Milan Sime Martinic
America has been on an endless cycle of unchecked police violence that has led to hundreds of killings by excessive force each year. Police respond to everything with full force, they come outfitted for war, guns drawn, and a license to kill. Political leaders have criminalized everything from life activities to poverty and created an inferior status of rights-bearing citizenship in ways that primarily affect people of color. The fog is lifting around the structural framework that embeds race into criminal code and treats black citizens as a violent criminal class. The system cannot stop itself, and every day it provides more evidence to this realization. This is why the calls for police defunding cannot be easily tamed.
In the middle of moving and impressive global protests spurred by the killing of George Floyd by police―with the entire world watching―a call to police reporting a black man asleep in a drive-thru resulted in his death, a bright yellow taser in his hand, deadly force from the hands of police. Rayshard Brooks, 27, dead, shot in the back, Atlanta, Georgia. We have been there before. The question we have not dared ask is now in everyone’s lips: Why is deadly force the first option for police?
Use of deadly force may, in fact, be lawful in these police situations, but the impact is awful. Never mind the one who dies, the impact is awfully devastating, demoralizing, and quietly anger-wrestling on the community and individuals and their hope for the future. That the deaths are senseless is numbing but that numbness begets racial resentment when skin color is almost always a component of these incidents. Black, brown, or just not-white people are overwhelmingly the dead in this story.
State violence. Violence against one group by a state run by members of another. That is the throat-gripping reality. It starts non-violently enough―people of color are stopped for things that whites are not suspected of, not bothered, not stopped, and they end up dead.
Yet, for all the noise, anger, and demonstrations his death unleashed, Brook’s death is not statistically surprising; in the US, police are the sixth-leading cause of death for 27-year-old black men.
Something is wrong. Something is amiss. This should not be. People of color should not have to die for encounters with police about minor things such as selling cigarettes (Eric Garner), a suspected fake $20 bill (George Floyd), falling asleep in your car (Rayshard Brooks). Was the police reaction proportional to the threat the person posed at the time? Why does it end in death?
That deadly force is often the first option for police when dealing with a person of color translates into a simple answer: Systemic racism.
There is no other answer. A look at all the other explanations over the decades shows they all fall to the side. There is no other answer. It is the realization that people of color have been institutionalized as inferior by what W.E.B. DuBois called a poisonous fog of lies. And it is that realization that drowns people, it drowns them to the point where they must come up for air or die. That is what we are seeing. A response to a state violence driven by systemic state racism.
Class-privileged communities live far from this everyday reality for black and brown people, but the multicultural and global reach of protests in the wake of the George Floyd killing are sparking a serious discussion about the systematic distribution of resources, power, and opportunity in society.
Former Atlanta PD officer Garrett Rolfe searches Rayshard Brooks at a Wendy's restaurant parking lot in a still image from the video body camera of officer Devin Bronsan | Reuters
The unfortunately named Defund-Police movement is really about de-constructing a hierarchical system that benefits a largely privileged class to the exclusion of people of color, a system of racially distributed resources that shape the view of minority communities by police and dictate the types of interactions resulting in arrest or death. That it is happening by design is the core complaint about keeping the current system in place. Changing a broad range of policies and institutions to shape a more constructive interaction between community and police is the goal.
That change could take the shape of a larger architecture and re-definition of the terms police and policing to a dialing-down of power by divesting, investing and reallocating resources to constructive community involvement, opportunities development, schooling, counseling, mental health care, alternative emergency response, conflict resolution and more, addressing issues such as food, housing, transportation, and employment insecurity in minority communities where powerful police is often the only the visible investment.
The current system has not worked for generations of black and brown people. Funding for police has increased in today’s dollars from $2 billion in 1960 to $137 billion in 2019. Its super-funded power and grandeur shows by invading and defeating minorities in their communities and their homes (Breonna Taylor, 26, shot dead last month in her Louisville, Kentucky home by police executing a no-knock warrant). The sum of its results can be seen in the street protests today. The movement is one that says the current police infrastructure cannot exist anymore, it is a move to re-create the police, reimagine its role by re-directing those funds to bettering the communities and to put police in the position of truly caring and serving the community, instead of simply overly arming officers.
To be sure, this model has already been implemented in communities like Camden, New Jersey where the entire police department was fired, to the last man, and a new Community Police Force was put in place. The results have changed a fear of police to an attitude of friends with police. Police brutality incidents and charges of racism have drastically dropped.
In the words of America’s Great Emancipator, President Abraham Lincoln, public sentiment is everything. The public sentiment to release the black community from this police bondage is at the heart what is fueling the global protests for change, a movement that has yet to lose steam. In fact, the American people have already shifted in their opinion, 67 per cent of people today say racism is a problem, up from 49 per cent just five years ago. Millions across the globe have decided it is worth braving the coronavirus pandemic to effect change.
Changing perspective on this is the quarantine-caused availability of time that allows people to process the trauma enmeshed in grief of the black community and to fuel the flames on a sentiment of outrage and a deep mistrust for systems that are supposed to protect and serve.
The movement is broad-based. While the Indian community in America has attempted to insulate itself against the brunt of racism behind the image of a “model minority,” it has not been immune to its effects; famously, Sureshbhai Patel was slammed to the ground and left paralyzed by Alabama police in 2015, stopped for “suspicious behavior”. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) in the United States has called upon the US police to acknowledge and eliminate “systemic racism and excessive use of force” by meaningfully addressing the twin problems, adding “We believe ahimsa (non-harming) and satya (truth) are the most powerful tools for bringing about much needed change.” US lawmakers of Indian origin—Representatives Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, Raja Krishnamurthy , Ami Bera, and Senator Kamala Harris, a former presidential candidate—are supporting legislation for reforms and demanding police accountability.
But this is now a broader cultural moment seeking meaningful reform. Most notably is the change that it is no longer acceptable to remain neutral on racism, even bias. This is cutting across cultures, nations, and American and multinational corporations weighing their responsibility to be on the right side of history. The protests are telling with lucidity, passion, and pain how police action is part of the larger issues of racism, of existing social conditions, and political systems in society and its power relations. The movement is a mechanism that is taking awareness, fear, violence, and pain and converting it into a sense of a cultural change and belonging.
News cycles are always much longer than then immediate moment but these protests are the sum of decades adding to a moment larger than the cycles. The same people disproportionally affected and dying from coronavirus also want to stop getting killed, they have children and not to worry about them not coming back when they go out; their plight, however, is no longer accompanied by only their silent tears, their grief, and hopelessness, it is at the heart of a global cultural shift.
As George Floyd’s body was delivered last week into the laps of the field where his mother lay, there was change in the air.
Milan Sime Martinic is a writer and researcher. His debut novel ‘IRONWAY: Watching over Benjamin Hill’ has been translated into five languages.
