Is an unsettling phase in our national saga finally nearing its end?
Four times in three years, three white police officers (and one Hispanic watch captain, rebranded as ‘white’ by the Paper of Record) were accused of tracking down and killing black men on purpose, a recurring theme of an epidemic of violence, recalling the worst of Jim Crow. But it turned out that the four cases were all very different, with the assumed role of race in each instance ranging from low or nonexistent to shockingly high.
The first was the most opaque of these cases, in which George Zimmerman provoked the confrontation with young Trayvon Martin. Nobody knows who started the melee that followed, which ended with Zimmerman flat on the sidewalk, in palpable fear for his life. In case two in Ferguson, it turned out that Michael Brown was not a “gentle giant” shot dead in cold blood with his hands raised in surrender, but a 280-pound thug who robbed a convenience store and was shot while trying to grab a policeman’s revolver.
Case number three in New York, where Eric Garner died in an illegal chokehold in the course of an arrest for a minor infraction, was a more obvious instance of police malpractice, even if the will to cause death was not there. As a result, this grand jury’s decision not to bring charges brought the kind reaction the other two cases had not. The Huffington Post noted that whereas reactions to the non-indictment in Ferguson had split along the predictable culture war schisms, this one was different, with the acquittal being called “inexplicable” (The Federalist), “regrettable,” (Hot Air) and “infuriating” (Red State) on the most right-wing of websites, and repeatedly slammed on Fox News.
At the same time, the Washington’s Post Jonathan Capehart confessed he was wrong in his first reaction to Ferguson: “Brown never surrendered with his hands up, and Wilson was justified in shooting [him]…we must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative on behalf of someone who would otherwise offend our sense of right and wrong.”
The case Ferguson wanted to but couldn’t ever be occurred April 4 in South Carolina, when white police officer Michael Slager fired eight shots into the back of the black Walter Scott, the 50-year-old he had stopped for a minor traffic infraction. Shooting an unarmed fleeing suspect is against the law in every state in this country. “This is why cops see this case so differently,” wrote Peter Moskos. “The criminal was the police officer…every police officer I’ve spoken to thinks that Scott’s death was horrible and that Slager committed a crime.”
Fittingly, it was officials in the Palmetto State — home of Fort Sumter and John C. Calhoun — that fired Slager at once, held him without bail and hit him with a charge of capital murder, meaning that death is a real possibility.
“The mayor and the police chief…did the right thing, and we commend them,” said Al Sharpton, who did much to make the protests at the previous sites so ugly and violent. “Who would have dreamed that a police chief in the Deep South would show more honesty and transparency than some of the big city police chiefs?” (Well, maybe someone who looked at the state’s governor and esteemed junior senator might have some idea.)
When South Carolina embraces the victim, and the victim’s survivors ask Sharpton to take his act elsewhere, the country may be in better shape than many imagined — and there may be some hope for us all.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
