In less than a month, from July 17 to Aug. 11, in separate incidents—in Staten Island, N.Y., Beavercreek, Ohio, Ferguson, Mo., and Los Angeles—four unarmed African-American men were killed by police (www.motherjones.com).
In his blog at sojo.net, Ryan Herring writes, “To be young
and black in the United States means to live under constant pressure, something
most non-black American citizens know nothing about” (“When Terror Wears a
Badge,” Aug. 14).
War on terrorism: While our government fights a war on terrorism, many African
Americans experience terror everyday. As Cornel West has said, “To be black in
America for 400 years is to be unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence
and hated.”
Herring notes that “more Americans have lost their lives at
the hands of police since 9/11 than in acts officially classified as terrorism.
A recent study showed that one black man was killed every 28 hours by police,
security guards or self-appointed vigilantes in 2012.”
Beyond the threat of lethal violence is the daily grind of
being constantly watched by police, suspected of wrongdoing simply because of
the color of one’s skin.
Falsely accused: A further threat from police is being arrested and falsely
accused. In The New Yorker (Aug. 4), Nicholas Schmidle writes about Tyrone
Hood, who has been in prison for 21 years for a murder he likely did not
commit. The article goes into great detail, with many interviews, to trace the
course of events that led to Hood’s arrest and conviction.
Those events included witnesses who told the reporter that
Chicago police threatened them with a gun until they said they saw Hood kill
Marshal Morgan, a 20-year-old basketball star. Turns out, they didn’t witness
that.
A series of articles ran in 2001 in the Chicago Tribune
titled “Cops and Confessions.” The reporters described how Chicago police had
relied on “coercive and illegal tactics” to solicit dubious confessions. Among
the articles was a profile of Kenneth Boudreau, one of the officers in Hood’s
case who had obtained incriminating statements from several witnesses.
The article pointed out that Boudreau “had targeted suspects
especially vulnerable to intimidation, including teenagers and the mentally
retarded, and stood accused of ‘punching, slapping or kicking’ them.” He had
helped elicit at least five confessions from suspects who were later acquitted.
Schmidle interviews him, and Boudreau doesn’t budge from his
belief that Hood is guilty, despite much evidence to the contrary.
The man who most likely did the murder later murdered
several other people. Meanwhile, Hood remains in prison.
On the run: In the Aug. 11 and 18 New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses
the book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman, who
for six years lived in a low-income neighborhood of Philadelphia and documented
the lives of two young African-American men.
“They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to
find themselves thwarted,” Gladwell writes. “Selling crack was a business they
entered only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them.”
Gladwell compares the climb of Italian crime families in the
1950s and ’60s into legitimacy with that of African Americans today. Back then,
cops were paid to overlook crime and focused more on hunting Communists.
Today’s law enforcement is different. “Between 1960 and
2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost 70
percent,” Gladwell writes.
A black man in America faces many systemic barriers.
Whatever we can do to help change those barriers will help make God’s justice
for all more visible.
