The Crime of Being Black

[David Morris]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Police_And_The_Citizens



 In South Carolina, a state trooper shot an unarmed
<http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/25/justice/south-carolina-trooper-shooting/> man
at a gas station who was simply going for his driver's license, which the
officer himself had ordered him to do. In Ohio, the case of John Crawford
III, the man gunned down in a WalMart because he was holding a BB gun,
intensified with the release of a video of the shooting. (In Crawford's
case, a woman who witnessed the events had a heart attack
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/25/ohio-wal-mart-surveillance-video-shows-police-shooting-and-killing-john-crawford-iii/>and
died. Collateral damage.) In Utah, there are two shootings that have roiled
two communities. In one,
<http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/lawyer-feds-probe-utah-police-shooting-25632571>
a
22-year old was shot and killed while in costume as a Japanese anime
character and carrying a sword. (Like the Ohio WalMart shooting, this
episode began when a nervous citizen called the cops.) In the other
<http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/58304981-78/police-taylor-lake-salt.html.csp>,
an unarmed man was shot outside a 7-11. All of this, of course, comes in
the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager in Ferguson,
Missouri, by Officer Darren Wilson, and the subsequent protests. This was
supposed to lead to a national conversation about the militarization and
training of local police departments. To be fair, that conversation
<http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/19/politics/coburn-bill-police-militarization/> is
going on. But unarmed citizens are still being shot. *Ni shagu nazad.* Not
one step backwards.

(And things in Ferguson are heating up again. Somebody torched an
improvised memorial to Brown, and local police officers have taken to
wearing wristbands that say, "I Am Darren Wilson."
<http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/on-duty-mo-cops-wear-darren-wilson-bracelets-article-1.1952330>
If
this keeps up, any trial of Wilson in connection with Brown's death is
going to have to be held on Jupiter.)
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