A role for the Black Lives Matter movement when police kill white people?

To draw attention to bad things happening to white people is decidedly out of fashion these days.  To do so risks communicating an "All Lives Matter" message, and that is ill advised in most progressive circles in this period when Black Lives Matter has been revived--appropriately, in my opinion--in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis Police in late May.    

So I was surprised to see Jack Healy's front-page story yesterday for the New York Times dateline Sedalia, Missouri, population 21,287.  The headline in the print edition that landed in my driveway is "In Rural Towns, Similar Chants to Find Justice."  The online headline is a little different, "A Family Cries 'Justice for Hannah.'  Will a Rural Town Listen?"  And here's the subhead, which highlights the rural context: 

People in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, but victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard.

Neither headline nor the subhead mentions race, however, which I'd argue is a fairly critical piece of the story--even more central to my mind than the rural angle.  This paragraph, about the young Sedalia woman who was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy appears deep in Healy's story:  

Ms. Fizer and the deputy who shot her were both white, a common dynamic in shootings that occur in overwhelmingly white, rural parts of the country. Black and Hispanic people are killed at higher rates than white people in rural areas, but the demographics of rural America mean that about 60 to 70 percent of people killed by law enforcement there are white, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers.

To me, its placement feels a bit like burying the lede.  

The lede the editors went with, which doesn't mention race, follows: 

Seven weeks had passed, and still there were no answers. So once again, a small cluster of friends and family gathered in the leafy courthouse square and marched for Hannah Fizer, an unarmed woman shot and killed by a rural Missouri sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop.

“Say her name! Hannah!”

“Prosecute the police!”

Their chants echoed protests over police killings in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta and beyond. But this was no George Floyd moment for rural America.

Though people in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard. They say extracting changes can be especially tough in small, conservative towns where residents and officials have abiding support for law enforcement and are leery of new calls to defund the police.

Hannah Fizer's mother, Amy, commented (in a statement that echoes one of my own mother's favorite expressions):   

It’s like pulling teeth.

Amy Fizer also explains that she and Hannah's father have not been been interviewed or kept abreast of the investigation into Hannah's death--and that the Pettis County Sheriff, Kevin Bond, has not revealed to them the name of the deputy who killed their daughter after stopping her on the way to her night shift at an area convenience store.  The deputy claimed that he "met with verbal resistance" from Hannah Fizer and that he suspected she had a gun.  Subsequent investigation revealed no gun.  

This is the sort of story I've not been expecting to see in national media for the reason I led with in this post:  this story draws our attention to the phenomenon of law enforcement--including white law enforcement, even in (or is the point especially in?) rural areas--killing white people. 

And so the story raises the question:  Where are white victims of police violence in the Black Lives Matter movement?  Should we acknowledge them in the context of that movement?  Or would acknowledging those deaths be tantamount to saying the forbidden "All Lives Matter"?  What are the political, social and cultural implications of not acknowledging them?  An earlier event that took up this conundrum, this one from 2015 in South Carolina, is here.  

We saw a partial response to these questions, I guess, a few weeks ago when Donald Trump answered a journalist's question about Black Americans being killed by police by saying that "more white people" are killed by cops than black people.  Here are some Tweets by  journalists that I captured just after his  comment:  

And here are two of my Tweets about the matter then:

The New York Times responded to Trump's comment with this story by Jeremy Peters:  

Mr. Trump added to his long record of racially inflammatory comments during an interview with CBS News, in which he brushed off a question about Black people killed by police officers, saying that white people are killed in greater numbers.

Mr. Trump reacted angrily when asked about the issue, which has led to nationwide protests calling for major law enforcement changes.

“Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?” the interviewer, Catherine Herridge of CBS News, asked the president.

“What a terrible question to ask,” Mr. Trump responded. “So are white people. More white people, by the way.”

Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police over all, people of color are killed at higher rates. A federal study that examined lethal force used by the police from 2009 to 2012 found that a majority of victims were white, but the victims were disproportionately Black. Black people had a fatality rate at the hands of police officers that was 2.8 times as high as that of white people.

Of course, what Trump said is technically true.  So were the clarifications by the media.  I call this the "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" problem.  Multiple accurate assertions can be made based on available empirical data.  The media choose to highlight one or the other.  In doing so, they drive wedges between folks who have a lot in common:  both people of color and low-income, low-status whites (who are arguably also people of color) are vulnerable to police misconduct.  Indeed, people of color and low-income whites are vulnerable to lots of bad stuff.  

I'd like to see these vulnerable folks banding together across racial lines and not to be put into a contest--or conflict--with each other.  Wouldn't we be better off, at least occasionally, to do what Healy and the New York Times have perhaps done/kinda' sorta/implicitly laid the groundwork for?   Cross-racial coalition building, that is.  It brings me back to a question I've been mulling for a long time, in this context and others:  Wouldn't all parties who have a beef about policing--parties of all colors/races/ethnicities--be better off joining forces rather than strictly competing to say who has it worse?  wouldn't we be better off not engaging in what Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie calls "the oppression Olympics"?  

It seems these days that lots of folks, including many non-whites, are skeptical that anything law enforcement do that is "wrong," "inappropriate," even in violation of the constitution, is attributable to anything other than racism or grounded in racial difference.  But don't the data from this Healy story belie that assumption?  Even the data Trump implicitly invoked in his ham-handed comments a few weeks ago?

On a somewhat different note, this story out of central Missouri reminds me of the movie "Winter's Bone," set in southwest Missouri, and the scene where the county sheriff pulls over Teardrop.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, then see the movie. Some prior posts about that movie are here and here.  

I'm also thinking about the movie "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri," set in a fictitious Missouri town.  That movie features plenty of racism by local police, but also law enforcement failures in relation to the investigation of a local teenager's death, that of a young woman who was raped before she was murdered.

The Healy report wisely addresses two other issues that loom large in rural contexts:  the higher rate of gun ownership and the lower rate of availability of mental health services.  Regarding the former, the story cites David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, who says

the prevalence of guns may explain why cities and rural areas have nearly equal rates of law enforcement killings even though murders and violent crime rates tend to be higher in cities.

More than half of the people fatally shot by rural officers were reported to have a gun, according to a seven-year tally by Mapping Police Violence. Ms. Fizer was among the roughly 10 percent who were unarmed.

And then there is the issue of body cameras, technology and resources.  I published this in 2014, and it was controversial in the U.S. but has been cited widely in Australia and New Zealand.  One of my points about rural socio-spatiality is that if you are going to police vast rural areas effectively, you're going to need technology and resources.  In this case, the Sheriff claims not to have had enough of both to do something else:  hold law enforcement accountable by downloading, sorting and storing body cam footage.  

It is tragically ironic that this story out of Sedalia was published on the same day that another victim of crime in a Missouri small town committed suicide.  Daisy Coleman killed herself yesterday, as Amanda Arnold reports in The Cut:  

Daisy Coleman, the survivor at the center of the 2012 Maryville, Missouri, rape case and whose story was later featured in the Netflix documentary Audrie & Daisy, died by suicide on Tuesday evening. She was 23 years old.

* * * 

Coleman became the subject of national attention in 2012, when she, then 14 years old, attended a party where she blacked out from drinking and was allegedly raped by 17-year-old Matthew Barnett, a senior football player who had familial ties to a former Republican state representative. Before dawn the next morning, Melinda [Daisy's mother] found Daisy, who was wearing just a T-shirt and sweatpants in below-freezing weather, passed out on their doorstep. A hospital exam later confirmed Coleman had been raped, which led to Barnett’s arrest. He ultimately faced few repercussions, however: He received two years’ probation but was never convicted. Meanwhile, Coleman endured relentless victim blaming, and her entire family was harassed. People were “calling me a bitch, a whore, and a slut every single day,” she wrote in Seventeen. One Fox News guest suggested Coleman had “expected” to get raped. Melinda claimed she was fired from her job at a local veterinary clinic over the scandal.

