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Not Every Police Shooting Is Unjust

Not Every Police Shooting Is Unjust

If the violent eruptions in Milwaukee earlier this month were familiar, it’s because they seemed to follow a script that, by now, has become numbingly routine. A Milwaukee police officer shot and killed a young black man. Protests and condemnations followed. Police were accused, once again, of treating black citizens as target practice.

In the last two years, police violence against unarmed black Americans has rightly claimed public attention, launching a new civil rights movement by a loose-knit collection of young activists cooperating under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.” Aided by ubiquitous cellphone cameras, they have helped to bring much-needed scrutiny to police tactics that are dangerous, unfair and probably racist. Their calls for greater police accountability have echoed through this political season.

But that familiar script — the one in which citizens appropriately protest a needless police shooting — may not be the one that played out in Milwaukee earlier this month. (And rioting and arson are never justified, in any event.) According to city officials, 23-year-old Sylville Smith, who fled police after a traffic stop, had a gun in hand when he turned to confront a police officer. The officer, in turn, shot him dead.

There were no bystanders to record the episode, no eyewitnesses coming forward to claim Smith had his hands up. There is no independent video footage available. But Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett told reporters that a still image from the police officer’s body camera shows Smith holding a gun as he turns toward the officer. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the officer reacted by firing his weapon.

Not every police shooting of a black man is unjustified. Sometimes law enforcement authorities have no choice but to shoot a criminal suspect who behaves in a way that poses risks — both to police personnel and to civilians.

There are plenty of cases wherein police officers have escalated confrontations, threatened violence needlessly, and even killed black men and boys who posed no risk. Those victims deserve to be held apart from the street thugs whose confrontations with police necessarily end violently. They deserve the protests and demonstrations, the news conferences and demands for new tactics that have come from Black Lives Matter activists. Think Eric Garner and Alton Sterling. Think Tamir Rice and John Crawford III. Think Walter Scott and Samuel DuBose.

Don’t think Michael Brown. I still chafe at the mention of his name. Brown’s 2014 shooting death, paradoxically, became the cause celebre that fueled the birth of Black Lives Matter, but he was no innocent. A U.S. Justice Department investigation found that Brown, who had just stolen cigars from a convenience store, likely struggled with the police officer who tried to arrest him. Forensic evidence suggested that he didn’t have his hands up when he was shot, despite witness testimony that he did.

Yes, yes, civilians have every right to hold law enforcement officials to a higher standard, to insist that police officers learn to de-escalate conflicts, to demand that police who recklessly target unarmed civilians are not only prosecuted but also convicted.

Citizens in places such as Milwaukee, where systemic racism still thrives, also have every right to demand better schools, equal employment opportunities, and a criminal justice system that does not disproportionately incarcerate black men and women. Those unjust conditions — and crushing poverty — helped fuel the rage that lit fires in the wake of Smith’s death.

But those of us who insist on reforming a criminal justice system still plagued by racism must also acknowledge that even police officers who do everything right will sometimes end up firing their weapons. That’s the nature of their work. And much of that work takes place in dangerous neighborhoods, where the law-abiding citizens are most at risk.

Sylville Smith was no Philando Castile, the well-liked cafeteria worker shot dead in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, during a traffic stop in July — killed, his girlfriend said, as he reached for his ID. It stretches credibility to act as if their deaths were equally unjust.

(Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: A burned down gas station is seen after disturbances following the police shooting of a man in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. August 15, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein/File Photo

Sylville Smith, Racial Martyr

Sylville Smith, Racial Martyr

As racial martyrs go, you could hardly do worse than Sylville Smith.

He was no Trayvon Martin or Tamir Rice, no unarmed innocent gunned down. No, Milwaukee police say Smith was an armed 23-year old with a lengthy arrest record — drugs, weapons, robbery — who bolted from a traffic stop Saturday afternoon. They say he ran a short distance, then wheeled around, gun in hand, refusing orders to drop it. Whereupon the police officer shot and killed him.

“I’m not going to say he was an angel,” Smith’s godmother, Katherine Mahmoud, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

The officer who killed him was a year older than Smith and black, like him. Though perceptions are obviously subject to change once body-cam footage is released, there is at this writing no reason to believe the officer acted improperly and, indeed, no serious allegation that he did. As such, this incident seems an unlikely focal point for public outrage.

That it became one anyway, that Smith’s death sparked two nights of arson, shooting and general unrest, is an ominous sign. It suggests the rise of a species of anger inimical to any hope of racial reconciliation in Milwaukee — and cities far beyond.

A certain amount of anger in the face of injustice is not necessarily a bad thing. Such anger — defined as a passionate impatience with unfair status quo — is often a necessary catalyst for progress. But when there is no progress even after long years, anger can intermix with frustration and despair and become something much less constructive.

It can become something that doesn’t listen, doesn’t reason, doesn’t even hope. Something that simply explodes.

African Americans in Wisconsin’s largest city say Smith’s death was the last straw after years of racially stratified policing. It is hardly immaterial that an officer was not charged just two years ago in the controversial shooting death of a mentally ill black man. Or that the department is under Justice Department review which, to its credit, it requested.

Who will be shocked if that probe finds what other probes have found in cop shops around the country: patterns of institutionalized racism that corrode public trust and impinge the ability of police to do their jobs.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency, when such probes are done, to treat the affected department as unique, an outlier. Think of the person who sees a drop of water here, a drop of water there, another drop over there, yet somehow never perceives the storm.

It’s worth noting, too, that Mike Crivello, president of the Milwaukee police union, issued a statement after the shooting to “denounce” the idea of racism in the department’s ranks. Of course, no institution of any size can credibly make a blanket claim of freedom from bias, but that didn’t stop him. That should tell you something.

