Author's Note: As most of you know, I have written on race, criminal justice, and politics here at DailyKos for more than two years. While I will continue to contribute to this community, I have decided to launch my own personal site for this type of work. I will cross-post to here, and I will post on politics at DailyKos alone. But I invite all of you to join me at my new home on occasion. It's called The Lone Dissent, and can be accessed at TheLoneDissent.com.
In 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan, of Kentucky, filed the lone dissenting opinion in the famed civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson. His unpopular opinion has stood the test of time, as he wrote, presciently:
"Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. . .The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."I hope that my work can honor the legacy of Harlan, who was a man before his time, and who overcame a racist, Southern upbringing to be a voice for justice. With that, here is this post, which will be the first at The Lone Dissent.
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John Crawford was holding a toy gun and talking on the phone to the mother of his children when, out of seemingly nowhere, two police officers arrived. One in an offensive, crouching position approached, and when Crawford came around a corner, that man opened fire.
Today, a grand jury declined to bring charges against the officer who pulled the trigger, and in doing so, that body closed the book on an event that demonstrates, once again, just how little we in America value black lives. Many people colluded to murder John Crawford. It appears that none of them will be held responsible.
Before a trigger-happy officer got to live his dream of taking down a man who he perceived to be a bad guy, a young, white male picked up the phone. Video of the shooting, which the FBI synced with the 911 call, demonstrates that Ronald Ritchie, a self-professed former Marine, lied to a dispatcher about what he saw. In doing so, he effectively signed Crawford’s death warrant at the hands of police force that can be increasingly expected to do no better in these situations.
As Crawford meandered through the Wal-Mart, seemingly unaware of the danger that he, as an “afroed” black man presented to the public, Ritchie described something very different to dispatchers. Crawford passed multiple people while holding an air rifle sold in the store. None of those people seemed to flinch. Even seeing Crawford holding the gun, one man neglected to move more than a few inches as Crawford passed him. Those people, it seems, recognized that Crawford posed no threat.
Yet Ritchie reported to police that Crawford was “pointing the gun at people,” a claim that immediately raised the intensity of the movement. Later, Ritchie stalked Crawford, telling police that Crawford was “loading” the weapon, which would have been quite a trick considering Crawford had one hand on his cell phone at all times.
At one point in the video, which was released by police following the grand jury’s decision of “no bill,” a family consisting of a mother and two children meanders toward Crawford. Ritchie reported that this family was putting itself in grave danger. The family, though, calmly looked at something on the shelves before slowly turning to head the other direction. Their lack of reaction, of course, was not reported by Ritchie to the dispatching officers.
Upon hearing Ritchie’s reports, dispatchers sent police to the scene, warning them that a “black man with an afro” was holding a black rifle and pointing that firearm at random customers. On guard, the police arrived, snuck up on Crawford, and shot him down on sight.
With today’s no-bill, the citizens of Ohio have demonstrated that when a black man is murdered, there’s just no enough collective outrage to make anyone pay, even when multiple parties are at fault.
The 911 caller Ritchie shoulders much of the blame. Whether out of malice or an institutionalized need to play the concerned citizen hero, he embellished in his phone call. Those were no small embellishments, of course. In a state like Ohio, which is an “open carry” state, people are legally allowed to walk around with real firearms. This means that Crawford’s carrying of a fake firearm should have prompted no alarm, and it didn’t do so for the other customers in the store. When Ritchie lied about Crawford pointing the gun at customers, he both reported Crawford for a crime - aggravated assault with a deadly weapon - and provided police with the cover it needed to act in its default para-military way.
The police officer who earned a pre-mature stamp of approval from the grand jury shoulders blame, as well. Even though he was acting on the bad information given by Ritchie, he responded in a manner least likely to resolve the situation safely. By approaching Crawford in the way he did, the officer put his own life in danger, put Crawford’s life in danger, and put the rest of the store’s shoppers in danger. He fired bullets at a man who presented no clear threat to him, and in fact, he invited a situation where he could use lethal force.
The officer’s actions demonstrate a callousness toward black life that continues to permeate officer-involved shootings. In Ferguson, Missouri, an officer shot first to ask questions later when an unarmed Michael Brown stood more than a few yards away. In North Carolina, an officer killed an unarmed former college football player who had just been in a wreck and approached the officer for help. In Florida, of course, two vigilantes took out their aggression on young black men by firing bullets into their unarmed bodies. The shoot-first plan is disproportionately applied to young black people, who, on the basis of just their skin color, are assumed to be dangerous until they demonstrate some outstanding quality which redeems their humanity in the eyes of police officers and other elements in the white world.
As a white man, I suspect that I could waltz through any Wal-Mart in open carry country, carrying a very real rifle, and I would never encounter police. I would likely not have a stalker watching my every move while on the phone with the authorities. And in the rare occasion that those authorities arrived, evidence suggests that they would have done everything possible to talk me down before they riddled my frame with bullets.
Today, an Ohio grand jury has been complicit in an institutional mindset that sees the criminal justice system as a bear trap designed ensnare those scary elements of society - young and old black men. We’ve designed our trap indiscriminately, of course, but when we find an unintended party - like a venerable police officer or a well-to-do white kid - trapped, we do our best to untangle him before the effects of that trap can do irreparable damage to his future. At Deadspin, Greg Howard wrote eloquently that America is not for black people. And what he meant was that the systems and institutions view black folks not as equal partners in the human experience, but as predators to be watched, and at most, tolerated. When the purpose of the criminal justice system is to shoot first at people who look like John Crawford, just to assuage the irrational fears of people who look like 911 caller Ronald Ritchie, it should come as no surprise that the same system can’t manufacture enough outrage to hold anyone responsible for the death of another young black male.
A man has died, and instead of a community being able to express its grief, it must once again express its anger. Many different parties - both institutional and individual - colluded to murder a black man in Wal-Mart. And none of them will be held responsible.