Twenty five years after innercity Los Angeles exploded in violence over the beating of Rodney King, an unarmed black man by four white police officers, America is again witnessing a heated debate on race, especially the racial disparities in law enforcement. Related to this is the question whether the election of an African American as president has helped heal the racial wounds in American society.
What makes headlines right now are the shooting of twelve police officers and the killing of five by a gunman in downtown Dallas Thursday night, but the underlying cause is the same: The man who did this said he was revenging the two police-related deaths of black men — Philando Castile, 32, in Minnesota and Alton Sterling, 37, in Louisiana this week. The demonstration in Dallas was one of several held in cities across America.
The officers were working at a Black Lives Matter protest.
The shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota follow a long string of deaths of black people at the hands of the police — in Staten Island; Cleveland; Baltimore; Ferguson, Missouri; and North Charleston, South Carolina, among others.
A graphic video recorded by Diamond Reynolds, Castile's girl friend, showed the young man who had been shot several times, slumping toward her. As she recorded, her 4-year-old daughter sat in the back seat and an officer stood just outside the driver’s side window, still aiming his gun at the mortally wounded man at point-blank range. Castile died at 9.37 p.m. in a hospital emergency room, about 20 minutes after he was shot. Alton Sterling was killed by police on Tuesday in an incident that was also recorded on video by a bystander.
Castile was the 123rd black person to be shot by police in 2016, based on a tally from the Washington Post. A proliferation of videos documenting the murders of unarmed black men and women — by the very people charged with their safety — has given rise to a whole movement defined by three words and a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter.
Nobody knows just how many people are killed by the police nationwide. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) keeps an official tally of law-enforcement officers killed in the line of duty — an average of 69 per year since 1980 — but there is no comparable accounting of lives taken by officers. In the year since an officer fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, 2014, 1,000 or more people have died at the hands of law-enforcement officers acting in the line of duty. What provokes outrage is the disproportionate presence of African Americans, people with mental illnesses, and young men among the dead.
In the 25 years since the riots, Los Angeles has taken many steps to improve relations between police and minority communities. Other US cities need to emulate them.
There should be, as President Barack Obama said on an earlier occasion, efforts to review the training of police officers across the country and root out racial bias in policing. He also called for a review of self-defense laws such as those in Florida, that may encourage fatal confrontations when one side in a dispute is armed. His third proposal was to consider new ways to make young African American men feel that they're a full part of US society.
The big problem, according to some police officers, is that they are constantly encouraged to arrest and ticket as many people as possible to look like they’re doing their jobs. As a result, they target the most vulnerable communities. That a court has shut down the New York City Police Department's “stop-and-frisk” policy because it disproportionally targeted minority communities proves their point.
Most important, the US criminal justice system has to ensure that those who kill innocent people, either because they are trigger-happy or racially motivated, get the punishment they deserve.
