State-sanctioned Killing Is What They Are…

American police rou­tine­ly fal­si­fy and plant evi­dence, lie under oath, and crim­i­nal­izes young Black men as a mat­ter of course.
But worse, young African-American males are are at much greater risk of being killed by police than young men of any oth­er eth­nic group.
Black men over and over, wind up in the for-prof­it Prison Industrial com­plex, which works like a ham­ster wheel from which many nev­er man­age to extri­cate them­selves.
The entrenched strat­e­gy works to keep the for-prof­it prison cells filled with black bod­ies and cre­ates, the dys­func­tion in the black fam­i­ly that enhances the con­cept of white suprema­cy.
As a con­se­quence, young African-American men devel­op expan­sive crim­i­nal records, iron­i­cal­ly, many have nev­er com­mit­ted any real crimes in their life­time.
Regardless, the expan­sive crim­i­nal records they accrue, is used to jus­ti­fy mur­der­ing them, by.… you guessed it, the very same police.
The trav­es­ty is not just that police do what they do, but that pros­e­cu­tors and the courts do noth­ing to stop these nefar­i­ous practices.

How, you ask, is it pos­si­ble that one can end up with an expan­sive crim­i­nal record with­out com­mit­ting a sin­gle crime?
If that is your ques­tion, you are not alone, I too was incred­u­lous that many peo­ple with crim­i­nal records have nev­er com­mit­ted a crime in their entire lives.
It took me many years of see­ing American police abuse,[see; https://​www​.pbs​.org/​k​e​n​b​u​r​n​s​/​t​h​e​-​c​e​n​t​r​a​l​-​p​a​r​k​-​f​i​ve/ ] that it became clear to me, that there has always been a sys­tem­at­ic strat­e­gy to crim­i­nal­ize young black men and women where pos­si­ble, incar­cer­ate them and even­tu­al use the crim­i­nal records they gave them to jus­ti­fy their erad­i­ca­tion from soci­ety.
If you are not offend­ed by that you are a part of the problem.

None of the fore­gone changes the fact that many young Black men do com­mit crimes they ought not to have com­mit­ted, and for those, there is no defend­er in this writer or from this medi­um.
The strat­e­gy did not nec­es­sar­i­ly tar­get African-America women per se. they who design the strate­gies under­stood that when men are removed from the home the chil­dren are gen­er­al­ly expect­ed to fol­low the fathers into the for-pay prison indus­tri­al com­plex.

However, not all of the women have caved to the pub­lic assis­tance, of [sec­tion-eight] which takes care of the major­i­ty of the rent and the [food stamps] which pro­vides the most basic dietary sus­te­nance.
Those, of course, comes with the oblig­a­tory, “you can have no men here or you lose these ben­e­fits”.[sic]
And so the cycle continues.

What they nev­er bar­gained for, were those African-American women who would beat the odds and edu­cate them­selves. These women have become a force to be reck­oned with.
And now as we have seen with Sandra Bland and oth­ers, includ­ing women in the “Black lives mat­ter move­ment”, Black women are not shield­ed from police vio­lence either.
This is not a new con­cept, it was the strat­e­gy which came into exis­tence after the Emancipation Declaration. Criminalizing the new­ly freed Blacks became the top pri­or­i­ty for states, and they went about it with fervor.

Today the strat­e­gy is the very same. A young black man walk­ing down the street is approached by a cop who grabs and orders him around.
He protests and is thrown to the ground and accused of resist­ing arrest, a (felony), com­mit­ting bat­tery on a police offi­cer, a (felony), and just to make it stick, Jay-walk­ing as the [con­coct­ed] rea­son for stop­ping the young man in the first place.
[It has to be all jus­ti­fied right]?
The judges will see through the lies. I hear you think­ing? Wrong! The judges, pros­e­cu­tors, police, and every­one else are all parts of well-oiled machin­ery of [injus­tice].
Even if that young man is not con­vict­ed on a felony on his first offense, he is now in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. And so he is giv­en pro­ba­tion for two years and the stip­u­la­tion is that he must report to a pro­ba­tion offi­cer for the dura­tion of the two years.
He must also[not] come in con­tact with law-enforce­ment while he is on pro­ba­tion. He must also not asso­ciate with any felons either. The only prob­lem is that they had already made felons of lit­er­al­ly every­one he knows in his small world of a few city blocks.
And so he tries his best not to come in con­tact with law enforce­ment. Understandably, he is now angry, because he did noth­ing wrong, to find him­self in this restric­tive and humil­i­at­ing posi­tion.
His only crime has been, to be born in his black skin.
But what the stip­u­la­tions in his pro­ba­tion does not do, is pre­vent law-enforce­ment from com­ing in con­tact with him, and report­ing the con­tact to his pro­ba­tion offi­cer. Or worse, some oth­er cop arrests him for look­ing at him the wrong way.
Either way, he is now tak­en into cus­tody by parole and serv­ing the two-years sen­tence he was giv­en and placed on probation.

And now you start to see how this all comes into being, but they are not done with him yet.
So he does his time, and yes he is angry as hell, he just did two years because some cop decid­ed he want­ed to show him who was boss.
Nevertheless, he heads home and tries to find a job. Place after place he goes but door after door is closed in his face. He finds out that no one will hire some­one who have been arrest­ed, much less some­one just released from prison.
Dejected, he stands on the cor­ner which just hap­pens to be a des­ig­nat­ed high crimes drug area, nev­er mind that his entire com­mu­ni­ty which is gross­ly under-served is one mas­sive ghet­to, and for all intents and pur­pos­es could in total­i­ty be des­ig­nat­ed a drug-infest­ed area.
And so he is arrest­ed for being in a high crime area (police des­ig­na­tion), in the process of being arrest­ed [again] he lash­es out at the cops who have turned his life into a liv­ing hell.
Sixteen bul­lets lat­er his body lays on the street cor­ner, his lifeblood drain­ing from his body becomes part of the dust and grime on the street on which just min­utes ear­li­er he stood, full of life and hope, try­ing to under­stand how to sur­vive in this hos­tile place.
His arrest and prison time jus­ti­fies his mur­der. The cops receive paid vaca­tion, and life goes on as if he nev­er existed.

It is for this rea­son that I find the United Nation’s Commission on Human Rights and oth­er groups to be hyp­o­crit­i­cal in the way they report on Human Rights Abuses in the devel­op­ing world, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly ignor­ing the press­ing and bla­tant dai­ly mur­der of peo­ple of col­or by America’s mil­i­ta­rized police.
I under­stand that the task of fol­low­ing up on these cas­es may be mon­u­men­tal and may even be out­side the capa­bil­i­ties of the UN.
After all, the Federal Bureau of Investigations itself does not have any idea how many peo­ple America’s thou­sands of police depart­ments kill each year.
The fact is that they are not required to even report to Federal Authorities, how many peo­ple they slaugh­ter each year.
Why do you think this is so?
The answer is in the skin col­or and social sta­tus of those who are mur­dered, even when they are unarmed and pos­es no threat to police.
Consistently, Prosecutors, their fraud­u­lent grand juries reg­u­lar juries and the Judges have failed to indict and con­vict these mur­der­ous mon­sters, and so they con­tin­ue to kill with impunity.

According to VOX​.com; Police offi­cers in the US shoot and kill hun­dreds of peo­ple each year, accord­ing to the FBI’s very lim­it­ed data — far more than oth­er devel­oped coun­tries like the UK, Japan, and Germany, where police offi­cers might go an entire year with­out killing more than a dozen peo­ple or even any­one at all.
The Los Angeles Times reports that about 1 in 1,000 black men and boys in America can expect to die at the hands of police, accord­ing to a new analy­sis of deaths involv­ing law enforce­ment offi­cers. That makes them 2.5 times more like­ly than white men and boys to die dur­ing an encounter with cops. The analy­sis also showed that Latino men and boys, black women and girls and Native American men, women, and chil­dren are also killed by police at high­er rates than their white peers. But the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of black males was par­tic­u­lar­ly striking.

At least two news orga­ni­za­tions built data­bas­es to try to account for as many fatal police shoot­ings as pos­si­ble. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts, and two of its cen­tral find­ings were that peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness­es made up large num­bers of those killed by police, and that very few offi­cers were ever pros­e­cut­ed for even the most ques­tion­able of fatal encoun­ters.
As a Pro-Publica arti­cle puts it; “It’s the Blue Lives Matter More the­o­ry of polic­ing.” “When in doubt, shoot. If you can shoot, you should shoot. If you have the choice of wait­ing that one sec­ond to see if you could pro­tect the citizen’s life and put your own life at risk, you must take the citizen’s life.” 

In case after case rather than show respect to the fam­i­ly of peo­ple they have mur­dered in cold blood police depart­ments, and indeed the oth­er police depart­ments which are assigned to inves­ti­gate these killings, spend their time try­ing to dig up dirt with which to smear the dece­dent rather than try­ing to fig­ure out what exact­ly hap­pened.
In one case which gar­nered nation­al atten­tion in the state of West Virginia, a sui­ci­dal man who was killed by police in a town called Weirton.
His car towed from in front of his home, after police killed him.
The offi­cer who ini­tial­ly respond­ed to the domes­tic call rec­og­nized that the young man was in cri­sis and did not shoot him even though he rec­og­nized that he had a gun.
The gun was point­ed toward the ground. Other respond­ing offi­cers imme­di­ate­ly shot and killed the man. The ini­tial offi­cer who sought to de-esca­late the sit­u­a­tion by talk­ing down the young man was fired for not killing him.
State police inves­ti­ga­tors com­piled records of every brush the dead man might have had with the law: a DUI that was dis­missed; a pur­port­ed role as a get­away dri­ver dur­ing an alleged assault in Ohio.
The offi­cial state police report includ­ed a claim by author­i­ties in Ohio that had they encoun­tered the man when he was alive, they would have arrest­ed him.
So much for the so-called integri­ty of inves­ti­ga­tions done by oth­er police agen­cies.
Police inves­ti­gat­ing police should give no com­fort to aggriev­ed families.

The pre­vail­ing cul­ture is that offi­cers are [ori­ent­ed] to shoot in con­cert with each oth­er, in order to back up and jus­ti­fy each oth­er’s legit­i­ma­cy to shoot in the first place.
On February 4^th, 1999 NYPD cops fired 41 bul­lets at 22-year-old Amadou Diallo, 19 of those bul­lets struck mis­ter Diallo killing him.
Out of that deranged and despi­ca­ble behav­ior by NYPD cops, the depart­men­t’s [cop­splained] why 41 bul­lets were fired at a sin­gle indi­vid­ual.
The term con­ta­gious fir­ing was born.
It became clear to the world then, that American police were not in the busi­ness of shoot­ing to save their own lives or the lives of oth­ers, they were shoot­ing to ensure that the vic­tim of their vio­lence nev­er gets to tell his side of the sto­ry.
For years I have advanced the argu­ments as a for­mer police offi­cer from a very vio­lent cul­ture, and hav­ing being shot in the line of duty, that police offi­cers should be taught to shoot only because they have to, not because they can. Compassion is not cow­ardice.”
Police offi­cers must not employ lethal force sim­ply because then can get away with killing.
That whole con­cept of shoot­ing to kill, under the guise of offi­cer safe­ty, defeats the very con­cept of good policing.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
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