Protesting Only if the Colors Are Right
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 18, 2002
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Earlier this month, some California police officers were videotaped treating a black teenage suspect, Donovan Jackson, with what appeared to be excessive roughness. Although the media have largely characterized the incident as one involving a black youth "surrounded by white police," there was in fact a black officer at the scene. Be that as it may, the principal offender was white officer Jeremy Morse, who slammed Jackson onto the hood of the police cruiser and then delivered a punch to Jackson’s face. Critics of the police have said that regardless of whatever the youngster may have done prior to this incident, Officer Morse’s actions were inappropriate. And indeed, they have a point. A large protest, to be attended by such notables as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, is scheduled for this Friday.
Meanwhile in Seattle, activists and community leaders have been conducting their own series of protests — in response to a local white police officer’s fatal shooting of a black man in April. In that incident, sheriff’s deputy Mel Miller approached driver Robert Thomas, who was sitting in his parked car in a predominantly white neighborhood. When Thomas pulled a gun on Miller, the deputy shot and killed him. Local black ministers instantly demanded that Miller be fired from his job, and after Thomas’s funeral hundreds of demonstrators blocked traffic on a major Seattle freeway during rush hour. Protest marches have been conducted on a regular basis ever since. The demonstrators insist that had Thomas been white, Deputy Miller’s suspicion would not have been aroused, and thus the shooting would never have occurred.
Notably, the public outrage attending the aforementioned police-civilian altercations has been conspicuously absent in the wake of other such encounters in recent years. Consider the case of Antonio Edwards, a black Miami man who was sitting in his parked Cadillac with two friends. His car, which was facing the wrong direction of a one-way street, was deemed suspicious by passing police officers because it matched the description of a vehicle used in a fatal shooting earlier that day. After the police pulled Edwards from the car and handcuffed him, black officer Carl Seals applied a chokehold on him for several minutes, cutting off Edwards’ air supply and causing him to fall into a coma. But because Mr. Seals was not white, there was nary a whisper of protest by the champions of "civil rights."
Consider also the case of a white Rhode Island policeman who was suspended without pay for having punched white teenager Frank Sherman during a traffic stop. Soon thereafter the officer walked into an auto body shop where Sherman and three friends were working and shouted, "You’re all going to die!" He then proceeded to shoot each of the young men point-blank, killing three of them and critically wounding the other. Yet this reprehensible crime prompted no public demonstrations of outrage — simply because the killer and all his victims were white.
Neither did many people hear about the fatal 1999 beating of inmate Thomas Pizzuto by three New York correction officers — two whites and a Hispanic. The officers pummeled Pizzuto to quiet his incessant demands for heroin-addiction treatment. But because the victim was white, the self-anointed defenders of "human dignity" had nothing to say about the incident.
Sometimes, of course, law officers — regardless of their race — are victims, rather than agents, of violence. Yet their unfortunate fates inspire nothing more than a collective yawn from the very same people who would have convulsed with outrage if the officers could have somehow managed to slay their killers first. Police officers — whatever their color — do not receive, from the "civil rights" cartel, even the barest shred of sympathy when they are wounded or killed in the line of duty. Consider the case of Newark detective John Sczyrek, who arrested two black men on narcotics possession charges. When the case went to trial, Sczyrek, scheduled to testify, was entering the courtroom when he was gunned down by a cousin of one of the suspects. Since the killer was black and the victim was white, the community reacted to Sczyrek’s death with equanimity. There was no soul-searching about possible racial motives for the crime. There were no rallies held to protest the shooting. No "community leader" denounced the gunman.
Then there was the case of white police officer Raymond Cannon, who was killed by four black gunmen in Brooklyn as he tried to thwart their bicycle-shop robbery. And what of Sergeant John McCormick, who was shot and killed by a Hispanic woman as he conducted a drug search in her cocaine-filled Manhattan residence? And who remembers the name Edward Byrne, a New York City police officer who was gunned down by four black men while guarding the home of a drug-case witness?
Predictably, "civil rights leaders" neither denounced any of these murders nor publicly called for the punishment of the killers. In the wake of Byrne’s death, they actually reproached the American "system" for having "created" criminals like those who had shot him. At a major press conference, a coalition of black clergymen expressed their personal opposition to capital punishment — even for perpetrators like those who had killed Officer Byrne. "Too many of those who occupy the death rows of our prisons are poor and/or black or Hispanic," said the Reverend Larry Dixon.
Nor was there outrage three weeks ago in Seattle, when white sheriff’s deputy Richard Herzog was shot and killed by a black man with a long criminal record. Herzog tried to restrain the man, who had been running naked in traffic, and attempted to subdue him with pepper spray. But during the altercation, the deputy was knocked to the ground and lost his gun to the man, who riddled Herzog’s body with bullets. Is it possible that Herzog resisted using his gun for fear that some might brand him a racist for shooting the suspect? Local County Executive Ronald Sims, who is black, believes so. "There’s no question race probably had an inhibiting effect," said Sims. In the wake of Herzog’s death, there were no demonstrations held to publicly denounce violence against police officers. As for those who were theretofore busy attending the myriad protests over Robert Thomas’s April death, their only response to Herzog’s tragic fate was to temporarily put those protests on hold.
All across this country, police-civilian confrontations spark public outrage only when white officers shoot or mistreat black suspects. And indeed, there is nothing wrong with exposing police misconduct where it exists. But what of those cases where nonwhite officers harm black suspects? What of those cases where white officers harm white suspects? And what of those cases where suspects — whatever their color — harm police officers? These elicit not even a syllable of condemnation from the professional protesters.
Such a double standard has serious social consequences, for it inevitably colors society’s perception of the police. As Seattle Sheriff David Reichert said at a news conference following Deputy Herzog’s death, "We [police] are sick and tired of being looked at as racists." And indeed, those who bring forth the charges of rampant police racism never mention that the great majority of incidents in which officers use force are intra-racial. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 1998, about two-thirds of homicides by police officers were against suspects of the same racial background. When a white officer killed a felon, that felon was usually white (63 percent). And when a black officer killed a felon, that felon was usually black (81 percent). Moreover, the rate at which white officers shoot black suspects has been declining steadily for two decades, while the rate at which they shoot white suspects has remained relatively constant. But who would ever suspect such things, given the one-sided nature of the professional protesters’ message? |