The ruthless bullying took a grave toll on Coleman, and in 2014, she was hospitalized following a suicide attempt; it was not her first. After recovering, she went on to advocate for survivors of sexual assault.

Maryville, population 11,972, is in far northwest Missouri, on the Iowa state line. Interestingly, both of these cases attracted the "intervention"--official or not--of professionals from Kansas City, the regional center. In the case of Audrie and Daisy, a Jackson County prosecutor was brought in to investigate local law enforcement and prosecutorial handling of the case. In the Sedalia matter, a Kansas City police officer who lives in Sedalia is challenging Pettis County Sheriff Bond in the upcoming election. 

And that takes me back to some Facebook comments by Sheriff Bond about the Sedalia protests.

Do you want this to continue and cause irrevocable harm to our community?  Are you willing to allow Pettis County to become the test project for some social justice experiment for rural America?

The use of "social justice" is interesting there, since the right uses it as a pejorative term for the left:  The sheriff also suggested that outside agitators are sowing "social chaos."  Even Hannah Fizer's father invokes similar concerns, as Healy summarizes:

But [Mr. Fizer] counted himself as a conservative Republican and worried that the protests in Sedalia could be co-opted by left-wing outsiders — a pervasive, but largely unfounded fear in small towns after Mr. Floyd’s killing.

Reminds me of similar concerns articulated by my mom about her community in nearby northwest Arkansas.  I wrote this about the "outside agitator" trope, and here's another piece about so-called "antifa busses," which are a hoax.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

The all too rare story that talks about privilege in terms of class more than in terms of whiteness

It's this New Yorker story about Jeffrey Epstein and how he got away with what he got away with--for decades.  An excerpt follows:

For years, Epstein was able to operate and be fêted in the social, financial, and academic worlds, despite barely bothering to conceal his illicit activities. Visitors to his various homes would see young women there who looked as if they should still be in school. In Florida, in 2008, he had secured a shamefully lax plea deal, which U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta signed off on. (Acosta later became the Labor Secretary for Donald Trump, who had had his own interactions with Epstein; so, as Trump has practically been shouting on Twitter, did Bill Clinton.) Prosecutors there knew of dozens of alleged victims who were minors, but Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to a pair of state prostitution charges, which both hid and distorted the girls’ stories. The lack of respect for young victims is another pathology that extends beyond the Epstein case. Before the Miami Herald published an investigation of that deal last November, Epstein had managed to return to his life in New York, and to evade accountability. 

Money offers one explanation for why people seemed to ignore what was plain to see. But money, here, is really shorthand for a range of ways to exert influence.

A path forward in the war on drugs

The documentary Meth Storm follows an impoverished family of meth addicts in rural Arkansas who are struggling to manage their addiction and stay out of prison. The son, Teddy, has found religion during his sixth stint in prison in the past ten years, and he promises the mother of his children that he will get sober and get his life back on track. Teddy’s mother said this commitment to sobriety was unlikely to last. She says her son has merely found “jailhouse religion” and will be back on meth shortly after he gets out. Disappointingly, Teddy’s mother is right. A few months later Teddy is arrested again for possession and finds himself in prison for a seventh time.

On the other side of the drug war, DEA agent Johnny Sowell acknowledges that every time they arrest a drug dealer, a replacement springs up shortly thereafter. Still, he hopes that this latest round of arrests of low-level drug dealers, dubbed Operation Ice Storm, will lead to the source of the super-potent meth coming in from Mexico. Johnny busts as many low-level dealers as he can, for selling as little as a gram of meth. He pumps them for information until he finally catches a direct connection to the cartel in a dangerous high speed chase. The connection refuses to snitch. If he does, the connection’s entire family in Mexico will be killed. Another dead end in the drug war.

