A Tale of Two Funerals

This essay is an opinion from Victor Wallis, who teaches history and politics at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. While WhoWhatWhy takes no sides in this debate, we believe the essay is worth your consideration.

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Racism takes many forms. Case in point: the double standard displayed in public reactions to the killings by and of police officers.

–Activists speaking for the victims of police violence have unreservedly condemned the recent killing of two New York City police officers.

–Officials speaking for the police or local governments rarely, if ever, condemned the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, or any of the other unarmed black men or boys that police have killed. If they did, the trumpets of justification drowned out any condemnation the public may have heard.

Those who protest the actions of killer-cops get at best mixed reactions from public officials and the media. After Michael Brown was executed with his hands up, a grieving community was met not with official condolences but with the provocative deployment of militarized police units. And after Eric Garner was suffocated under a pile of cops, the only indictment that came down was aimed at the video-photographer who recorded Garner’s desperate pleas for air.

Unquestioned Police Solidarity

By contrast, the police in all public statements express automatic solidarity with one another, no questions asked. They are upheld in this by the judicial system, which turns the usual indictment process upside down when the defendants are police officers. All too often in such cases, the prosecuting attorney—whose job (sometimes in conjunction with a grand jury) is to determine whether an individual should be charged with a crime—preemptively exonerates that individual without allowing a trial that could consider all the evidence.

These regular institutional responses imply that violence exercised by the police is somehow more acceptable than violence directed against the police.

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, under intense criticism from police organizations for his earlier nuanced response to the killing of Eric Garner, declared that an attack on police officers is an attack on all citizens.

Why was it inconceivable for him to say something as straightforward when Eric Garner had the life squashed out of him before our eyes? Or when the grand jury, a few months later, refused to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo and his cohorts for that act?

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Why should everyone be expected to identify more with fallen police officers than with their victims? This is where we confront the structural underpinnings of police violence.

While the victims of the police are ordinary human beings (even though not treated as such), the police are the armed enforcers of a system of privilege. Although their statutory role is to protect all of us, their behavior on the job skews this function in such a way as to assure that fear is drummed into any sector of the population seen as a potential threat to social order.

The culture that underpins this behavior has endowed the police with impunity for actions that go far beyond what is necessary to carry out their order-keeping function. Thus, it was one thing to arrest Eric Garner (for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, a misdemeanor offense in New York); it was quite another to maintain the pressure on his windpipe when he could no longer breathe.

This summary execution recalls the bullet pumped into the back of Oscar Grant (also recorded on video) after he had already been subdued by several officers at an Oakland transit station in 2009. Such actions, as Steve Martinot argued in an April 2013, fit into a long history of racist repression.

The Sympathy Imbalance

The personal pain of survivors—given the most media prominence when police are the victims—deserves our sympathy regardless of who has been killed. Why should the suffering caused by out-of-control cops be less universally felt than the suffering caused by a troubled individual who goes on a personal vendetta that ends up targeting random police officers?

The point behind the slogan “Black Lives Matter” is that all lives matter, but that this general principle is far from being universally honored. (Witness the many expressions of unconditional support directed at Officer Darren Wilson after he killed Michael Brown.)

When De Blasio said that protests should be suspended out of respect for the slain police officers, one could well have asked why, when cops earlier had killed unarmed black men, public officials (at every level) did not call for a similar show of respect to the communities that mourned them, but instead confronted those communities with heavy weaponry.

Fortunately, more people are becoming aware of the grotesque power imbalance reflected in these morally inconsistent responses. If such practices are to cease, however, it will be necessary to go far beyond attaching body cameras to the police or having political leaders appoint “independent” prosecutors.

There will need to be a change in the power configuration of this society. An important step toward achieving this change will be acknowledging that current practices are unacceptable, not only because they are immoral but because they undermine respect for the justice system on which social order rests.