Itchy trigger fingers

It seems that amid the uproar over police killing Blacks, there is at least one very confused Black cop:

Dennis Shireff, a nearly 30-year police veteran, has never been shy about speaking out against what he saw as brutality and racism among his peers. While serving with the St. Louis police, he was even suspended for saying that the department recruited too many “Billy Bob, tobacco-chewing white police officers.”

So after the high-profile killings of unarmed black men by white police officers in Ferguson, Mo.; New York; and elsewhere, Officer Shireff, who now works for a small department outside St. Louis, feels the tug of conflicting loyalties: to black people who feel unfairly targeted by the police, and to his fellow police officers, white and black, who routinely face dangerous situations requiring split-second life-or-death decisions.^[1]

Let’s start with those “split-second life-or-death decisions.” When I was growing up, I learned that that was what was called being “trigger happy” or having an “itchy trigger finger.” And I have to ask, really I do, why it is that that police trigger finger is itchy twenty-one times more often toward young Black males than it is toward young white males.^[2]

I understand that cops don’t need to be the brightest bulbs.^[3] So maybe this is a little hard for them to understand.

But there is a war on between wealthy (mostly) white (mostly) males and everyone else in society. Or at least there is to the really rather limited extent that subaltern folks are fighting back.

This war appears on many fronts. “There’s class warfare, all right,” Warren Buffett famously said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”^[4] It appears in sky-high incarceration rates which persist despite their minimal impact on crime rates and the damage incarceration does not only to individuals but to their families and communities.^[5] It appears in a criminal [in]justice system rush to “close cases” that takes rather less care to find truly guilty parties.^[6] It appears in a stigmatization of the poor as “undeserving” and as criminal that serves a propaganda purpose of keeping the rest of the population in line.^[7] It appears in domestic spying and a militarized police, neither of which make sense in the absence of an organized, militant opposition among the population. It appears in a rush to rescue banks in the financial crisis that began in 2007 that left homeowners and the unemployed to twist in the wind.

We have hardly fought back. We have been too busy scrambling to survive. Our employers and our landlords, when we have them, are our colonizers. The DEA and the police are an occupying force. The FBI and NSA are our secret police.

Lest I be accused of binary thinking, permit me to return to Warren Buffett, who said, “it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”^[8] It is the rich, and those who act on their behalf, including the police, who have decided that this conflict exists and who are prosecuting it.

In wearing the uniform, Black cops have chosen a side. If they don’t like “defending police procedures [meaning their itchy trigger fingers] to fellow blacks who see them as foot soldiers from an oppressive force” and they don’t like “serving as the voice of black people in their station houses, trying to explain to white colleagues the animosity many blacks feel toward law enforcement,”^[9] then they need to be someplace besides where they are. But as long as they wear that uniform, they betray the people.

1. ^[1]John Eligon and J. David Goodman, “At Home and at Work, Black Police Officers Are on Defensive,” New York Times, December 24, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/us/at-home-and-work-black-police-officers-on-defensive.html↩
2. ^[2]Grio, “Black males 21x more likely to die in police shootings than whites,” October 11, 2014, http://thegrio.com/2014/10/11/black-males-21-times-white-teens-police-shootings/↩
3. ^[3]ABC News, “Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops,” September 8, 2000, http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story↩
4. ^[4]Ben Stein, “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,” New York Times, November 26, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html↩
5. ^[5]Ernest Drucker, A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: New, 2011).↩
6. ^[6]Dan Simon, In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2012).↩
7. ^[7]Herbert J. Gans, The War Against The Poor: The Underclass And Antipoverty Policy (New York: Basic, 1995).↩
8. ^[8]Ben Stein, “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,” New York Times, November 26, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html↩
9. ^[9]John Eligon and J. David Goodman, “At Home and at Work, Black Police Officers Are on Defensive,” New York Times, December 24, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/us/at-home-and-work-black-police-officers-on-defensive.html↩