A lot of people, not just the police, need to be accountable

When I arrived for work on a night shift on Sunday, it just seemed like another day on the job, but after 3 AM I was told by a supervisor that a 5 PM to 5 AM curfew had been announced, and that I needed to go home. Apparently the previous evening there had been “disturbances” linked to protests in regard to death of George Floyd, a black man who had been put in a lethal choke hold with the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. I had to catch a bus, and with crowds of protesters started to throng and police barriers here and there, it was a long slog even after I got on the bus. While I was waiting at the bus stop there appeared a group of National Guardsmen, and soon afterward Seattle police in their urban combat gear showed behind them here:

This wasn’t quite the same as the Rodney King “riot” here, after the police officers involved were acquitted by a Simi Valley jury. I remembered returning from work just before midnight and turning on the television, and observed a breathless local television reporter roaming around downtown with scenes of mostly young people behaving as if it was Mardi Gras. Since I was living in a rundown, roach-infested closet (now just rubble in a landfill) just a few blocks from downtown, I decided to check things out. There were a lot of white “kids” having a good time watching a few “protestors” breaking windows and knocking over newspaper stands. There were some police to be seen, but they seemed to be more spectators allowing the few less peaceful to act out their grievances. It was over after just one night.

Since there was a lot of time to burn attempting to navigate through police barriers and running “protestors”—seemingly mostly guilty-feeling white people who wanted to say their “sorry,” mixed in with some folks who get a kick out of having an excuse to confront “authority”—me and the bus driver engaged in conversation concerning the goings-on. We both agreed that what we saw the officer doing in the Floyd video was completely unnecessary and inexcusable. We also both wondered about that curious “gap” in the video between the time Floyd was led handcuffed to the car and the time he was being held handcuffed on the ground, with the officer’s knee on his neck and Floyd telling him he couldn’t breathe. It may not have sufficiently “explained” the officer’s action, but as we have seen before, “missing” video edited for effect by the media sometimes can cause problems of credibility. We also wondered if the officer felt it was “necessary” to act the way he did if they were told after run of his record that Floyd had previously served time for home invasion and armed robbery in Houston.

The state of Washington has not had many such cases in recent times where police officers have killed apparently unarmed people without sufficient provocation. Or rather, not any involving black persons; there have been, however, cases of Hispanic and Native American victims, such as Nelson Martinez-Mendez, armed only with his wallet containing his driver’s license, shot by Bellevue police officer Mike Hetle, and Native American woodcarver John Williams in downtown Seattle; although these cases were news for a short time, and both officers involved were soon out of a job, there were no “riots” or even protests, organized or not. 

By the way, Hetle, who was later hired first by the Department of Homeland Security, and then by NASA for something called the Enterprise Protection Program, was charged in Virginia with murder this past March, after killing a neighbor who was a NASA executive. The victim, Javon Prather, was black; once a racist thug, always a racist thug. NASA claimed not to know anything about Hetle’s past escapades. Perhaps if Hetle had received actual punishment for the killing of Martinez-Mendez, this murder would not have occurred either.

In 2019, according to the tracker website Killed By Police, there were 35 people killed by lethal force by law enforcement in the state of Washington; 13 were white, 8 black, 8 Hispanic, 3 were other races and 3 “unidentified.” One of those killed by police was Derek Antonio-Sanchez, by Kirkland police. According to the local newspaper, “During a domestic disturbance, Sanchez grabbed his girlfriend's 18-month-old son and refused to let the child ago.  Kirkland officers negotiated with Sanchez for about an hour, the sheriff's office said, before one officer opened fire. Police said the man's behavior was ‘erratic’ in the moments before the shooting.” Note that there is nothing here to indicate Sanchez was armed, or that he threatened police.

It is not like other groups in this country have no cause for protest. Certainly Native Americans have more cause than others, and Hispanics were the victims of lynching and extralegal murder too, mainly in Southwest, and Texas in particular—all which is documented in the book Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States by William Carrigan and Clive Webb, and today Hispanics still exist between a rock and a hard place, between both white, black—and increasingly Asian/Indian—prejudice and “grievance.” There were even mass killings of innocent people, such as the 1918 Porvenir massacre of 15 men and boys by U.S. military personnel and Texas Rangers, in apparent “retribution” for Pancho Villa’s cross-border antics.

In the U.S. overall, the numbers provided by Killed By Police come out to the following percentage of victims of police shootings in 2019 in which race and ethnicity has been determined:

45 percent white

29 percent black

21 percent Hispanic

5 percent other races

According to FBI crime statistics, black perpetrators of crimes of all varieties, including violent crime, range between 40 and 45 percent of all crimes. What this suggests is that while blacks may be over-represented per their population in dying at the hands of police, white people may actually be more likely to be killed by police as a percentage of actual perpetration of a crime. I suspect that some people here have already forgotten the recent shooting on Third Avenue in front of the McDonalds, where two black male shooters with poor aim missed each other but hit eight innocent bystanders, killing one and wounding seven, including an eight-year-old child. Police can certainly be paranoid and act on it; but a shooting like that leads to questions of "Where were they?" and "Why didn't they do anything?" A rock and a hard place? Damned if you do and damned if you don't?

What we see, however, is that the black community tends to be much involved in its sense of victimization by society and certainly more “emotional” about it. This is clearly something our fearless leader in the White House doesn’t understand, hiding in his bunker like a craven bully-boy coward, while William Barr, another tough guy who in the past has given law enforcement the green light to behave lawlessly themselves, is flailing around trying to figure out how to douse fires that his kind helped to set.

Meanwhile, Seattle is now quiet as a mouse--not necessarily because of the extension of the curfew, but because, well, the white folks who live here feel the made their "statement" of "support," and they don't need to do more. Oh sure, there are still people walking around with signs, but all these fakers did, as far as I am concerned, was to extend the curfew a little while longer, and now I have to sit in this office building till morning because the buses stopped running by the time I finished work for the night.