The Panther leaders were in their late twenties and early thirties. The rank and file were much younger. Cleaver ran for president on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1968, though, according to the U.S. Constitution, he was, at age thirty-three, two years too young to hold the office.
In the fall of 1968, Newton was convicted of manslaughter but acquitted of assault, kidnap, and murder charges. In the middle of a venomous public row with California’s governor Ronald Reagan about free speech, Cleaver was ordered back to jail. A few days before Thanksgiving, convinced that the authorities would kill him were he to be returned to prison, Cleaver fled to Cuba. He turned up in Algeria some months later. Cleaver’s writing had brought him considerable attention and had helped him win parole in 1966, after he’d served nine years of a fifteen-year sentence for rape and assault with intent to murder. He was an associate editor of Ramparts, which was somewhere between an underground newspaper and a glossy magazine. Soul on Ice was mostly composed of pieces that had first appeared in Ramparts. The book was on the bestseller list when he went into exile.
In 1971, the Black Panther Party split apart, fueled by Cleaver’s attacks on the Panther leadership. The FBI couldn’t have staged it better. From Algeria, Cleaver phoned Newton when he was on air in a San Francisco TV studio and berated him. In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide (1973), Newton expressed his respect for Cleaver as a writer, as he had in To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (1972), but he noted that Cleaver’s violent rhetoric and his obsession with firepower had caused him to betray black people. In 1977, Cleaver, then hiding in France, bargained for his return to the United States. He wanted the royalties waiting in escrow, rumor had it. Ramparts had ceased publication in 1975.
That poster of a handsome, beret-wearing Huey P. Newton, holding a spear and a rifle while seated on a wicker throne, lived on in the mind. However frightening he got, degenerating into a suicidal, murderous drug dealer, his decline did not app
ear to have the cynicism of Cleaver’s later opportunism. In his introduction to Cleaver’s Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (1969), Ramparts editor Robert Scheer said that Cleaver had sacrificed a literary career for the black revolution. He noted that when Cleaver first got out of prison, he and the playwright Ed Bullins started Black House in San Francisco, a short-lived black cultural center. But Cleaver wrote only one more book. In Soul on Fire (1978), he presents himself as a grateful Christian. After that, he became a laughable figure: the designer of so-called Cleaver pants, which featured a third “leg” for the johnson; a Mormon; a candidate for senator from California in the Republican Party primary; a befriender of the Ku Klux Klan.
Even before Cleaver’s death in 1998, his former Black Panther colleagues David Hilliard and Elaine Brown were writing in their memoirs that when the Black Panther Party split, Cleaver threatened to kill them. Elaine Mokhtefi’s memoir, Algiers, Third World Capital (2018), is the big nail in his coffin, exposing the stories Cleaver told of his life in Soul on Fire as fantasy. Moreover, Mokhtefi convincingly reports that Cleaver killed his wife’s lover in Algeria and that he was the one who started the shoot-out with police in Oakland in 1968.
I remember that when Soul on Ice was first out, my older sister was adamant that I give it a big miss. Looking back, I see the protective sibling who warned bullies when we were children that they had better leave me alone, because she carried in her satchel an atomic bomb. No doubt she had already read Cleaver’s homophobic attack on James Baldwin, and she understood more about me than I did about myself at the time. In 1968, she cared less about freeing Huey than she did about investigating the police killing of three students at South Carolina State, a black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Eventually, I did read the notorious chapter on Baldwin but nothing else of the book.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 17