My home town of Sacramento just
made the national (and international) news again. Sacramento has enjoyed a good run lately: First, the movie Lady Bird was one of the
Oscar finalists. Both the movie and the director were hometown products.
Something to be proud of. Then another recent
movie, The 5:17 to Paris, depicts three young men from
Sacramento who thwart an attempted
terrorist attack on a European train. Two of them were in fact students at my
university, and I met one of them.
And now, the trifecta is
complete, except that Sacramento’s third
appearance on the world stage within a year is a tragic event: The utterly
unnecessary killing of a young black man, Stephon Clark, by two members of the SACPD.
So once again, I have to write
about this shameful feature of American
society: For some reason, this country sticks out head and shoulders above
other comparable countries in the number of homicides committed by cops. (I
have written about this several times before. See Americans Killed by the Police and Violence, Racism and Law Enforcement.).
Country
|
Number killed per year
|
Population
|
Ratio
|
Australia
|
9
|
24 million
|
0. 4 per million
|
Austria
|
1
|
8.7 million
|
0.1 per million
|
Canada
|
25
|
36 million
|
0.7 per million
|
Denmark
|
1
|
5.7 million
|
0.2 per million
|
England and Wales
|
2.3
|
58 million
|
0.04 per million
|
Finland
|
0
|
5.5 million
|
0 per million
|
France
|
14
|
67 million
|
0.2 per million
|
Germany
|
8
|
83 million
|
0.1 per million
|
Iceland
|
0
|
334,000
|
0 per million
|
Japan
|
0
|
127 million
|
0 per million
|
Netherlands
|
5
|
17 million
|
0.3 per million
|
Norway
|
0
|
5.2 million
|
0 per million
|
South Africa
|
400
|
56 million
|
7 per million
|
United States
|
1,100
|
326 million
|
3.4 per million
|
Your chances of being killed by
a policeman in the US are 5 times greater than in Canada, 9 time greater than
in Australia, 10 times greater than in the Netherlands, 17 times greater than
in Denmark and France, 34 times greater than in Austria and Germany, 85 times
greater than in Britain and infinitely
greater than in Finland, Iceland, Japan and Norway. But you are twice as
safe as in South Africa.
African-Americans make up 13% of
the US population, but account for twice that proportion (25%) of all the
victims of police killings (Police Killing of Blacks).
What gets me is that, every time
there is another killing-by-police followed by a national “conversation” about
this issue, including numerous editorial comments by pundits, there is so much EQUIVOCATION. On
TV, we see panels of “experts” arguing the various “sides.” Similarly,
newspaper columnists discuss “both
sides” of the issue. This happens not just on Fox News, but also on
“mainstream” or allegedly “left-leaning sites” such as MSNBC, as well as in
allegedly “liberal” organs such as the Sacramento
Bee. See for example the March 23 column by Marcos Breton, a usually very reasonable
fellow, titled “Probe Could Clear Police
Shooters.” Or Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg’s statement that he would
not “second guess” the actions of the officers who just killed Stephon Clark.
To his credit, the mayor subsequently expressed
more sympathy for the victim and for African Americans in general.
But by and large , there is at all levels of society a reluctance to speak the truth, to forcefully
and unambiguously say that the routine killing of people by policemen in
America is a national disgrace which has to change. This simply does not happen in other comparable countries. By “comparable,” I mean advanced democracies - Western Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan,
etc. Only the black community has a clear view of the problem.
The so-called “debate” attempts
to identify allegedly legitimate
arguments on “both sides:”
We are told that peace officers
are legally in their right when they kill suspects who behave suspiciously.
After all, they
“put their lives on the line
every day” to protect us, right?
Don’t German and Japanese
policemen do the same?
Or the argument that we have
more crime than other countries. So? Our crime rate exceeds some other
countries, but not all, nor are other countries crime-free by any means. So this is another pseudo-excuse.
Our system is simply not
conducive to change: The Police Department (headed by Daniel Hahn, himself
African American), the District Attorney’s office (headed by Anne Marie
Schubert), the Mayor’s Office, the
Coroner’s Office and the other branches of government prefer not to rock the
boat.
Sacramento is the capital of
oh-so-liberal California. This isn’t Alabama, where sheriff Bull Connor used to
sick German shepherd dogs on peaceful citizens, or Arizona, where sheriff Joe
Arpaio brutalized and caused the death of many suspects.
We pride ourselves on being
progressive.
But in Sacramento alone, 16
people have been shot to death by police over the past two years. Some had
guns, some had knives, three were unarmed (Sacramento Bee, March 25,
2018). So the problem is nationwide.
Policemen who kill people are
never, ever convicted prosecuted criminally. At the most, they sometimes get fired, as
happened after the killing of Joseph
Mann in 2016: He was a mentally ill black man,
shot dead by two peace officers who had first tried to
run him over. This killing was
declared “justified” by the D.A. but at least the two men lost
their jobs.
California has a “Peace Officers Bill of Rights,” which makes
policemen’s personnel records completely confidential, thereby making it impossible to find out whether an
officer is guilty of prior misconduct.
Homicides-by-cop are
investigated by Internal Affairs. Isn’t this a joke?
If your child were picked up for shoplifting and the authorities asked
YOU to investigate what happened and report back to them, would you turn in a
report and say “Yup. She did it. Here, take her and lock her up.”?
It’s time to admit that there
are not two sides, there is no “debate.” The statistics in my table above tell the whole story. We
have a unique problem: American cops should stop killing hundreds of people
every year, just like all other
civilized countries..
But maybe we are not so
civilized?
One of the most disturbing aspects of the recent
killing of Stephon Clark in Sacramento is that it happened in his own HOME!
When law enforcement is permitted to kill people
in the privacy of their own residence, we are verging on becoming a Police State. There is no safety from the
State any more.
© Tom Kando 2018;All Rights Reserved
