Back in March, at the start of lockdown, I decided to watch Fruitvale Station. Winner of awards at both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, this had been on my Netflix watchlist for some time. It was one of those films which I knew would be difficult for me to watch thought, so I had been procrastinating over it for several months.
A biographical drama, it depicts the story of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African American from California who was shot to death by the police on New Year’s Day in 2009. His killing followed a minor altercation on a train as he and a group of friends made their way home from a night of New Year’s festivities in San Francisco. Little had they known, as they celebrated, what horrors the year were so shortly to bring them.
One of the first such incidents to be videoed on mobile phone, Oscar Grant's killing sparked a series of protests and riots across the city. The police officer involved claimed that he mistook his gun for his Taser. He served just 11-months in prison for involuntary manslaughter. Yet across the country, thousands of people are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes as petty as siphoning gasoline from an 18-wheeler, shoplifting three belts, breaking into a parked car and stealing a woman’s bagged lunch, or possessing a bottle cap smeared with heroin residue. for their inherent dignity.
The rate at which African Americans are sentenced to life without parole for nonviolent offenses at rates that suggest unequal treatment and that cannot be explained by white and Black defendants’ differential involvement in crime alone. Fate Vincent Winslow was homeless when he acted as a go-between in the sale of two small bags of marijuana, worth $10 in total, to an undercover police officer. Police did not arrest the white seller, even though they witnessed the entire transaction and found the marked bill used to make the controlled drug buy in his pocket. Winslow, who is Black, was sentenced to mandatory life without parole under Louisiana’s four-strikes law based on prior convictions for simple (unarmed) burglaries committed 14 and 24 years earlier and a nearly decade-old conviction for possession of cocaine.
In other similar cases African American Timothy Jackson was sentenced to life without parole for shoplifting a jacket worth $159 from a department store; Paul Carter to life without parole for possession of a trace amount of heroin residue that was so minute it could not be weighed; and Sharanda Purlette Jones, a mother with no prior criminal record, was sentenced to mandatory life without parole for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. Her conviction was based almost entirely on the testimony of co-conspirators who received reduced sentences for their testimony.
Just days after I watched Fruitvale Station, a whole season of further racial atrocities was to unleash itself across America. The first of these was the killing of 25 year old Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through a predominantly white neighbourhood in Brunswick, Georgia, in February.
Described by Ahmaud’s father as ‘a modern-day lynching’, the case involved a white former police officer Gregory McMichael and his son Travis, who apparently decided that Ahmaud Arbery resembled the suspect in a series of local break-ins. According to testimony released this week by the Georgia bureau of investigation, Gregory McMichael stated that “gut feeling” told him Arbery was responsible for the thefts in the neighborhood. Once again, we’re back to that old perception of the dangerous and predatory black male.
The pair duly armed themselves with a pistol and shotgun and jumped into a pickup truck to pursue him. Travis McMichael subsequently shot Ahmaud Arbery three times. In a further worrying facet of the case, despite the video evidence it wasn’t until almost three whole months later following uproar across the US and state takehover of the case that the duo were arrested were made.
We are forced to ask, why was that when their full identities and whereabouts of were known to the police?
In the meantime, as the details of Ahmaud Arbery’s killing began to unfold, the incident of the dogwalker in New York’s Central Park provided us with yet another ugly example of insidious racism. After being politely asked by birdwatcher Christian Cooper to follow park regulations and leash her dog, Amy Cooper was recorded on camera threatening to ‘call the cops and tell them that there is an African American man threatening my life’. She then proceeded to make the call and her report that ‘an African American man in Central Park is recording me and threatening me and my dog’ went viral.
One can only guess at what she had hoped to achieve and why. What in fact followed was widespread condemnation and her summary dismissal from a job at investment firm Franklin Templeton. The fact that she had felt completely confident and assured that her behaviour was acceptable and would be sanctioned and supported by the authorities raises so many questions. Like the McMichaels and so many before, Amy Copper clearly viewed the black male as a figure to whom she could arbitrarily attribute blame; an easy target at whom she could point an accusatory finger and invoke the full retribution of the state.
Without Christian Cooper’s persistently calm and measured response to this indignation, what might the outcome have been? Were it not for the availability of video to expose the truth and force people to account, how would so many of these injustices pan out?
On May 25, the killing by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, was a seminal moment, the repercussions of which will reverberate across the globe. His dying words ‘I can’t breathe’ eerily echoed those of Eric Garner in 2014 when mobile phone footage captured New York City police officers sitting on his head and pinned him to the ground on a sidewalk. "I can't breathe," Garner mouthed.
Indeed, last month’s shooting appears to have stirred up uncomfortable memories for at least some of those involved in the Garner case. Last week, a full six years later, retired NYPD detective Michael DeBonis, who had worked for the deputy commissioner for public information posted on instagram 'We killed Eric Garner'.
In a post which has since been removed he said I'm fully aware that some of my cop friends may call me a traitor, a hypocrite or even un follow me..... We killed Eric Garner.......His arrest was legal….but in the end … WE PUNISHED HIM FOR RESISTING ARREST … WE WATCHED HIM DIE … WE DIDN'T EVEN SIT HIM UP AND RENDER HIM BASIC AID.....In the end he DIED for selling untaxed cigarettes....It was a horrible injustice that is forever a part of our history. … I'm a hypocrite for saying this now, because I didn't say it publicly then, but WE ALL need to hold ourselves accountable.
The grand jury had declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who put Garner in a headlock and wrestled him to the ground.
This list in the past six years alone has been long. Michael Brown in 2014 Ferguson, Missouri; Alton Sterlng in 2016 in Louisiana. Also in 2016, Philando Castile shot five times at close range in front of his girlfriend and her four year old daughter during a traffic stop. Once again the police officer responsible - Jeronimo Yanez - was acquitted of all charges.
In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the groundswell of protest and advocacy for change across the globe has been monumental. Starting in the US and spreading to the UK, Ireland, Switzerland, Brazil, Rome, Madrid, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Australia, France, Germany, South Africa, South Korea, Kosovo, Tunisia, Japan and Bulgaria, the response has been unprecedented.
To argue, as conservative African American commentator Candace Owens does, that the global protest is misplaced, is myopic to say the least. In a controversial but much viewed YouTube post, she highlights George Floyd’s criminal past, somehow positing that because of his flaws, he should not be the catalyst for a massive social justice movement.
Fortunately, millions across the globe do not espouse this view and this time at least we might see an end to this shameful and unacceptable cycle of killing by those pledged to uphold and enforce the law.
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