Do black lives matter?

Of course black lives matter. No morally legitimate value system says otherwise. To a genuine Christian, a black person is created in the image of God and is a brother or a sister. To a true American, a black neighbor is a fellow citizen with the same rights and entitlements as any other. To any fundamentally decent person, a black person is a human being deserving dignity and respect and honor.

Does singling out “Black Lives” slight others?

Not at all. It is a simple, direct declarative sentence. Saying the sky is blue doesn’t imply that the sky is the only blue thing there is. Saying “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t imply that “Only Black Lives Matter.” In the current national emergency, saying “Black Lives Matter” draws attention to the disproportionate use of violence against black people.

Aren’t most of the people who are shot by police guilty of something?

It is likely that Michael Brown robbed a Ferguson, Missouri convenience store moments before he was killed. That’s a serious crime. He should have been arrested and tried. If he was found guilty, he should have gone to prison. But he should not have been shot in the street. Eric Garner was selling cigarettes on the sidewalk of New York City. That’s a minor crime, and he should have paid a fine. Instead, he died face-down on the pavement, gasping for breath. The same for George Floyd. Walter Scott was driving with a faulty brake light. That is a moving violation. He should have gotten a traffic ticket, but instead he was shot 5-8 times in the back. Breonnna Taylor and Botham Jean were at home — she was sleeping; he was eating ice cream — when the police barged into their apartments and killed them. Charles Kinsey was doing his job as a caregiver to an autistic patient when the police yelled at him to get on the ground. He lay on the ground and identified himself as a caregiver. He told them he was unarmed. He stretched his arms out and splayed his fingers to show he wasn’t holding anything. They shot him anyway.

Isn’t there more to the story?

Sure. There’s always more. Walter Scott ran. If he hadn’t run the officer probably would have handed him the ticket and he could have walked away. The Louisville police didn’t start shooting until Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend shot at them. But they had just beat the door down and barged into the apartment in the middle of the night. Kentucky law allows a person to defend their home from invasion and that’s what the boyfriend was doing. But Louisville police policies allow a police officer to act in self defense, which they did when the boyfriend started defending himself.

It is easy to find “more” in any story. But the truth remains that none of the people on the long and growing list of excessive police violence deserved summary execution.

Aren’t the officers who shoot black people almost always exonerated? Doesn’t that prove nothing wrong happened?

Yes, and No. Yes, the police departments review each shooting and usually decide that the officer who pulled the trigger acted as he or she was trained to act. But that does not mean nothing was wrong. The training and the policies are the problem. Consider one of the most outrageous cases in recent history: the killing of Botham Jean in his own apartment by former officer Amber Guyger in Texas. The following detail emerged from court testimony at Guyger’s trial.

Guyger said “Let me see your hands!” is one of the main commands she was trained in at the academy. “If you can’t see them,” she testified in hypothetical reference to a suspect’s hands, “they’re usually reaching for a weapon that can be used against us.”

See? Police officers in some departments are trained to assume that anytime they can’t see a person’s hands, that person “is usually reaching for a weapon.” That is nonsense. Even in the late-night, criminal environment into which police must venture, hidden hands does not mean “drawing a weapon.”

Police training and police policies promote excessive use of force. Officers are taught to dominate every situation. This leads to sudden escalation. In an instant, a person who was standing still and speaking calmly can find himself being handcuffed or manhandled, which leads to a “What are you doing to me?” reaction which the police interpret as resisting arrest and justify still more aggressive action. The officers who shoot people aren’t always racist or murderous. Often they are just scared. And that, too is a result of training. Fear is instilled in police officers through deliberate anti-citizen training. They are taught that “blue lives” matter more than others.

It is beyond the scope of this article to prescribe exactly what kind of training police should have. But police procedures are never guided by the democratic process. They are not voted on by the citizens. The Constitution does not provide any defense or justification for standard police procedures. Those procedures are simply what the police departments of America set upon themselves. It’s the cops telling the cops how the cops think the cops should act, with the rest of the citizenry left out of the loop.

Aren’t most police officers decent people?

Yes. Everyday in America, police and citizens interact hundreds of thousands of times. Most of those encounters are pleasant and cheerful. The share of police officers who are racist, or eager to kill, or too afraid and twitchy to be trusted with a gun, or too badly trained to respond properly to a situation is small. In fact, the basic decency and compassion of most police officers is what keeps the number of police killings to only a few a day.

