About 10 or 15 years ago I was working for a young attorney and he had me writing blogs for him. It was interesting. I had to do a lot of research to find what I thought were interesting topics to write about. In the course of researching those blogs I came across an online publication that basically was a roundup of stories from around the country.
The reason I am mentioning this is because a lot of the stories were about police mistreating people of color.
I remember finding those stories and reading them all, at first. Then I got to where I skipped over them because I was not writing about criminal law, my area was civil law. The stories were inevitably about people who were arrested who shouldn't have been arrested, or they were arrested and beaten up for seeming to resist the police. The stories were everywhere, from every corner of America. There were So.Many.Stories.
I'd say 95% of those stories were under-reported.
You see, the police used to be able to pretty much do what they wanted without fear of scrutiny by anyone. That is changing. Not fast enough, but it IS changing.
One of the rare bonuses to so many of us walking around with smartphones that can be used to take quick videos is that there are few corners of the world not subject to being filmed. Police officers know this.
The Floyd case has shocked and horrified me to the point where it's almost unbearable to see the video of it. The officer who had his knee on Mr. Floyd's neck has now been arrested -- story.
If not for the videos made of what happened I guarantee you this story would not have made national news. As long as there have been police officers there have been officers who abused their power and mistreated people. I'm not defending that. It's reprehensible. However, we now live in a world where accountability is more likely.
I've never been arrested.
However, I had a scary encounter once with a police officer years ago. I was in graduate school and I had broken up with a boyfriend and was very upset. I was crying, loudly, for a while. My neighbors called the campus police and reported me for crying too loud, saying I was screaming. When the police officer knocked on my door I was shocked, utterly bewildered. He said my neighbors thought I was being abused or beaten. The sight of the officer calmed me down immediately. I was also frightened and confused. Instead of coming over to see what was wrong, my neighbors called the police. It wasn't a police matter. I had done nothing wrong. The officer wasn't very nice, and he didn't act like he cared. He just wanted me to be quiet.
I grew up in a family where, when I was crying, someone always came and comforted me. Always. Even as a baby, my parents never made me "cry it out." Being grown up and living alone meant there was no source of comfort and I'm sure that contributed to my sadness and crying spell.
After the officer left I just sat and shook for a few minutes.
After that, I could better imagine how someone of color feels when they are wrongly accused of something. Multiply my feelings a million times, of course. What I went through was nothing, in comparison. But it gave me a very tiny taste of what a really unpleasant account with a police officer can be like.
We had protests here in Atlanta yesterday. In a story reported yesterday our mayor [who is black] admonished the protestors.
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms' voice rose in a televised press conference, with a stern message for violent protesters: "You are disgracing our city; you are disgracing the life of George Floyd ... We are better than this."
She is right, and she is wrong.
I have a friend who is the mother of a black son. She is white. She has to live in a daily fear most white people will never understand: fear of her son being arrested just for being black but actually doing nothing wrong. I have another white friend whose adopted sons are Asians and her family has faced overt, ugly racism many times -- oh, and they live in Colorado, not the south. She also worries about her sons.
We may not see a perfectly racially harmonious world in my lifetime. I am resigned to that. Maybe in my son's lifetime, though.
My son has faced discrimination. I understand a little of what mothers of black sons face.
He has some Kazakh ancestry. When I went to Kazakhstan in 2007 to adopt my son the orphanage workers kept saying "He is classified Russian!" I was told that repeatedly. I didn't understand why it mattered until a while later when it was explained to me that to be classified as native Kazakh meant discrimination, and mixed-race kids fared worst of all in a segregated society. That, despite the fact the president of Kazakhstan was Kazakh, not Russian.
Had he stayed in Kazakhstan my son would have faced three kinds of discrimination: for being an orphan, for being handicapped, and for being mixed race. His chances of ever having a good job were practically nil, at that time. [Things may have changed. I hope so.]
Race should have no bearing on how anyone is treated, in any walk of life, anywhere, any time. But the world is how it is, despite that, and we must work to change it. If protests change it, good. There is malicious anger and there is righteous anger and we need to remember that.
I am praying that the Floyd cases and Arbury cases will remind us, sadly, to continue to actively pray for a better world and to insist on a better world, for our children and all the generations to come.
We have come a long way, and we have a long way to go.
Condemning all police officers isn't the answer.
Condemning the protestors isn't the answer.
We have to find ways to move forward without blanket condemnation of any group. We have to keep the conversation going. We have to keep filming injustices. We have to keep working for change.