Our Men are Dying; What are We Prepared to Do?

On Thursday, July 8, 2010, a jury in Los Angeles handed an involuntary manslaughter conviction to former BART cop Johannes Mehserle for killing Oscar Grant, an unarmed African-American man at a public transit station. Mehserle said that the shooting was an accident. He thought he had pulled the trigger on his taser, not his hand gun.

Really? I know that humans are prone to making mistakes, but riddle me this: why was it necessary to use even a taser on an unarmed man who is handcuffed and lying face down on the ground –while your partner has his foot on the man’s neck? My prayers go out to Mr. Grant’s family because he will never come home to them again.

I witnessed first hand one evening nearly 20 years ago what could have resulted in a grieving moment for my family. A close friend and I had just returned to my family’s home and were chatting in her car when my brother, Edward, pulled up with a police car on his tail. We got out of the car and walked towards my brother. The officer claimed that Edward had failed to yield to a stop sign. Edward was arguing profusely that he had stopped, while the officer was inching closer telling him to shut up.

It is important to note that the stop sign was a half block away from our house; the policeman had followed my brother for that distance without turning on his lights. He stopped when Edward parked his car in front of our house. Apparently, the policeman wanted to seize a golden opportunity to arrest, harm or kill another black man who was driving in a nice neighborhood with a couple of his friends.

Surely my and my girlfriend’s presence was unexpected. I looked into the officer’s eyes (seeing satisfaction swell) and turned towards Edward, telling him to “be quiet. The officer wants you to get angry so he will have a reason to arrest you or worse.” My brother began to calm down, and the officer, not surprisingly, returned to his patrol car without issuing a ticket.

Unfortunately, police brutality is not the only threat to a black man’s life. According to University of California-Berkeley Professor Harry Edwards, in the first five years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we lost less than 5,000 soldiers. During those same years, nearly 27,000 African-American men have died on American streets by gunfire. Well, it is safer for our men to go to war, than to walk one block from their home. What are we prepared to do about that?

Now, my intent is not to besmirch the character of the many police officers across this country who serve our communities bravely and with integrity. Rather, I want to call attention to an epidemic that is all too common. Maybe on some level we have become immune. Some might consider “epidemic” to strong for the actual statistics. Too strong for Oscar Grant, or too strong for what my brother experienced? I say both, because one is too many.

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.