Wake Up America

Over the last few days I have been watching online videos of police and black African American interactions, usually to do with some alleged traffic infraction. Now I don't have any statistics to hand about what percentage of stops are black as opposed to white, but it does seem to me that that quite often blacks are picked out and treated differently than whites. But this is not the main point I want to address here. What I do want to address is the issue of how things go down when it is a black person who is being stopped.

It is truly amazing how rapidly things escalate from a simple traffic stop to an all out assault which all too often ends in the death of somebody when it is a black person being stopped.

One video I watched was the recently highly publicised case of a Lt Nazario being stopped for tinted windows and an apparent lack of tags for his car. In the end, it turned out that the driver did have the correct tags after all. But it took a lot of unpleasant and scary, not to mention, unnecessary violence on the part of the police to get to that point.

I won't describe the entire details of the incident since you can see for yourself by watching the video via the link below. What I will touch upon is the How of what went down and what I believe to be the prime cause of this and a great many other similar incidents.

First off the police signalled for the driver to stop. However, since this took place down some dark country road, the driver chose to flash his lights to signal his awareness of the police presence, but to continue driving to a well lit area just one minute down the road. The reason why he did this was quite simple, he was afraid of what might happen out of plain view. Given the current situation, I personally find this totally understandable common sense. Sadly, the police took a different view, they saw it as an attempt to escape justice and as such an escalation of the event. In this way, the police are following a different narrative to the driver.

Finally the driver pulled up at a well lit area, more than a little confused as to why he was being stopped. And if he wasn't afraid when this all started down that country road, he sure was now.

The police pulled up behind the driver and began to very aggressively scream orders to the driver. When the driver saw that the police were holding deadly weapons which were pointed at him the poor man must have been terrified.

It didn't help that the main policeman started to give contradictory orders. "Put your hands out of the car......now get out of the car!" Well of course to get out of the car the driver would have to put his hands back inside the car to release his seatbelt and open the door. He's damned if he does and he's damned if he doesn't.

It was at this point I realised that the main problem was one of cognitive dissonance and a fearful rush of adrenaline. Both men believed their life to be at risk and acted accordingly. The problem was, only one of the parties was heavily armed, the two policemen.

So we have some sort of Mexican standoff, all due to the two different narratives each was following. The police have been programmed to believe that any black man in a nice car is a potential criminal, possibly a lethally armed felon, who will do anything to escape justice, including shooting the policeman dead.

Indeed, in the eyes of the policeman, the driver has already shown his none compliance by trying to escape from the initial call to stop his vehicle. This is confirmation bias at work at its most dangerous. It is also an institutional racist narrative which has already cost many innocent black people their lives.The black African American driver is following a narrative informed by a spate of killings of black people by the police in situations very similar to this one. He has some cause to be nervously afraid and fear for his life.This is nothing less, and a hell of a lot more, than a war of nerves.

As you can see from the video, the situation escalated when the driver, not sure which of the two contradictory police orders to obey, kept his arms out of the window and politely, if somewhat nervously, asked why he had been stopped. Seems like a reasonable question to me.

At that point all the policeman had to do was calm down and explain the reason for the stop. Instead the policeman, now angry in the extreme that the driver had not obeyed the order to get out of the car, pepper sprayed the poor man in the face and proceeded to drag the man out of his car, forced him to his knees and handcuffed him. At one point the policeman threatened the driver that he was going to "Ride the lightning" slang for being executed in the electric chair. Although I guess it could equally mean that he was going to be executed right there on the spot. Not good, in fact absolutely, disgustingly appalling.

Looking very closely at the video, I caught sight of the much younger policeman holding a gun with his outstretched arm, pointing it at the driver. The rookie boy looked terrified at what was going down. Just one slip of his nervous finger on the trigger and that would have been yet another innocent blackman dead.

At some point in the video, when all was a lot calmer, at the back of the vehicle there was some meaningful exchange between the policeman and the driver. The policeman asked the driver why he hadn't stopped down that country road and he replied it was because he was afraid. The policeman said that he too was afraid. Each was afraid of the potential outcome of their own narrative. One informed by racist ignorance the other by real events.

The other striking part of this particular exchange was how the policeman clearly admitted his racist informed narrative. The other thing I noticed was how the policeman then told the driver that if he said no more about what had gone down then nothing would go on his record. For what? He hadn't actually done anything wrong for lords sakes.

So basically this policeman was trying to cover his own arse with the threat of ruining the man's career. Should the driver make any complaint about it, there would be potential negative repercussions! At this point I have to admit the thought occurred to me, who the hell would want to be a Blackman?

I have lived in three different countries, and in one of them I have suffered a mild, but nonetheless hurtful, degree of institutional and public racism. But I thank the lord that I have never felt in fear of losing my life just for the colour of my skin.

It is high time this problem was resolved before any more innocent black people lose their lives for no good reason, indeed, for little more than crass ignorance and an ill informed narrative that says that all black people are dangerous felons.

For the record, I have had, and still have a number of black American friends and all of my interactions with these people has been nothing less than a total and utter joy.