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Perspective: Africa - September 2016

“a justifiable homicide” on account of her
“brandishing a deadly weapon” which
caused them to “fear for their lives.” Since
they met the written use-of-force guidelines, they were acquitted.

counters between police and black people,
and Donald Trump’s stereotypical rhetoric, it is easy to conclude that all black
Americans are unemployed and poor, and/
or gangsters, in constant conflict with the
police. The reality is that 74 percent of
black Americans are working, middle and
upper class; they live in safe, integrated
neighbourhoods, flourish socially and economically, and have limited contact with
the police. A black man driving a brandnew Mercedes Benz in West Los Angeles
attracts zero attention from the police
because it is an affluent, integrated area
and they have seen plenty of black people
in Bentleys, Teslas and Rolls Royces; a
black man driving a brand-new Mercedes
Benz in a poor, gang-plagued neighbourhood like South Central Los Angeles will
find himself followed by the police who
are looking to pull him over on some
traffic-related technicality. Why? Because
the cops suspect that either the Mercedes
is stolen or the man is from West LA and
is visiting their part of town to score drugs;
they don’t want to let some rich yuppie
help sustain the demand for the drugs that
are ruining the community they police.
Facts and context are everything in these
matters.

If these police officers were at a family
barbecue and their demented great-grandmother picked up a knife and waved it
around, you can bet the relatives would
find a way to resolve the situation without
opening fire. “Hey, you distract her from
the front, and I’ll grab her from behind…”
No one would say, “Let me go inside the
house, get my gun and shoot her.”
These elaborately technical use-of-force
guidelines have eliminated the umbrella
of context and commonsense and allowed
police officers to get away with murdering
black people across the United States.
The black community needs to take
some responsibility for not cooperating
with the police: having lived for many
years in a predominantly black Los Angeles neighbourhood controlled by the
Shoreline Crips, I can testify that in my
gang- and drug-infested neighbourhood,
people would mourn their loved ones at
funerals, knowing full well the identity of
the killers, but refuse to say who did it;
this, in turn, fuelled anger and resentment
within the local police force who felt their
attempts to secure justice for the victims
were continually frustrated by the victims’
own loved ones. However, the police need
to take responsibility for being paranoid
and trigger-happy under any and all
circumstances that involve black men no
matter what the context, creating distrust
in the very communities they are trying to
serve.

What the Black Lives Matter movement
still needs to address is the prosecutorial
dimension of this problem which is far
more sinister and impactful than any encounter in the streets: after all, it isn’t trigger-happy patrol officers who determine
someone’s prison sentence. A white woman holds her estranged husband hostage
for hours, shoots five times and hits him
three times, and serves four years; a black
woman in Florida fires a warning shot in a
confrontation with her estrang