May 3^rd

Last night a police officer was shot in the head in Queens, a borough of New York City. I got this information as I was watching Fox News. The anchor, a woman of mild color, was instantly in tantrum mode. She was absolutely outraged that there were no street demonstrations, no riots, no public outcry at this crime. She couldn’t understand why this event was different from the outrage shown over the broken back of Freddie Gray, the suffocating and subsequent heart failure of Eric Garner for the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes and so on and on.

There should surely be outrage at the shooting and the clearly attempted murder of any police officer anywhere. There are some notable differences between these situations, however, that the Fox anchor does not seem to recognize. She might understand these differences if she thought about them even briefly but thinking does not seem to be in her job description. Let me help!

Consider Freddy Gray; his crime was apparently making eye contact with a policeman. Then Freddy ran, was caught put into a police van and emerged injured so badly he soon died. The excuse given by police for his arrest was that he carried a switch blade knife. The knife excuse didn’t fly because the knife was a pocket knife, which isn’t illegal to carry, and it was in Freddy’s pocket out of the sight of any policeman until Freddy was searched. So the cops lied. Then once six police officers were charged with crimes relating to Freddy’s death the police union claimed this was a rush to judgment.

Here is another interesting difference: Neither Freddy, nor Eric Garner, nor Walter Scott (shot five times in the back while fleeing from a policeman for the offense of driving without a tail light.) has anything equivalent to the powerful police union whose job seems to be protecting police regardless of their guilt or innocence. The cop felt threatened and so shooting the person perceived as threatening is just fine. Police, essentially, have a license to kill if they get nervous. The civilian, usually unemployed and poor, will have a court appointed attorney who may or may not stay awake during his client’s trial. (That his attorney fell asleep during his trial was not enough for one defendant to successfully challenge a jury’s guilty verdict.)

 There are few unemployed cops but the unemployment rate in the Baltimore area where Freddy Gray lived is 25 percent. The police are supposed to be constantly in grave danger, constantly risking their lives to protect citizens, and there are certainly situations where that happens. How many police are killed by gunfire each year? That varies, but in 2014 there were 27 fatalities by gunshot among all law enforcement officers in this country. Civilians killed by officers are harder to determine because of different reporting standards for each state. Estimates range from four hundred to one thousand. Many of these police shootings of civilians, of course, are the result of suspected felons fleeing arrest. Sometimes, though, it seems that the police officer is acting as judge, jury and executioner. And so police killings of civilians are about twenty-two times more likely than civilian killings of police.

Just some things to think about for those who think.