Here’s the thing: You get tired of being treated as an unreliable witness to your own experience. You get sick of not being heard. Black Milwaukee has complained for years about biased policing. Yet the police chief pronounced himself “surprised” by this uprising. Apparently, he hasn’t been listening.

The rest of us would do well to avoid that mistake. If this unrest is an omen, it is also an opportunity — for civic self-examination and accountability, for giving the people a voice, for listening to what they have to say. For making change.

This violence, following what might well have been a justified shooting, was tragic and troubling. But it also made one thing starkly clear. African Americans have been demanding justice a very long time.

And they’re getting tired of asking nicely.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Kimberly Neal, sister of Sylville Smith, speaks at a vigil after disturbances following the police shooting of a man in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. August 14, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein

Milwaukee’s War On Black People

Milwaukee’s War On Black People

Published with permission from Alternet.

Donald Trump supporter and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke has built a national profile by openly declaring war on the Black Lives Matter movement, from the floor of the Republican National Convention to the pages of national media outlets, once even proclaiming on social media that racial justice protesters will “join forces” with ISIS.

Now that some Milwaukee residents have staged days of open rebellion against police violence following the cop killing of 23-year-old black man Sylville K. Smith, Clarke is ratcheting up his rhetoric. During a press conference on Sunday, he employed dog whistle racist language, stating that “the urban pathologies have to be addressed to shrink the growth of an underclass.” Clarke went on to argue that, from Baltimore to Ferguson Milwaukee, there is a “war on police”—and vowed to escalate his crackdown on demonstrators. Meanwhile, Governor Scott Walker on Sunday declared a state of emergency and activated the national guard against protesters.

But in a city that has been called the most segregated urban area in America, angry demonstrators are telling a different story: of a state-sanctioned war against poor, black residents. This perspective was articulated by Milwaukee man Sedan Smith, who identified himself to local outlet CBS 58 as the brother of Sylville Smith.

“It’s the police. This is the madness that they spark up. This is what they encourage. This is what they provoke. This is what you get. You take a loved one from something, this is what you get,” Smith declared on Saturday, standing in view of an auto parts store engulfed in flames. “I don’t know when it’s going to end. But it’s for y’all to start. We’re not the ones that’s killing us. Y’all killing us. We can’t make a change if you all don’t change.”

Before Sylville Smith was killed, Milwaukee was already reeling from former Milwaukee police officer Chistopher Manney’s killing of mentally ill black man Dontre Hamilton with 14 gun shots in 2014. While Manney was fired from his position, he did not face any charges for the murder, and Milwaukee residents staged Black Lives Matter demonstrations to protest his impunity.

Protesters taking to the streets today say that police violence against black residents of Milwaukee remains systemic. “You see anger, just the anger and the frustration of a community that has suffered atrocities and oppression on behalf of what they deem to be the police oppressive system, that has never seemingly been held accountable for taking the life, like the young man said, of their loved ones,” Muhibb Dyer, a community activist and co-founder of the organization Flood the Hood with Dreams, told Democracy Now.

But in Milwaukee, injustices against black people extend far beyond policing. A 2013 study from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee found that the state has the highest incarceration rate for black men in the country at 13 percent, thanks largely to Milwaukee’s stunningly high rates. Report authors John Pawasarat and Lois M. Quinn note:

The prison population in Wisconsin has more than tripled since 1990, fueled by increased government funding for drug enforcement (rather than treatment) and prison construction, three-strike rules, mandatory minimum sentence laws, truth-in-sentencing replacing judicial discretion in setting punishments, concentrated policing in minority communities, and state incarceration for minor probation and supervision violations. Particularly impacted were African American males, with the 2010 U.S. Census showing Wisconsin having the highest black male incarceration rate in the nation. In Milwaukee County over half of African American men in their 30s have served time in state prison.”

Not surpringly, Wisconsin’s budget allots more for incarceration than for schooling. This is in a state where four out of every five African-American children live in poverty.

A report released last year by the University of California at Los Angeles found that schools in Milwaukee suspend black students at nearly two times the national average. Meanwhile, Wisconsin has the worst achievement gap between white and black students in the United States, thanks largely to the Milwaukee public school system, which has been systematically defunded and privatized for more than two decades.

Racial disparities extend to home lending. A study released in July by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found, “In the Milwaukee Metropolitan Statistical Area, whites represent 70 percent of the population, yet received 81 percent of the loans. African Americans are 16 percent of the population yet only received four percent of the loans.”

NPR’s Kenya Downs wrote an article last year raising the question, “Why is Milwaukee so bad for black people?” Downs wrote: “Milwaukee is a vibrant city known for its breweries and ethnic festivals and can be a great place to live — unless you’re black. Statistically, it is one of the worst places in the country for African-Americans to reside.”

When Baltimore erupted in uprisings last year following the violent death of Freddie Gray in police custody, angry protesters, most of them black youth, were widely demonized. Yet, a recently released Department of Justice investigation into that city’s police department vindicates protesters’ outrage, exposing law enforcement’s stunning and systematic atrocities against poor black communities, including systematic harassment, violence and degradation.

Now, like their counterparts in Baltimore, black youth of Milwaukee are being demonized as thugs and criminals by the police department entrusted to serve them. Bolstered by a hate-fueled presidential campaign, Clarke is escalating his demagogic incitement against the very people he and his city have failed.

Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, she coedited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.

Photo: A burned down liquor store is seen after disturbances following the police shooting of a man in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. August 15, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein