Why 'All Lives Matter' Is a Dodge

There is a serious crisis in American policing. African-Americans have been shouting about it for a couple of years now because they've been its primary victims. I wasn't even finished sorting through the reactions to Wednesday's post about the killing of Alton Sterling by members of the Baton Rouge police department when news about the killing of Philando Castile by members of the police department of a Minneapolis suburb began to filter out.

Now, if two criminally dubious police shootings of helpless African-American men in as many days isn't a critical mass, then critical mass is not achievable short of calling in the Air Force to perform strafing runs on African-American neighborhoods—which, by the way, is something that actually happened in Tulsa in 1921, so there are precedents, damn them all to hell.

From ABC:

Valerie Castile told CNN Thursday that she had instructed her son to always "comply" if he was ever stopped by law enforcement. She said her son didn't deserve "to be shot down like this." He was just "black in the wrong place" and was a victim of "a silent war against African-American people," she said.

One of my correspondents directed my attention to the killing by Fresno Police—who have a long track record of being unacceptably trigger-happy—of a young man named Dylan Noble, who was shot in the parking lot of a gas station because he failed to "show his hands" when police demanded he do so. Per ABC:

The Fresno Police Department said in a statement that its officers were sent "to investigate a report of a man walking in the area with a rifle. While searching the area for the armed subject, officers observed a black pickup truck traveling ... at a high rate of speed. