Michael Slager will be charged with murder thanks to a brave citizen with a camera. Image: theguardian.com
This week we learned that Patrolman Michael Slager, the South Carolina police officer who was captured on video fatally shooting citizen Scott Walker in the back, will be charged with murder. Recorded by a witness, the now-viral video shows the veteran cop firing eight shots in quick succession and then appearing to toss his stun gun near a mortally wounded Walker, presumably to create the appearance of a struggle.
It would seem like an open and shut case. Cop shoots unarmed man, cop gets fired and goes to jail – not so fast. Take a look at these headlines:
“Officials fire white SC officer charged with murder in shooting death of black man” -Fox News
“Michael Slager, Cop Who Killed Unarmed Black Man Walter Scott, Had Prior Excessive Force Complaint” -Huffington Post
“NAACP holding press conference after SC officer-involved shooting” -WCBD, Myrtle Beach/Florence, SC
“White Police Officer Is South Carolina’s Third Charged in Past Year for Killing an Unarmed Black Man” -Mother Jones
“South Carolina officer who shot black man was subject of prior excessive force complaint” -Fox News (again).
I could go on, but it’s too depressing. Shall we discuss the elephant in the room, the obvious fact that Officer Slager was white, and his victim was black? According to big media, yes – not only will we discuss it, but we will discuss it ad-nauseum, to the exclusion of all other perspectives, even the actual facts.
Why are they going to such great lengths to accentuate stories of blacks killed by whites, especially white police officers? Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner are recent examples, and now Walter Scott is added to the list of black poster-boys for racial violence.
Let us first do away with the most ridiculous of all possible explanations, the one that the media seems to want you to go for – that white people tend to be bigoted, violent creatures who will take any and every opportunity to do violence against non-whites, and that white-on-black police killings are on the rise because we haven’t progressed much since before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
One may suspect that the race factor is artificially amplified because it makes good television. It plays on people’s base emotions by calling attention to already-obvious physical and cultural differences. It stirs up tried-and-true tensions within our society, which makes for some good fear-porn and thus drives ad revenue for the news outlets.
When Eric Garner was choked to death by the NYPD, all you heard about was race, race, race. Image: thefederalist.com
That would of course be the easy answer, a convenient cop-out of an explanation. It’s an excuse not to look at the even uglier reality, that police violence of all kinds is on the rise, because the police are fundamentally changing. Today’s law enforcement officer is better trained, better equipped and more ready than ever – not to police their own communities, but to fight a counterinsurgency war.
The U.S. military describes counterinsurgency as “a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations conducted along multiple lines of operations.” Essentially, it is police doctrine for a war zone, aimed at suppressing extremist violence while repairing damaged infrastructures and seeking support from the local community – “hearts & minds,” if you will.
It hasn’t been the same since 9/11. As police doctrine has bled into the military in the face of a changing battlefield, military doctrine has bled back into the way we police our communities. We are now firmly planted in this new counterinsurgency age. With all its massive surveillance, hand-me-down military vehicles and aircraft, and elaborate gear and weaponry (not to mention the relentless propaganda)! – today’s urban police departments have effectively circumvented the Posse Comitatus Act to become fully militarized enforcement arms of the state.
So are you guys cops or troops? And who’s the enemy? Image: Cop Block
With all that advanced military capability comes a different philosophy, one necessarily drilled into military members going into hostile environments – that the frontline, and the enemy, are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Thus, they are trained to assume that around every corner is an insurgent, inside every piece of trash a bomb, and on every route an ambush.
This type of psychological conditioning is known to increase a Soldier’s survivability in Iraq or Afghanistan and, truthfully, probably increases a police officer’s survivability while on patrol as well. But at what cost? The modern law enforcement officer is quicker to intimidate, to escalate force, to throw citizens to the ground for asserting their rights, and ultimately to draw his weapon and fire. As Ohio militia leader James Johnson famously told the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism in 1995, “that’s not law enforcement; that’s just enforcement.”
This is not a race problem. Race is the distraction. It is a police problem. Intentionally or not, the media is complicit in the distortion, which serves to set us against one another, so that we ignore the very real, growing threat to our society, the police state and officers who are exempt from human intelligence and decency.
At least, Out of all the times we have heard about unprovoked police violence thanks to the proliferation of amateur video on social media, we can rest assured that one killer cop will be held accountable for his actions. The truth only came about thanks to a good samaritan armed with a phone camera, and the brave young man who filmed the incident deserves our praise and respect. In this case, the citizen, not the state, was the one to police the community.
By Anthony James Kidwell – DontComply.com
