November
24, 2014 a grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death
of Mike Brown.
On
November 24, 2014 I had a talk with my twin boys about their lives in America. It wasn’t about Mike Brown. I pulled up a video from YouTube showing on
September 4, 2014, State Trooper Sean Grouper shoot unarmed motorist Levar Jones. We watched as the patrol car’s dash cam recorded
the scene. My boys asked why the officer
was following the man. I had already
seen the video so my answer at the time was, “You’ll see.” And the sad
conclusion was this: a seatbelt violation.
We
continued to watch the officer trail the man’s pickup truck. By the time the officer reached up to him,
the man had already exited the vehicle.
The officer got out of car and said, “Can I see your license please.” You
can see Mr. Jones check his pocket. He then turns to retrieve it from his car. The officer yells for Jones
to, “Get out of the car!” There is no weapon in Jones’ hand, yet the officer unloads
his firearm into him.
Immediately
after Mr. Jones has fallen to the ground he says, “I just got my license. You
said get my license. I grabbed my license, right there, that’s my license.
Right there.”
Even
still, the officer yells at the wounded young man to put his hands behind his
back. “Put your hands behind your back,
put your hands behind your back, put your hands behind your back!”
You
can here Jones yell out, “What did I do, sir?”
Eventually
the officer asks Jones if he has been hit, and he calls on his radio for a 10-52.
Jones,
clearly in pain, says, “I can’t feel my legs.” “I just grabbed my
license.” “Why did you shoot me?” Through all the screams of agony, Jones keeps on about his license being right there, and about the officer asking for the
license and his getting it. Finally
Jones asks, “Why did you pull me over?” to which the officer responds,
“Seatbelt violation, sir.”
Every
mother’s worst nightmare. Ma’am your son has been shot because he
wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
Yet
as Jones continues to speak he says, “Seatbelt? I pulled it off at the corner,
right there to pull in the gas station.”
I
chose to focus on Levar Jones instead of Mike Brown, because the Mike Brown case
is mired in controversy. There’s a lot we don’t know, and a lot we do. We know he was unarmed, and that he is
dead. Cops were quick to pull up old,
unrelated footage of him assaulting someone, which skews public opinion. Worse
still are of course conflicting witness testimonies, reports giving conflicting
statements, and depending on who is giving the autopsy reports, conflicting autopsy
reports.
With
the video of officer Grouper and citizen Jones there are no conflicting views.
Mr. Jones was followed and stopped for a minor traffic violation, was gunned down,
and almost lost his life even after following the officer’s directives.
If
it wasn’t for the video, the officer’s version would have gone viral: “Before I could even get out of my car he jumped out, stared at
me, and as I jumped out of my car and identified myself, as I approached him,
he jumped head-first back into his car … he jumped out of the car. I saw
something black in his hands.”
But
the video clearly shows Jones being taken unawares and then complying with the
officer’s request.
This
is what I have to warn my kids about. Not confronting an officer, but an
officer ambushing them. As with Trayvon Martin: being at the right place, at
the right time, can still cost you your life.
And in that case people focused on the unknowable, what
Trayvon might have, could have, would have done, as opposed to
what actually happened. The fact that he was hunted down by a criminal mind
after that person was given direct orders to stand down and wait for the real
police.
At
the time of Trayvon’s murder I had just finished reading 12 Years A Slave. It
was interesting the parallels between what was lawful for any white man to do
in regards to blacks during slavery. A white man could stop a black person anytime for any
reason and demand their papers (that meant that free men were also subjected to
random searches). Clearly this system still exists. Even the law backed Zimmerman. I read that even Jimmy Carter agreed that
Zimmerman had a right to stop Solomon Northup Trayvon Martin. And there is a powerlessness blacks feel when
others can stand their grounds as predators, can strip our boys of their lives,
and walk away scot-free. Cops or citizens.
I
was in my 20’s when Amaduo Diallo was shot 40 times and he, too, was showing
the officers his wallet.
That
is my fear for my boys. Not a possible confrontation, but by boys being
blindsided. Of course there are good
cops, I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about the ones that will see the color of their skin and shoot.
There was another story recently about a call to 911 about 4 black man waving a gun out of a tan Toyota. Police Officer pulled over a woman who was driving a red Nissan with three young kids in her car. They demanded that she and her children stick there hands out of the window. At gunpoint they got her out of the car, handcuffed her, had a six-year-old step out of the car with his hands up, before another cop had the sense enough to realize that there were only kids in the car.
Obviously if this had been a normal traffic stop we would understand the precaution, except for the fact of the facts at hand: tan Toyota vs red Nissan, four black males vs. a female with three children.
If
you want to know why Ferguson is a tinderbox maybe this is why. Maybe at one
point in those boys lives their mothers had to sit them down and say, Son, in the country of freedom, you are not
truly free. We spend more time
discussing a car that’s been overturned in the wake of what many feel is an
injustice, than we do about drunk kids overturning a car at a pumpkinfest. Article after article has been written about
that disparity with the criminal justice system for people of color. More arrests, longer sentences, higher felony
convictions. And nothing is being done
about it. And with a felony conviction
one cannot vote. In the Jim Crow Era if
your grandfather couldn’t vote you couldn’t vote. Now the New Jim Crow, lock ‘em up take away
their right to vote.
I
once sat around a table with a group of white women and they wanted to know how
to talk to their kids about not using drugs, while not being hypocritical about
it. I personally have never done drugs, so I found it amazing how openly they
were talking about drug use, yet people who look like me were serving time for
drug use or selling drugs.
Then
recently a video of grandmothers smoking weed for the first time went viral.
How we love them. How adorable they are. I always say, just change the makeup of
the panel and see if people will still love it.
Make the grandmas black, better yet, make them black males. I’m amazed at how everyday black people are
going to jail for possession of weed and others get to do drugs with impunity
and face zero backlash.
I know they were probably in a state
where marijuana is legal. I get that, but again, are any of the states where
marijuana legal heavily populated by people of color? My boys told me a sad
joke about a month ago, they said that on the playground they saw a 5-leaf
plant. Their friends said, “Dude, if that had two more leaves some [n-word]
would have stolen it.”
I
didn’t even realize that that comment was made because weed has seven leaves.
And all I kept thinking is, how many white people smoke weed? How many areas in
the US is weed legal? How many movies and television shows are made where weed
is just as common as beer. Yet, they still stigmatize the black male. And
blacks make up only about 13% of the student body in their school. So this is
coming from kids who will one day be cops, and lawyers, and judges. They
already have it in their minds that when blacks do something it’s criminal.
I,
too, am a walking tinderbox.
http://www.essence.com/2014/08/25/texas-mother-and-children-accidentally-pulled-over-gunpoint-police/
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