Talking About Injustices

(D)ude: Man! I’ve been trying to retrieve specifics about eighteen-year-old Michael Brown’s ambitions and personality. I want to know him because the United States Press Corps statistically dismisses Black American boys and men as a conglomerate of misdirected drive and dangerousness.  

(M)an: Dude! The LA Times was the first to provide details Monday of Mike Brown’s envisioning a career as a heating and cooling engineer, while W_W_W dot VOX dot com did an excellent thirteen question slide presentation of last Saturday’s police execution of the unarmed teenager and the subsequent protests and police militarization tactics employed giving way to riots earlier this week until Thursday’s peaceful demonstrations under the  compassion and supervision of Police Captain and Ferguson native Ron Johnson.      

D: Man! Captain Ron Johnson administered and received back a lot of genuine embraces and handshakes from the community of mourners collaboratively attempting to calm the tidal waves of outrageous behaviors and actions by the Ferguson, Missouri PD and the resulting civilian reactions of revulsion and disparity and hopelessness and fear nationwide.           

M: Dude! The United States Press Corps needs to be handed legal dictionaries and instructed to look up the words robbery and theft. Or, at least, given access to the Internet and Wikipedia’s differentiations between common law and civil law, robbery and shoplifting, and race and humanity. According to W_W_W dot VOX dot com, Michael Brown would be attending his first day of classes last week at Vatterott College, a Missouri trade school where he was scheduled to pursue his American Dream.   

D: Man! The duplicate eyewitness evidence by Tiffany Mitchell and Dorian Johnson lending to a first-degree murder charge against Officer Darren Wilson is causing widespread panic amongst the sectarian United States Press Corps that has thus far smothered fatal abuses by law enforcement nationwide, in the cases of Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, and Dante Parker. From all the articles available online, Greg Howard’s from 8:52 PM Tuesday was the first to actually place a historical perspective on the crisis with the title America Is Not For Black People.      

M: Dude! Greg Howard’s article actually has a wonderful connecting link to The Atlantic, specifically Ta-Nehisi Coates’s May 21, 2014 featured feat The Case for Reparations: Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

D: Man! Greg Howard’s article also links onto the American Civil Liberties Union’s June 2014 investigation War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing. The findings are haunting, especially the instances of SWAT raid lapses and graphic casualty reports interspersed throughout the research study alongside the haunting photographs of victims like Tarika Wilson and her 14-month-old son, 68-year-old grandfather of twelve Eurie Stamp, 19-month-old Bounkham “Baby Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, 26-year-old Iraq War veteran Jose Guerena, and 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones.         

M: Dude! Greg Howard’s analyses are noteworthy. Part of the reason we're seeing so many black men killed is that police officers are now best understood less as members of communities, dedicated to keeping peace within them, than as domestic soldiers. The drug war has long functioned as a full-employment act for arms dealers looking to sell every town and village in the country on the need for military-grade hardware, and 9/11 made things vastly worse, with local police departments throughout America grabbing for cash to better defend against any and all terrorist threats. War had reached our shores, we were told, and police officers needed weaponry to fight it.

D: Man! Continuing, Officers have tanks now. They have drones. They have automatic rifles, and planes, and helicopters, and they go through military-style boot camp training. It's a constant complaint from what remains of this country's civil liberties caucus. Just this last June, the ACLU issued a report on how police departments now possess arsenals in need of a use. Few paid attention, as usually happens.

The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he'll reasonably think that his job isn't simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.

M: Dude! And concluding that section of Howard’s article, If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they're working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.

D: Man! Michael Brown had a very evidentially legit concern for becoming terrified of the repercussions of submitting himself to police authorities last Saturday afternoon. Because he was headed for college in a matter of just two days, Mike feared an arrest record from a possible and highly likely if not definite detrimental confrontation with White American police officers for himself as a Black American youth with an intimidating height and stature as well as the dark complexion.

M: Dude! Fear of an arrest record to contend with for life well before his parents and he could begin the latest chapter of collegiate planning and ambitions for Mike as he was headed to Vatterott College, Michael Brown’s decision to keep moving forward and away from the grasps of the Ferguson Police Officer Warren Davis is justifiable.  

D: Man! Yes, Mike’s anxiety is palpable considering how the stats were stacked against his being able to face justice in such an otherwise defensible case for white guys like ourselves. God! Where art thou?

M: Dude! Where art thou, God?

D: Man! In Michael Brown’s defense, there were no dashboard cameras in Officer Warren Davis’s patrol car because they remained unpacked at the Ferguson Police Department Headquarters. Criminal intent on the part of the predominantly combatively racialist Ferguson PD? It reminds me of the lack of statistical data in research conducted by the Center For Community Alternatives_(CCA) and American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission Officers concerning The Use of Criminal History Records in College Admissions Reconsidered.

M: Dude! How so?

D: Man! The CCA and the AACRAO developed a 59-question survey instrument that was electronically administered through their USA network of over three thousand member institutions. Out of the 3,248 institutions only 273 responded even after being told their identities would remain strictly confidential.

M: Dude! To use criminal justice info in the screening process of college applicants but not be held accountable for filling out such surveys by the CCA and the AACRAO is flagrantly unfair. Talk about injustice!

D: Man! Talking about injustice, 24% of the colleges that did perform criminal background checks admitted to not knowing the specifics of how the background checks were conducted, whether by the state agency assigned to collecting criminal records and known simply as the State Central Repository, or contracting through a private company specializing in background checks.

M: Dude! And to think that Michael Brown might have had to self-report any skirmishes between himself and that Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson to the devastation of possibly being placed on probationary status for the duration of his time in college and then having that other possibility of being denied admission completely or becoming disheartened to the point of self withdrawal from professional school.

D: Man! It’s too serious an accusation to tell a student his or her criminal justice info is sufficient grounds for probationary status or rejection, when you yourself do not know all the specifics to how your educational institution gathers and collects and stores such data! There is the inference of premeditated intensions here too in terms of the college admissions department dismissing an entire population of applicants. And we have to keep in mind that students who never had a record with law enforcement beforehand overwhelmingly and singlehandedly commit the offenses on college campuses.