A well trained and humane police officer should not need to discharge his or her firearm, in order to incapacitate a 17 year old, even if that kid is carrying a knife. Yet, even if the officer in question is both poorly trained and inhumane, it would need only 1, maybe 2 shots to the lower body, to physically subdue a person who is little more than a child at his stage in life. However, the 16 bullets fired into the body of black teenager, Laquan McDonald, by caucasian Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, show the militaristic approach and the callous brutality with which law enforcement officials are prepared to deal with ethnic minority, and especially African-American, members of the community. Those 16 shots are proof positive, if any more were even needed, that the ‘Black lives matter’ movement (BLM) is not just necessary but essential.
The incident in question took place on October 20th 2014 and the 16 shots, fired mainly into the upper body (pictured right), are very telling as to the mindset of many American police forces when it comes to dealing with black people. The first shot entered the head of Laquan McDonald, which was either purposefully aimed to hit him there, in which case Van Dyke was trying to kill him, or was just an extremely poor shot. If it was the latter, then it is baffling to see why the officer should have felt it necessary to fire another 15 times into McDonald, as he lay completely defenseless with his head blown open. Either way, it shows a twisted mindset that saw a black kid and cared not a jot for his life. Van Dyke fired 16 rounds, most of which into the upper body and most of which against an already subdued suspect, in just 13 seconds. Although there may be isolated incidences of white police officers treating non-black suspects with similarly disgusting and needless brutality, they are just that, isolated incidences. However, for black Americans, this is unfortunately an all too common interaction with law enforcement. There in lies the necessity of the black lives matter movement.
A popular refrain one hears from the opponents of BLM is that ‘All lives matter’ , and whilst that is, of course, true in the very literally sense, it misses the point in a most spectacularly pig-headed way. To focus on one specific area, does not mean ignoring or denying the existence of connected issues, its simply a matter of prioritising problems based on severity and urgency. Nobody (at least nobody serious) within BLM would suggest that police brutality towards other ethnic groups is irrelevant or non-existent, its just that the interactions between police and black civilians are significantly worse and in need of very swift alteration. From my personal experience of interacting with opponents of BLM, they can be separated into three main categories: Those ignorant of the issues, those who are just outright racists, and those (largely white) folk who are entitled assholes that can’t allow anything to happen without making it all about them. Although, as with every element of this messy world, it is never quite as clear cut as that and there is significant overlap between those three broad groupings. Yet, those labels can be applied to almost, if not every, opponent of BLM that I have encountered.
As for officer Van Dyke, he has been charged with first degree murder, becoming the first Chicago policeman in decades to be charged with that offence for an on-duty incident. It seems that his record, as a Chicago police officer of 14 years, was patchy at best, with a number of public complaints being made against his conduct. The charge against him was layed only hours before the release of the footage of his brutal slaying of McDonald, on the orders of the presiding judge in the case. The officer was charged before the release of the tape (rather than the other way round), seemingly, to avoid having to deal with the cries, from the aforementioned ‘entitled assholes’, that the judge had “caved into pressure from rioting nig- … um, I mean black folks”. Although the civil unrest that might have been expected following the tapes release did not really materialise, with only a small number of arrests being made at what were largely peaceful protests.
So, the story of Laquan McDonald is added to the grotesquely long and ever expanding list of black victims of police brutality and racism. The names of Micheal Brown, Walter Scott, Eric Garner and Freddie Grey rush quickly to mind, as recent examples, when discussing this topic but they are but the tip of a gargantuan iceberg of killings, assaults, wrongful arrests and harassment that is dealt out to the African-American community on a daily basis. As a proportion of the American population, black people are twice as likely to be killed by law enforcement officials and are significantly more likely to be killed whilst being unarmed.
That is why BLM is necessary, it is not to denigrate the non-black victims of police brutality, it is to raise awareness of, and hopefully make a change to, the particularly severe issues faced by African-Americans when dealing with the police. If you are unable to accept that very basic fact, then I would suggest that you need to examine the issues as to why that is.