There has been a meme floating around for a few weeks, courtesy of the Tea Party News Network (TPNN). It tells a story about Laylah Peterson, a five year old white girl who was shot by "two black males" while she sat on her grandfather's lap. The meme then asks where Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were in that case, and asserts that they don't care "unless the victim was a person of color and there are television cameras pointed at them."
The meme does not disclose where it happened, only that the neighborhood is 77% black and 14% white. A quick Google search on the girl's name reveals that it occurred in Menomenee Falls, Wisconsin and that police throughout the Milwaukee region pulled out the stops to find the killers and that the local community's response to the family was overwhelmingly helpful and sympathetic.
So, is Laylah Peterson's death comparable to Michael Brown's or Eric Garner's or Trayvon Martin's, or John Crawford's or Amadou Diallo's or Oscar Grant's? Or is the meme comparing apples and tennis balls?
Let's stipulate a few things up front:
* Laylah Peterson's death is a national tragedy. A man should be able to bounce his granddaughter on his knee in any town or village in this country without fear that someone who has no business possessing a gun will kill the child with it.
* Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are headline hustlers and I am often offended by the haste, with which they insert themselves before cameras in the middle of tragedies. Similarly, I am offended when people use tragedies such as the the Petersons' to perpetuate a logical (and racist) fallacy that tries to diminish the deaths of black men at the hands of policemen who are not later held accountable for their actions.
* Last, let's stipulate that Laylah's murder has this in common with the other killings: one party was white, one party was black, one party died, and one party perpetuated the death. There is not much else in common.
In the Peterson case, the police and community responded immediately. It was an all too common tragedy in our country; an innocent killed by feral creatures equipped with weapons that are all too available to them. TPNN's meme implies that, because Laylah was white in a majority black community that no one really gave a damn. The facts, as reported by a Milwaukee Fox network affiliate tell a different story of massive community grief and rapid police response.
The other cases tell a frightening tale of police misconduct and/or reckless disregard that is papered over by jurisdictions who are reluctant to give grieving families grounds for litigation, prosecutors afraid to confront police partners, and policemen and their fraternal organizations who confuse solidarity with abetting conduct that ultimately condemns them in the eyes of the communities they are entrusted to serve.
But here's the real difference in these cases. We--as a society--give police power of life and death over us. We trust them to exercise those powers with prudence and discrimination in circumstances of extreme tension, in which they must make snap judgements. We rely on their training, professionalism and integrity at a personal and institutional level to keep us safe. If police departments and their jurisdictions are unwilling to act responsibly and accountably in the Brown, Garner, Crawford, Rice, Diallo, Grant, etc cases can we really trust them to protect and serve all us middle class white folks? Ask Chey Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights MD. Or read Rodney Balko on the perils of militarized police departments and mindsets. Or ask journalists in Ferguson, MO who were assaulted for drinking coffee in a McDonalds near the riot zone last August.
The other day President Obama remarked, in the context of Eric Garner's death and the Grand Jury's finding that the NYPD officers committed no crime, that this was an American problem. He's right. African Americans have been referred to as canaries in our national coal mine. They are most sensitive to our nation's toxins of hate, discrimination by class or race or whatever, and the exercise of power without accountability or restraint. But the toxins will kill us all eventually. Be warned.
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