Even Eyewitness Testimony Can't Stop Incidents Of Bad Policing

Whenever we get another one of these unarmed black men killed by a cop, we lose a lot of rubber as we spin our wheels in the street trying to find the balance between trusting the men and women we depend on to serve and protect us, while the unavoidable truth is that no one can ever hire perfectly for any job.

Occasionally, police departments hire guys (sorry fellas, but its rarely ladies making these errors in judgement) that love weapons more than they love law enforcement or dislike minorities more than they love justice.  In certain toxic instances, they hire men with all of these traits.  There is probably no easy way to avoid these leaks in the system, and police unions become unfortunate shields for the worst of law enforcement's hiring mistakes.

It would be easy to chalk up the lost lives that will always come from the imperfect process of hiring, but the issue is bigger than Mike Brown from Ferguson or Eric Garner from New York.  I could Google names for hours of young black men that have died at the hand of law enforcement. Even worse, are the many nameless faces that never made it to the news; those forgotten ones that inspired certain residents of Ferguson, Missouri to loot a shoe store.

I know.  Retribution is a funny thing, but so is this unbreakable fear that America has of black men.  Especially young black men that embrace the entirety of hip-hop culture and go by the name Big Mike.  When Big Mike was alive, his 18 years of maturity was easily mistakable for grown man dangerous.  They called the kid Big Mike for a reason.  Apparently, the homicide of Big Mike took place in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri similar to most suburbs of America.  These are the places in America where whites, who can afford it, run away from the places where too many non-whites start to inhabit.  It would be nice if I could characterize it in some way that doesn't sound so disparaging of those who run towards the suburbs. The truth is, anywhere you see a suburban area that is not predominantly white, it is usually the old suburban area that whites have long since abandoned in mass.  Areas like Ferguson, Missouri, where Big Mike took his last breath on earth, or Aurora, Colorado, where I spent my middle school and high school years.

The Denver Metro is a cluster of old school suburbs that evolved from  the main city. Instead of building neighborhoods that distanced themselves from the main city like they do with modern suburbs, metro area neighborhoods  like Denver, extend from the main city by design.  People in Colorado love Denver, even those that choose to live outside of its most active inner circle.  Aurora is one of the first of these offshoot cities with a vibrant history of military bases that anchored the city during its rise.  Lowry Air Force base was a key central part of Aurora before a recent  redevelopment and on the outskirts of the military base are several pockets of housing that offered various price ranges to the military families that occupied the area.

Directly across the street from the base is an upper crust slice of neighborhood that was said to be commonly owned by the officers.  The houses are noticeably nicer than all the others in the area, and only a few people we knew actually lived in these houses.  One of them was one of my closest friends.  His dad was an Air Force officer so he was fortunate to have a house inside of this little slice of heaven. Somehow, when I think back to my Mike Brown moments in history, it always seemed to be with this particular friend of mine, who was every bit as black and as nerdy as me, if not more so.

He was the military family kid that lived on the nicer side of the street. There were a few other black kids that lived in the same area, but they were lighter skinned black kids of mixed race.   When we first got confronted by questionable policing, it was in this 6 block neighborhood where my friend lived. The shakedown  was the basic 'what are you doing in this nice area' kind of shakedown, but a shakedown no less. This might have been one of the last pieces of white sanctity nestled inside of the rough edges of north Aurora, but it was nestled, not isolated like a true suburb.  Shakedowns in other parts of Aurora were very prevalent at the time.   Aurora, once the suburban refuge to neighboring Denver, had begun to lose all of its non-minorities to South Aurora and other areas not called Denver or North Aurora.  Unfortunately, the staffing of Aurora police officers in the 80's is much like that of Ferguson, Missouri today, not reflective of the community that it attempted to serve.

We were two blocks away from his home, probably walking back from hooping on the military base.  Colorado had finally given in to the lottery ticket craze and someone had discarded a loser on the sidewalk along our route home. 30 seconds after we picked up that ticket, a police car pulls up to us and stops us to ask us what we were doing in the area.  The answer of heading home didn't fit the pre-planned agenda for this stop, so he proceeded to take down names and check for warrants.  The few black dudes that lived on the outskirts of this small community probably did have warrants, so his shake of the dice had a reasonable expectation of luck.  When he crapped out so quickly on two high school nerds that actually did live nearby, he was none too happy that I requested his name, badge number and a reason for the stop.  As I recall, he accused us of littering (the lotto ticket was a loser remember) and made sure we never got the rest of that information.

The next time I got a police shake down, I was a sophomore in high school and responsible for pulling off the Sadie Hawkins (girls ask the guys) dance for our class.  While dressed in shirt and tie, myself and that same friend of mine and another young black gentleman in a shirt and tie, had to move the school soft drink machine into the gym for the dance.  I guess there could have been three black burglars in shirt and tie trying to steal a soft drink machine behind a well populated school, with no get away car just as the cop suspected of us.  The white students who were holding open the door for us came quickly to declare that they were pointing guns at the sophomore class president and his most likely to succeed friends, but even the teacher that soon arrived could not digress this overly aggressive act of policing.

The first incident occurred in broad daylight, but the latter was in the dark, backside of the school gym.  From the street view, I respect that this cop might have thought that he had unveiled something nefarious.  Whether he really had a call about someone matching our descriptions or simply used it to quell the embarrassment of the moment is hardly of a concern to me.  In the process of trying to keep people safe, innocent people occasionally endure shake downs (see; airport travel).  My concern is for the unbridled passion at which this officer went about his business.  When police officers regularly treat innocent people as guilty until proven otherwise, they eventually end up with fatal errors in judgement.

To the credit of old school cops, they were more likely to beat young blacks down and leave them to get home on their own instead of shooting them dead.  Now, gun culture and the prevalence of guns creates hypersensitive cops that trust the laws to acquit them against shootings more than they trust the people they are sworn to serve and protect.

Will chest camera's  improve police accountability?

Where do these quick triggered tendancies come from?  Lack of diversity in leadership positions, especially in communities where diversity represents the community at large. These environments demand leaders who reject typical hiring behaviors to insure that diversity, of gender and ethnicity, becomes a priority of leadership itself.  Diverse hiring within diverse communities is a central component for what defines good leadership. White cops, educators, judges....leaders, will never develop minority sensitivity running from intimate minority interaction like working side by side with them every day.  In fact, hiring black officers to police their own neighborhoods seems to be the loudest bone of contention from the more controlled of the angry Ferguson protesters.  Must we always use tragedy to foster the changes that are abundantly apparent long before the tragedy occurs? As we speak, Ferguson police officials seem focused on discrediting the eye witness accounts which drastically differ from the statement of the officer who pulled the trigger in this death (his name has yet to be released in fear for his safety).

In  the wake of the choking death of Eric Garner in New York, NYC, public advocate Letitia A. "Tish" James, is leading a change that includes police with video cameras abreast.  While some cops clearly hate the idea, others, especially those who've  been involved in justified shootings, see this as a way of clearing the name of good cops who get illegally targeted while justifiably performing in the line of duty.

I can hear all of you privacy advocates screaming in the background.    Do chest camera's further exacerbate  our limited privacy? The answer to that question is rather easy.  Integrate or video tape.  The choice is yours.