A Post-Dallas Challenge for Religious Progressives: Staying on Message about Structural Racism

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BY PETER LAARMAN
Peter Laarman is a United Church of Christ minister and activist who recently retired as executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting in Los Angeles. He remains involved in numerous justice struggles, in particular a campaign known as Justice Not Jails that calls upon faith communities to critique and combat the system of racialized mass incarceration often referred to as The New Jim Crow.
JULY 10, 2016

Te easily-predicted meme of the moment coming from law enforcement officials and their many political allies is a threefold rebuke to the entire criminal justice reform movement—not just #BlackLivesMatter but all of us who consider fighting the mass criminalization of people of color (and the engineered economic immiseration of people of color—most specifically Black people) to be the nation’s most urgent unfinished business.

The three main “beats” of the post-Dallas pushback are these:

The police put their lives on the line every day for public safety and deserve appreciation and deep respect for that;

They have been horribly smeared by a handful of opportunistic Black radicals, but the silent majority rejects the smear;

They are decent and honorable people who should not be smeared on account of handful of rogue individuals who wear the badge.

This is precisely what I would expect the police establishment to say at this moment. I would likewise expect to hear it from African-American police officials, like Dallas Police Chief David Brown. You don’t rise in law enforcement as a Black person without fervently and repeatedly reaffirming your True Blue colors.

What is deeply dispiriting, however, is the number of people in political leadership and in the commentariat who mouth the exact same memes: 99% of police officers are great public servants, blah blah blah.

http://religiondispatches.org/a-post-dallas-challenge-for-religious-progressives-staying-on-message-about-structural-racism/

[struggle4progress]

1. There are about 765K police officers in the US

According to the Washington Post, there were 990 fatal police shootings of suspects in 2015. About 93 are now known to have been unarmed: that's about fatal shooting of an unarmed suspect for every 8000 officers

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2. That's one fatal shooting of an unarmed person by police every 4 days.