Teddy and Johnny have something in common besides their decaying town. They both keep doing the same things they have always done, in futile hope of a better result. Teddy keeps trying to turn his life around, but always goes back to drugs. Johnny keeps arresting people like Teddy to stop the flow of drugs, but he never gets any closer to the source. Like characters in a modern Greek tragedy, it is impossible for anybody in this community to avoid the cruelty of their own fate. The war on drugs rages on, regardless of the participants efforts to resist.

So what is to be done for communities ravaged by drugs like the one in Meth Storm and their urban counterparts? What is needed is compassion in the law for addicts and drug users, one that recognizes their humanity and decouples it from race or income level.

But what does this compassion look like in policy terms? To start, we must create avenues for drug users to course correct before they are trapped in the cycle of addiction and incarceration. For example, drug courts which emphasize treatment instead of just punishment have shown promising drops in rates of recidivism among drug users. Well maintained and funded pretrial diversion programs are also effective in preventing users from being rearrested.

We also need to reform how we treat drug users who find themselves incarcerated. A study from 2002 indicated that over half of all prisoners in the US met the criteria for a diagnosis of drug abuse or dependence, but only 15 to 20 percent of those who would benefit from treatment received it. Part of the reason is that the current criminal justice system focuses on punishment, rather than treating addiction as a disease. When prisons spend their resources in accordance with this assumption, the inevitable result is that many of the incarcerated do not get the help they need. Every addict who goes to prison should receive treatment for their addiction, otherwise it is only a matter of time before many will return.

Another reform that has been gaining traction is ending mandatory minimums that were a result of the tough-on-crime stances of the 1980s and 1990s. Although the end of the racially tinged 100:1 ratio in sentencing for crack cocaine versus cocaine was a welcome reform, this was a band-aid policy for a specific drug and not a permanent solution. The law still maintains a grossly unfair 18:1 sentencing ratio between crack cocaine and cocaine, and the vast majority of mandatory minimums have not been addressed. For example, the mandatory federal minimum sentence for distribution of five grams of methamphetamine is five years, even though that amount could be as little as a week’s supply to a heavy user.

In addition to ending mandatory minimums, we must go further to ensure that there is something worth returning home to after former dealers and users have served their sentences. We need to invest in job training for prisoners and provide opportunities for these returning individuals to work in their communities and become contributing members of society.

Another consideration is that sentences for using or selling even a small amount of drugs can last much longer than the period of incarceration or parole, because hiring managers discriminate against those with drug convictions. We must destigmatize non-violent drug convictions in hiring and allow rehabilitated drug offenders to have their slate wiped clean. Without these reforms, the reality is that in an area with no jobs like Faulkner County, Arkansas in Meth Storm, the only way the formerly incarcerated can make money is in the drug trade, which will further ingratiate themselves into the cycle of addition and incarceration.

So how do we obtain the political capital to get these policy outcomes in place? We need to humanize drug users and, yes, even low-level drug dealers. The first step is to encourage the positive trends of humanizing opioid users. For people of color whose communities have been criminalized for decades as a result of the war on drugs, it may be difficult for many to square the injustice of only granting compassion to wealthier and whiter opioid users. However, the reality is that many Americans continue to otherize drug users, by saying drug use is something that only poor whites, Latinos, or Black folks do.

In order to help build a broader coalition of support, we need the public to believe that addiction can affect their own family and friends, so any humanizing narratives about drug use and addiction are helpful. For example, when rockstar and drug addict Tom Petty died of an accidental overdose, there was an outpouring of support and much credit given to his family for making his cause of death public. However, when a poor addict like Teddy dies in rural Arkansas, its doubtful that there will be similarly affectionate support. It will just be another sad statistic in the war on drugs. With greater recognition that drug use is not attributable to someone’s characteristics of being poor or a racial minority, we can enact policies that will change the fates of people like Johnny and Teddy in Meth Storm.