guardian | Though I was as gleeful as the next homosexual to see a raunchy
Broadway musical quoted by the head of the FBI, Comey was actually
equivocating on racism’s power to harm by using it: “We all – white and
black – carry various biases around with us”, he said. And while that
may be true, no level of civilian bias against police, not even cars
blaring NWA’s Fuck the Police
(as I heard often while in Ferguson myself) justifies the police
violence against which protesters are fighting. The structural racism
people of color experience isn’t harming police – unless they’re people
of color, off duty, and subjected to stop and frisk by their fellow officers.
He
did address the cynicism and “mental shortcuts” which exacerbate racial
profiling. But then he alleged it doesn’t mean an officer is racist
when “mental shortcut becomes almost irresistible and maybe even
rational by some lights”, nor did he even name systematic racism as at
work there.
Comey also talked about how “data shows that the percentage of young
men not working or not enrolled in school is nearly twice as high for
blacks as it is for whites”, adding that he understands “the hard work
to develop violence-resistant and drug-resistant kids, especially in
communities of color.” But kids in communities of color don’t need to
“Just Say No” – they need, and we need, to demand an end to economic segregation and a lack of educational opportunity.
The FBI
director hinted at the existence of racism when he talked of changing a
legacy “so enormous and so complicated that it is, unfortunately,
easier to talk only about the cops”. He is right that it’s not fair to
pin everything on police; but, it’s unhelpful misdirection to point at
(unarmed) citizens failing to “really see the men and women of law
enforcement” (who are always armed) as the problem with policing.
It’s also unhelpful to act like being a cop is more dangerous than it actually is. Existing data has shown that it’s not a particularly dangerous job; it’s not even among the 10 most dangerous jobs in America.
Far more people are killed by cops in any given year than cops are
killed by civilians – and, cops who do die “in the line of duty” are about as likely to do so in a vehicle related injury than by being shot.
Still, no amount of pandering to the homosexual agenda with Avenue Q
quotes can soften the blow of hearing the nation’s top cop ignoring the
very basis of our legal system by claiming – right after a year with a record number of legal exonerations
– that “criminal suspects routinely lie about their guilt, and the
people we charge are overwhelmingly guilty.” Actually, criminal suspects
are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law; exonerations
indicate that even those decisions aren’t permanent.
This week, there have been a number of positive developments in the
fight against police violence; Comey’s speech is among them, to be sure,
along with the lawsuit against Ferguson debtors’ prisons and the MacArthur Foundation ponying up $75mn to fight overincarceration. But Comey’s speech isn’t the big sign of progress; the real progress is that, six months after Mike Brown was killed,
the movement that his death triggered is still so powerful that the
head of the FBI finally feels the need to address the injustice that so
many Americans now find apparent.
