Editorials

If you’ve been exposed to the New Testament, either in church or just Bible as Literature class, you might recall that as Jesus was dying on the cross he invited one of the thieves who were being killed at his side to join him in Paradise that day. The lesson we were supposed to learn from that verse (Luke 23:43), at least at my school, is that no one is beyond forgiveness, that it’s never too late to repent. 

Today, when Christians remember the crucifixion story, press reports of the summary execution of Stephon Clark in Sacramento continue to be appalling. The worst part of the story is that the police pursuit which resulted in his death was begun on the flimsiest of excuses. There's no proof that he committed a crime, but in any event he died within seconds of being challenged by the Sacramento police--no time to repent if he'd wanted to. 

The most believable version I’ve been able to find in the press is that someone, “someone”, had been breaking car windows with some sort of tool, maybe a crowbar, and that the sheriff’s department helicopter,hovering over the scene, told the Sacramento police in the neighborhood that they’d spotted this someone. No positive identification of Stephon (whose brother called him a boy, though he was 22 and had two kids) as the culprit has even been reported. 

But what if he was that guy in the black hoodie the sheriffs said they saw? Is there a death penalty for breaking car windows? There’s not even an allegation that “someone” stole anything. No crowbar was found. 

Random vandalism to car windows is unfortunately very common—it happened on my block to a couple of cars just last week, and yes, it’s annoying. But you don’t shoot a kid with 20 bullets for breaking windows. Especially, of course, if he didn’t do it. 

Or you do, perhaps, if he’s black or brown. The standard excuse when police officers shoot to kill is that they were afraid, afraid that the suspect had a weapon and would use it. But they were wrong, fatally wrong, in this case as in all too many others. No gun, just the phone that all kids have in their hands these days. 

There are two problems here. First, you can call it racism, even though one of the cops has been identified as African-American. Race-based fear permeates our culture, and it even affects members of the feared ethnic groups sometimes. It’s irrational, not based on statistics, but it’s there. 

Unfortunately, the other problem is based on statistics. Studies show, or at least as many studies as the U.S. government has allowed, that the more guns a country has the more gun deaths it has from all causes.  

Duh…but NRA types routinely deny it. But what that means is that a police officer’s fear that a subject has a gun is more likely to be correct than it would be in a rational society. I’ve not looked it up, but I’ll bet that in Australia by the population percentages many fewer suspects are killed by police there than in this country, regardless of race, since excess guns have been taken out of the equation in Australia. American police kill people they think just might have one, and too many guns in circulation increases that type of fear.  

That doesn’t mean, however, that police should ever be allowed to get away with shooting to kill on suspicion of vandalism. Also unfortunately, there’s an obvious motivation for pumping a boy’s body full of lead: dead men tell no tales. And just to make sure, don’t rush for medical attention. If the kid were simply wounded, lawsuits leading to lifetime awards could be anticipated. If he’s dead, in most cases life goes on for the killer, as it did in a recently decided Louisiana case and many more. From the Washington Post story on that one: 

“While just under 1,000 people are shot and killed by police annually, just a handful of those cases each year lead to criminal charges, according to The Washington Post’s fatal police shooting database.” 

If police officers make a fatal mistake about how much danger they’re in and kill someone, they should immediately be fired. Such bad judgment, even once, is simply a disqualification for the job.  

The most rational response to Stephon Clark’s killing has been shown by his brother Stevante: pure rage. Just rage, without qualification. No surprise that Black people are enraged time and again by these senseless summary executions, but all of us should be, and should do something about it. What exactly that can be is not clear. 

In Berkeley would-be reformers have been struggling with these questions for years, hoping for action from the city council but not getting it, as of this week's council meeting. Now a pair of ballot measures are being circulated by those hoping to come up with some solutions. We’ll see how well they do.