Question for you, dear readers.
What do the 1965 Watts Riot, the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the 1973 one in Jamaica, Queens, NY, the 1980, 1982 and 1989 riots in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood, the 1992 Rodney King one in Los Angeles, the 2009 Oscar Grant one in Oakland, and the 2014 Ferguson, MO riots all have in common?
The answer is that all of them were triggered by Black people fed up with the systemic police brutality aimed at our community and zero accountability for the cops perpetrating it.
This short list of police brutality-fueled U.S. riots demonstrates that they are, sadly, as American as apple pie. What’s also sadly apparent is that far too often, the folks dying at the hands of killer cops are predominately African American.
In 2019, according to the Mapping Police Violence database, Black people were three times more likely to be killed by police violence than our white counterparts. Out of the 1099 people killed by the police last year, 24% of them were Black. In 2017, we were 34% of the 1127 people killed by police in the US.
We’re only 13% of the US population.
Back in 1978, my teenage self received the learner’s permit that would ultimately lead to my getting a driver's license. It was a day that should have been a happy milestone in my young life.
Not long after we arrived back home from the DPS office (Department of Public Safety, our Texas state troopers), my father sat me and my brother down on the couch, and proceeded to give us the conversation that all African American parents dread — that conversation about the American justice system and police brutality.
During “The Talk,” as we call it in the community, my father told us what not to do in a traffic stop:
Don’t make any sudden moves the cop will interpret as hostile.
Announce in a loud, clear voice you are reaching into your glove compartment for your car registration or when you are reaching into your pocket for your wallet to get your driver's license.
Don’t attract attention or give the police a reason to pull you over by speeding.
Don’t do more than five miles over the speed limit so that if you find yourself in a speed trap, you can simply take your foot off the accelerator pedal and slow the car down quickly without hitting your brakes.
If you’re doing a road trip, stick to interstate highways and stay off the back roads that run through small towns.
Knowing I have a Taurus temper combined with a propensity for bluntly calling crap out, he warned me not to make any sarcastic comments that would anger the cop. Just limit what I had to say to “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.”
Your goal in any traffic stop, he said — especially if it involves a white officer — is to get out of it alive.
That conversation was over 40 years ago, and I still remember it. It also occurred at a time when the Houston Police Department was so out of control, we sarcastically changed the “Wear The Badge That Means You Care” recruitment ad slogan they used to “Wear the Badge That Means You Kill.”
HPD received that derisive moniker because of the Randall Webster case. Webster was a 17-year-old white teen killed by HPD officers after a traffic stop. A gun was planted on him to attempt try to justify the murder. Three months later, in May 1977, Joe Campos Torres, 23-year-old Mexican-American Houston resident, was beaten by six HPD officers, handcuffed, then thrown into Buffalo Bayou and drowned.
So why did I take you readers down Monica’s Memory Lane? To give you a personal example of how the off-the-charts level of police brutality and violence we experience in America affects all of us in the Black community on one level or another.
And I do mean all of us. It doesn’t matter whether that Black person is male (George Floyd), female (Breonna Taylor), trans (Tony McDade), young (Tamir Rice), or a senior citizen (Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr). We’re all dying far too often at the hands of police officers.
It is sadly so much a part of our 400 year experience of being Africans in America that comedians like the late Richard Pryor incorporated it into their comedy routines discussing the topic. But police brutality is no laughing matter when white people get to grow up with Officer Friendly and Black people grow up with Officer Oppressor.
The police brutality regularly aimed at African Americans is rooted in slavery and anti-Black racism. The slave patrols in the South were designed to terrorize and control Black people, and those authoritarian slave patrol tactics made their way into the police departments tasked with patrolling our neighborhoods.
In September, 1966, a San Francisco Police Department officer named Alvin Johnson shot an unarmed 16-year-old boy, Matthew Johnson, sparking five days of protests and riots against police brutality that led to 457 arrests. The next month, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded as a result, and began armed patrols to monitor and observe the police.
It’s obvious the police have been killing Black people with impunity for decades, and I didn’t have to be Nostradamus to tell you that sooner or later there was going to be an explosion of anger from the Black community because of it.
So what should be done to solve the problem of police brutality?
The first order of business is to ensure that cops — and especially white cops who murder someone — serve time for it. We need prosecutors and District Attorneys who are willing to prosecute them. We need civilian review boards with enforcement teeth. Use of body cameras should be mandatory, along with a nationwide ban on chokeholds.
The FBI warned ten years ago that white supremacists were infiltrating local police departments. They must be ejected without delay from any police force.
Cops who kill people or who have a history of disciplinary issues should be placed in a national database and barred from ever working in law enforcement again.
Those are just the first steps, and I know they won’t happen as long as Agent Orange is in the White House. That means it will fall to the next Democratic-led administration to pick up where the Obama Administration left off in terms of trying to solve the problem of police brutality.
Because it is way past time that happened.
More on the George Floyd protests and movement for racial justice:
- Why Pride has always been about protest and rebellion
- One Minneapolis writer on why he marched for George Floyd
- How systemic racism is exhausting Black people
- Tips for how to protest safely and effectively
- Here are 6 small ways you can get involved in the anti-racism movement
- Remembering Tony McDade, the Black trans Tallahassee man who was fatally shot by police
- Iyanna Dior's assault sparks a conversation about transphobia and Black Lives Matter
- Over 70 LGBTQ+ organizations voice support for anti-racist protests
- The Okra Project launches mental health fund for Black trans people
- Why Black and Brown people need to be included in the Pride flag
- Keith Boykin among the dozens of journalists attacked by police while reporting on protests
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