newappsblog | Only a couple of weeks after the Ferguson shooting, and only about
three miles away, St. Louis police shot and killed another black man,
Kajieme Powell, after he apparently shoplifted from a convenience
store. The details of what happened in Ferguson are in dispute, which
has allowed the law and order crowd to defend putting six bullets into
unarmed Mike Brown – two into his head – as a proportional act of
self-defense.
No such ambiguity exists in the Powell case. The police released cellphone video
yesterday, and it is absolutely chilling. Powell emerges from the
convenience store with a pair of canned drinks. He seems a little
confused – puts them down, paces around, and so on. Then the police
show up in a white SUV, and jump out, guns drawn (already! They decide to escalate before even arriving at the scene).
Powell backs away, says “just shoot me” a couple of times, climbs up on
a retaining wall, takes a couple of steps in the direction of the
police… and then they shoot him dead. Total time between the police
arrival and his death? About 15 seconds.
The video, of course, completely contradicts the police department’s
story about a drawn knife and aggression on Powell’s part. When
confronted with the contradiction, the police chief replied that “in a
lethal situation, they used lethal force.” The only thing harder to
understand from that video clip than why killing Powell was justified by
the situation is how anyone can continue to deny that the problem is
structural. I am not accusing the officers or the police chief of
lying. It’s much, much worse than that: I’d be pretty sure they really
did think their lives were in immediate danger.
To put it differently: Clive Bundy
is alive today, and was not shot even though he and his supporters
repeatedly pointed guns at police. Kajieme Powell and Mike Brown and
Eric Garner and a lot of other people are not. It turns out that you
get your white privilege even if you deny the sovereignty of the federal
government.