Setting aside the questions about police shootings, there are also questions about the on-going destructive and violent demonstrations.

Isn’t the destruction of property always wrong? Isn’t it an invalid form of protest?

The Boston Tea Party was a criminal act of destruction of property. Americans celebrate it as an heroic act of patriotism. The destruction of the Berlin Wall was also destruction of public property, and Americans see it as a laudable outburst of freedom and human rights. And not just liberals. Conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, were delighted when the Berlin Wall came down and didn’t mind at all when Germans attacked the wall with sledgehammers.

These two cases show that Americans do not believe destroying property as a form of protest is always wrong. It may be wrong in some case, but it is not always wrong.

Compared to the Boston Tea Party, the vigorous protests of the summer of 2020 were more justified. The Boston Tea Party expressed objection to a small tax that nobody was forced to pay. Anyone who didn’t want to pay the tax could avoid it by not buying tea. No one was going to die if they paid the tax or if they didn’t. But hundreds have already died, and more die every day from excessive police violence.

“Defund the Police.” Doesn’t that go too far?

If it means eliminating law enforcement altogether, then yes, that would go too far. American communities certainly need law enforcement. And police should be well paid and well equipped.

Level-headed people use the phrase “Defund the Police” for something reasonable and desirable. As it is, most of what police officers do all day isn’t police work. Police are called to deal with issues that aren’t their specialty. When a psychotic goes off their meds, the police get called. When two neighbors argue about a property line, the police get called. The police get called about a racoon in someone’s back yard, and when a slow-moving funeral procession needs a traffic escort. False alarms for burglary detectors (caused by winds, flashes of light or loud noises) keep patrolmen in major cities skipping all night long.

None of those circumstances require a fully trained and equipped police officer. None of them require a gun. The racoon just needs someone to go “Shoo!” The funeral procession just needs someone with a flashing light on an ordinary car. The psychotic needs someone with mental health training, but not a gun. The arguing neighbors need, more than anything, a wise, old, no-nonsense aunt to “Talk some damn sense into their stupid heads.”

So, to defund the police could — and should — mean to shift away from the police a portion of their budget sufficient to fund alternative service providers to deal with the things the police don’t want to deal with anyway. This could be very cost effective. The funeral escort work could be done just as well in a standard car as with a tricked-out police vehicle costing $100,000 or more. The mental health cases could be dealt with by mental health specialists. And, yes, if the mental health confrontation becomes violent and intractable, an officer with a gun may be needed.

To ensure that officers are available when needed, they should be freed from escorting funerals and shooing away racoons.

That shift of resources needs to happen, and that’s what “Defund the Police” ought to mean. It could actually result in better funded police agencies. If 20% of their budget were reallocated and 30% of their duties shifted away, police would benefit financially.

Haven’t the protests run their course? Isn’t it time to stop?

No. Political and social action is not measured by popularity or TV ratings. They are measured by reform action that usually take far longer than public interest or mass support. The Women’s Suffrage Movement in America agitated from 1848 until 1920 and was very unpopular the whole time. The American Revolution dragged on for a decade, and many people were no doubt bored with it long before it succeeded. But the loyal patriots of 1776 stuck with it until they got the results they wanted.

Shouldn’t black people and those who stand with them be patient?

Sure. Patience is a virtue. Good things take time. But they are not asking for something new. The rights and protections they want are already the law of the land, and has been unfairly denied for decades. It is important to recall how long they have been waiting for justice already. How many years should they wait?

If you say five years, then start the clock in 2014, when Eric Garner was choked to death on the streets of New York City.
If you say eight years, then it has been that long since Trayvon Martin was shot by Florida rent-a-cop George Zimmerman.
If you say 30 years, then it has been nearly that long since Los Angeles policemen beat Rodney King.
If you think reform should take 65 years, then they’ve already waited that long since the murder of Emmett Till.
If you say 80 years, then its been that long since Amadee Ardoin was murdered for the crime of receiving kindness from a white woman.

By any reasonable measure, aggressive police violence against black people has been going on long enough. By any reasonable measure, justice is due.

For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.
Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.

That was written by Martin Luther King Jr in 1963, and if patience was at an end 57 years ago, how tightly stretched is it today?