When Cops Do Their Jobs, Black People Die

I'm thankful i haven't been shot by a cop... yet.

Yesterday, my friend Kayleigh McEnany wrote:

The fact is simple: when police do their jobs, the country is safer for everyone. It’s time to end the bloodthirsty quest to find and demonize the next Darren Wilson and start according police officers the respect they deserve.

Today, we have video of cops doing their jobs (the 5:20 mark is where the snuff starts):

Officer Jason Van Dyke is the man who shot LaQuan McDonald, 16 times. This is the worst thing to happen to a Van Dyke since they cancelled Coach. He now stands accused of murder, more than a year after the shooting shown by the dashboard camera. But at the time of the shooting, Chicago police said this:

FOP spokesman Pat Camden said McDonald was shot in the chest after he lunged at Van Dyke and his partner with a knife. “He is a very serious threat to the officers, and he leaves them no choice at that point to defend themselves,” Camden said that night.

I don’t think most cops think their job is to shoot unarmed black people to death. But I do think most cops think their job is to protect other cops — including the ones who shoot unarmed black people to death. Black people die not just because there are a few racist cops, but because there are many, many more cops who refuse to do anything about the violent racists in their ranks.

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Police culture creates a world where a black teenager can be shot 16 times for jaywalking, and his killer can walk around free for a year while his superiors try to hide the evidence of the crime. This happens all the time. This has been happening all the time.

This isn’t news to me. Cops lie all the time, I’ve known that because I’ve had to know that as I try to get through this world without being shot to death. I didn’t need the damn snuff film to “prove” that racist cops in Chicago kill black people and the police department covers it up.

Kayleigh needed the video. White conservatives across the country needed the video. Absent the video, they wouldn’t even know what kind of world they’ve been living in. The best spin I can put on the pro-police faction in this country is that they kind of can’t BELIEVE that the cops are as racist and as violent as black people know they are. IT’S TERRIFYING, isn’t it, to think that we have these people out there, clad in blue and wearing a badge. It’s terrifying to live around domestic terrorists who wear a uniform and have the backing of the law. For white people, seeing cops in this light must be like being told that their grandfather has been body-snatched and replaced by an homicidal, synthetic robot (I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout 4). They need to believe that cops, by and large, are trustworthy and good, because the alternative is too horrible.

But their alternate dystopia is my real life.

I don’t know what white families talk about over Thanksgiving. I assume it’s like this, but I don’t know. But my family, full as it is of young black males, oh we’ll definitely be thankful. We’ll be thankful that the cops have not succeeded in their “bloodthirsty quest to find and demonize” anybody at our table… yet.

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Chicago Protests Mostly Peaceful After Video of Police Shooting Is Released [New York Times]

Earlier: A Year After Ferguson Burned