EDITORIAL: Willful Ignorance

There is a lot of feigned ignorance about wrongdoing in relation to the trigger-happy cops shooting Black citizens. I don’t mean the explainers who try to break down why it was OK for a cop to brutalize a citizen, or throw a girl across a room like a ragdoll. I don’t mean the people who mourn the deaths of 5 officers nationally and ignore 519 killings by police in the first 6 months of the year (a number of which occurred IN POLICE CUSTODY). I’m referring to the segment of people who want to distract from the discussion of Black Lives Matter by creating a sidebar debate about how all lives matter when it’s clear the intent of BLM is anything but to discredit the lives of others. I just refuse to believe that these people can be eloquent enough to verbalize their disapproval of BLM while at the same time be stupid enough to not understand that BLM (or just Black folks who don’t want to be killed in general) have nothing to do with what the detractors claim. You’re simply not that dumb. I don’t believe you.

The intention is clearly just to change the conversation and make people defend the ideology of BLM instead of addressing the actual murders that happened before everyone’s eyes. Since the nation can't unsee the crimes perpetrated by the police, there's a need to try to discredit those who would demand justice for the victims. We’ve all seen this movie before. This is some old 1950’s and 60’s bullshit. We all know that there were attempts to discredit Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Roy Wilkins, Huey Lewis, Fred Hampton, hell, all of The Black Panthers, voting rights organizers (Google COINTELPRO). With Federal blessing!! It’s been done. It’s frustrating when I read blog discussions where the comments go on for miles, full of venom, about Blue Lives Mattering more, or BLM thinking Black lives matter more instead of equally, All Lives Matter, etc. etc. ad nauseum. It’s just distraction. All the energy invested in arguing with anonymous trolls on the web is energy not being applied to forcing change, forcing accountability and forcing our representatives to address the REAL message. Politicians already know the real premise but as long as you can be distracted by this sidebar bullshit they will just wait BLM out. It’s similar to how the grand jury in Ferguson waited to announce no indictment in the murder of Mike Brown by waiting until night time on a winter’s night when they had the decision for some time before. They expected that Black folks wouldn’t react severely if they waited them out and announced the result late at night, in the cold of winter as grand jury members were spirited away from the courthouse where the announcement was made. It was a way to control the reaction, control the number of people privy to the outrage and a chickenshit way to allow yet another killing of a Black person by a police officer.

KOOL-AID SIPPERS –

Ask your “friends”, are you drinking the Kool-Aid of the campaign to devalue Black lives to the point where you offer up justification for murders that are presented to you on film? If so, you’re no better than the corrupt police administrators that close ranks around officers who are CLEARLY committing recreational murders. Yes, recreational. Meaning after you shoot an unarmed person once, or even twice, they are typically no longer a threat to you, cop or no cop. You can no longer be in fear for your life. To stand over someone and empty a clip into them is murder. To have eight cops surround a person with a knife and they all collectively shoot the person 15 times; a person who isn’t advancing on ANY of them, that’s recreational execution. The person who gave the order to kill Mario Woods or didn’t give the order not to shoot to kill should go to jail. Killing him was optional. Any one of those cops could shoot a person (who can’t fire back) in the leg, from a distance (as these officers were) and disable the person, disarm them, tase them and arrest them. Instead, they all fire on cue and kill the man as if they are on safari in Black neighborhoods. Anytime a cop jumps up on the hood of a car and empties his gun into the unarmed passengers, that’s murder. So, if you support that or try to find understanding in how the cop arrived at his decision you are part of the problem.

If you think this is a training issue you are aiding and abetting a criminal. You don’t have to be trained to know whether it’s better to incompacitate a person or shoot them 16 times. Whether you're a cop or a civilian. You don’t have to be trained before you know not to completely fabricate a police report to cover up what you did. Just the fact that you see a need to cover up what you did means you already knew it was wrong in the first f*cking place. You don’t have to be trained to not charge someone with “resisting arrest” when you were never arresting them to begin with. This is just police bullshit that has been perpetrated in Black neighborhoods for as long as I can remember. Hell, I’VE been arrested for resisting arrest before when there was no arrest taking place. Case was thrown out but I ended up having my name and my fingerprints in the criminal justice system forever. Ya know, they don't erase 'em after your case is thrown out. Hell, you're lucky to even HAVE your case thrown out. But I digress… Point is, if you think these issues I’ve named are training issues I deem you willfully ignorant. I don’t believe we can both be given the same facts, that you are of average intelligence and you don’t comprehend where the problem lies. If you believe a person, handcuffed behind their back, who has been searched and put in a police car can extract a (fictitonal) gun from its obviously well concealed hiding place and shoot themselves is a TRAINING ISSUE? That’s willful ignorance. See this article or this one. If you believe women (no, not one woman but several) who are arrested for minor traffic offenses are so distraught that they all hang themselves in their jail cells, coincidentally out of the camera's line of sight, has to do with training and not foul play...

When you see a video of a cop assaulting a homeless person, you go “that’s fucked up, he should be prosecuted”. When you see a video of a lion’s carcass after a ‘hunter’ kills it you go “that’s fucked up, he should be prosecuted”. When a gorilla is killed after a child falls into his enclosure you say “that’s fucked up, someone should be prosecuted”. When a cop empties his clip and shoots a teenager 16 times, files a false police report claiming he was being attacked and shot once in self-defense, and all officers on the scene corroborate the story, you go “well, what was the person doing to put themselves into that position?”

Willful. Selective. Ignorance.