I’ve been researching recent cases of black people (usually men) killed by police. I started with names I’ve been seeing in social media posts and reminded of, others are names I discovered while doing my research. It was a long and tedious process - every time I was getting towards the end of my list, I’d find a bunch of other people discussed in my research and my list would start growing again. At one point I thought,” I am so sick of doing this! I just want the list to end.” That thought was immediately followed by,” Wow, if I feel like this just from researching all these cases, imagine how the black community has been feeling all this time!”
I now have a much better understanding of why the BLM movement is making certain demands. I don’t agree with how they want to solve some of these problems, but the problems they are trying to address are serious and need to be resolved.
As I researched, it became clear that there are a few different problems with policing that need to be addressed. Mental health crises, chokeholds, tasers, assumptions of danger, mistaking other objects for guns are some of the biggest factors in these deaths.
The one factor that was present in the largest number of death-by-police cases was mental health issues. 26% of officer-caused deaths were people having a mental health crisis at the time.* Many times the person’s family called for help controlling their loved one. Imagine the guilt they must feel about calling the police for help because it ended in the death of their family member! No wonder some people are reticent to call 911.
Of those mental health cases, 19% died after being tased, 31% died after being placed in a chokehold, and 50% were shot and killed. While I disagree with BLM’s desire to defund police, I do think we clearly need social workers working with police departments to help on mental health calls. Maybe a new job should be created where people who have completed their social work education then train at the police academy. These people could help with mental health calls.
I was surprised to learn that 15% of the people killed by police in my research died after being tased. I didn’t know that tasers can be fatal in some circumstances. Knowing that, should we continue to consider it to be a non-lethal tactic? I believe we need more info about this - why tasers are killing people, what changes can be made to prevent these deaths.
15% of cases involved the officer firing his weapon due to him believing that the person had a gun on them, often mistaking cell phones for guns. Play guns like paint guns and BB guns have also been mistaken for the real thing and caused shootings. In 2020 when almost everyone has a cell phone, with many are black, gray, or silver, we need to find a way for police to do better.
Unbelievably, 8% were shot and killed by police while restrained. Why? If a person is restrained, what else do you need? Why shoot? And why a lethal shot - why not an appendage or something?
Obviously the US has a history of terrible treatment of blacks by whites starting with slavery, then lynchings as recent as the 1900s, and mobs of white teens attacking lone blacks in the end of the 20th century. I noticed that the cases in the past twenty years have been different. There hasn’t been the same blatant group attacks. Instead, it seems like there has been a shift from a conscious hatred to a subconscious presumption of danger. Civilians and law enforcement of all colors appear to have a tendency to presume danger or guilt when interacting with a black person. Assuming guilt instead of innocence is leading to deaths caused by fear.
Jonathan Ferrell and Renisha McBride were both killed within two months of each other, both mistaken for robbers and shot after seeking help following car trouble.
“I can’t breathe.” Those aren’t new words.
Just six years ago Eric Garner said them eleven times before passing out with a police officers’ arm wrapped around his neck, later dying at a hospital.
John Crawford, 22, and Tamir Rice, 12, were both shot and killed by police in separate incidents in 2014 when toy guns were mistaken for real guns. If they had been white, I doubt witnesses and police would have been as quick to assume they were real and dangerous.
Recently even being at home is dangerous if you’re black, whether your a male or female, adult or a 12 year old girl. In Sept 2019, Bothem Sean Jean was shot and killed when a white off-duty police officer entered HIS apartment by mistake and shot him, allegedly thinking Jean was the intruder. In October 2019, Atatiana Jefferson was shot and killed by police investigating an open door reported by a neighbor. She was shot inside her home by a police officer who was shooting from outside. In March of this year Breonna Taylor was shot and killed when police entered her home with a no-knock warrant at the wrong house.
Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Terence Crutcher, Keith Scott, and Stephon Clark were all shot, essentially, for making police nervous. They were all unarmed when killed by police, and yet not a single officer was charged in any of their cases.
In at least 50% of cases, the shootings seem to have been inspired by or included a component of a presumption of guilt or danger. A snap judgement out of fear have cost many people their lives. The movie “The 13th” provides some insight as to how the idea of the scary black man has been grown in our collective psyche. While I don’t agree with everything said in that film, it connects a lot of dots that most people aren’t aware of because our government school system doesn’t educate its citizens about its less than stellar moments in history.
History isn’t the only place where the government school system embeds racism. Modern scientific thinking is largely based on the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin posited that life began and evolved in different areas of our planet at different times and at different rates. Here’s an excerpt from his writings:
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous [i.e., most human-looking] apes — will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
Did you catch that? Darwin, the father of the predominant worldview in Western civilization, clearly asserted that Caucasians (white people) are at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, while blacks (negros, Australian aboriginies, etc) were only slightly more than an ape. And THIS is what has been taught as prevailing science in our public schools for almost 100 years (the Scopes Trial was in 1925). After 12 years of indoctrination before high school graduation, it’s no surprise that despite the best intentions each new generation of Americans continues the unfair and dangerous assumption of the guilt of black men.
As a Christian, I believe that humanity is a special creation of God, being made in His Image, separate from and over the animal kingdom. I encourage you to reject the secularist worldview of Darwinism, and embrace the Christian worldview because it is the only means by which we can look at what’s happened and call it morally wrong. Darwinism doesn’t allow for that. When groups of animals kill other animals, that’s just nature being “red in tooth and claw” (Lord Tennyson). There is no morality in it. It just is.
If you support/ believe in Darwinism and BLM, you might want to spend some time re-thinking your beliefs. I urge you to embrace a Biblical worldview that holds all humans from conception to be inherently valuable by virtue of the Imago Dei. It is THAT worldview that affords us the ability to point to the death of George Floyd and call it wrong, sinful, and evil.
*These figures are just from the random selection of cases I found. They aren’t based on complete list of all cases, but I think they provide enough of a snapshot to warrant discussions and further research.
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