What if We Didn't Have Video?
Even uber-conservative Sean Hannity on Fox News sounded appalled. "You do not shoot an innocent man in the back eight times, in cold blood like this!" he declared.
That left his black conservative activist pal Jesse Lee Peterson to carry the weight of calling for fair play for police: "I'm not justifying at all the action of the police officer," Peterson said, "but what I am saying is that we, as American citizens, owe it to the officer to give him the benefit of the doubt and to wait until we get all the information."
I won't argue with that, but I'll also call for getting "all the information" about systemic police practices, too.
The Los Angeles Times, for example, reports that black residents have feared "a culture of over-policing" in North Charleston for years. "In a city that is 47.2 percent African American and 41.6 percent white, blacks were stopped almost twice as often, year after year," the newspaper found, "according to state law enforcement data of all stops that did not lead to an arrest or ticket."
That sounds a lot like the Justice Department's investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department after Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed black teen Michael Brown.
Although the report concluded that Wilson acted in self-defense, it also found a culture in which disproportionate traffic stops, heavy fines and jail were used as a revenue stream for local government -- at the disproportionate expense of African Americans.
Coincidentally, Ferguson held their first municipal elections this past week after that national controversy erupted last year. Turnout by black voters more than doubled from less than 15 percent to 30 percent. Two more African-Americans were elected to the six-member City Council, bringing the total to three black members for the first time.
That's not quite proportional to the black population in Ferguson, but it's a big start toward representative government and accountability.
It also sends an important message to the rest of the country. Protests and investigations are fine, but if you want police and the rest of government to be accountable, get out and vote.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
