Once again, the unnecessary shooting of an unarmed black man by a police officer to whom he posed no danger is making headlines. Charles Kinsey, a behavioral therapist, was working with an autistic client earlier this week when he was shot by a Miami police officer. Shot as he held his hands in the air and assured the cop that he was no threat.
The big difference in the Kinsey shooting and the others that we often discuss in spaces like this is that he lived to tell the tale. What isn’t different is the inevitable question: “If an innocent guy like that can get shot, how can black people ever feel safe at the hands of police?”
We are reminded, once again, that the answer is “they can’t”. Not without a complete upheaval of the law enforcement system as we know it, at least. But how many ‘good’ men, women and children have to be harmed to get us to a place where we can even dream of such a thing? What sort of victim do we require to have The Moment that changes the hearts and minds of a nation committed to notions of inherent black criminality?
We haven’t found out yet for another great American shame, gun control.
“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
That tweet, from Mail commentator Dan Hodges, has been shared on Twitter more than 86,000 times, and it seems to sum up what many of us think about the likelihood of decreasing access to guns of any sort in the United States. If the murders of 20 first-graders – mostly white and middle-class ones, at that – couldn’t bring any real change, what could?
I think the 2014 death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice is the police violence analogue. Video of officer Timothy Loehmann gunning the child down as he played alone with a toy rifle was viewed by people across the globe. Two years, and many noteworthy police shooting videos later, the fight to stop law enforcement officers from killing black civilians with relative impunity is nowhere near won.
Like Sandy Hook, Tamir’s death was supposed to be The Moment: the death that was so tragic, so senseless, that even those who don’t believe that black lives matter would reconsider their blindly pro-police stance. But it wasn’t.
Nor was Walter Scott, hunted down and shot from behind by an officer who would claim otherwise until a videotape proved him a liar.
The killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge was disturbing enough for the New York Daily News to use a graphic image of his final moments to plea with readers: look at this shit, this didn’t have to happen. Not 48 hours later, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, a beloved school cafeteria worker, would document the minutes after he was gunned down by a police officer in Minnesota via Facebook Live. The world watched him die, his woman serving as a stoic narrator and her daughter a solemn witness.
For a moment, it seemed that the tide was turning. Would these two horrific killings be enough to change the conversation about American policing? Could the world now acknowledge what African Americans have understood for decades: that the police are the cultural descendants of overseers and masters on slave plantations? That an actor has done a better job explaining the oppressive nature of law enforcement in one Tweet (“We are not theirs”) than a sitting president?
The answers to those questions remain to be seen, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that this country will turn a wilful blind eye. America doesn’t want to have a real conversation about race; it wants to use any small sign of progress or equality as reason to slap “Mission Accomplished” on a plane and fly over our issues, time and time again.
Worse yet, there is this pervasive myth that police and African Americans face the same danger, that they are both suffering from something as simple as a lack of understanding. Recent murders of police officers allegedly at the hands of black veterans in Dallas and Baton Rouge have been used to perpetuate this narrative. The stats, of course, tell a different tale.
So, will the shooting of Charles Kinsey be The Moment? Can you get more innocent than someone who works with the disabled, someone accosted while doing this work? After we sacrificed baby-faced Tamir Rice, and so many others, my gut tells me no.