I avoided watching the snuff film of Terence Crutcher — the latest unarmed black man to be shot to death by the cops… on video… that we know of — until my job demanded it. I can’t fight back against the police. I can’t shoot a gun or make a bomb. I have one wife, two kids, and three characters at the level cap: they all need me alive more than they need a martyr. Watching these videos doesn’t even make me “angry” any more. It just makes me feel like a coward for not doing more to stop this from happening.
Who needs that? When I first became aware of the Crutcher shooting, I chose instead to focus on Monday Night Football. Watching Jay Cutler and his resting bitch face was a much happier way to spend my evening.
By the time I got around to it today, I had been made aware that the officer who shot Crutcher was a woman named Betty Shelby. For a second I was hopeful. Maybe my implicit sexism that I try to overcome got a hold of me. For a second I thought that maybe this Shelby officer was actually threatened by the big black man. Not the bulls**t “I feared for my life” that police officers have been trained to say after they gun down an African-American citizen. Not the ridiculous “he was threatening me” meme that has come to see racist white fright of black men as legal justification for killing those black men.
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But maybe here there was an actual imbalance of power that could only be settled with a gun. Just yesterday, police had a shootout with an armed terrorist in New Jersey. Maybe this woman was just trying to protect herself.
Of course, I was wrong. Police were responding to reports of a stalled vehicle in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The video picks up with Crutcher near the squad car. The overhead camera, from a helicopter, shows him walking back towards his vehicle with his hands up. FOUR offices approach him, ALL with their guns drawn. He placed his hands on the vehicle. Maybe his hands are too close to the open window of his car. They shoot him. He dies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmIfTEZRBko
As I watched the senseless death, I was struck by how much I wanted it to… make sense. For all I know, this is how white people watch every one of these videos — ALWAYS trying to find the slightest justification for the horrific violence staring them in the face. I mean, every time one of these things come out, you can always go on Twitter and find some “deplorable” who thinks that straight-killing brothers is just what it takes for cops to go home to their families.
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I’m too damn old and too damn black to live in the blue fantasy world where cops are heroes and black people get what’s coming to them. But I’m also sick of being terrorized. I’m sick of being radicalized. I clicked on that video hoping to see a violent black man get taken out by cops who were just doing their job. Because that’s the only narrative that protects me and my children from the random terror brought by the police.
Ain’t that some s**t? For about one full minute of my life, I had Stockholm Syndrome. Like, the real deal. I identified with the people who brutalize my people more than with my people. I wanted my state-sponsored predators to be right. It was a scary minute, y’all. For a minute, I was Data being tempted by the Borg.
But I’m better now. The brutality of the murder shocked me back into my senses.
I remember that it doesn’t help to blame the victim of an act of terror. Nobody is telling the people who were injured in Chelsea not to walk past trash dumpsters. Nobody is telling the people stabbed in Minnesota that they shouldn’t go shopping. Nobody should tell black men that they can’t expect to survive an encounter with police if they put their hands up and on their vehicle.
Unlike Chelsea and Minnesota, people will, of course, try to blame Terence Crutcher for the fact that he is dead. But I remember now… those people are assholes.
Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. Would that taking a knee was all that was required to stop cops from killing people.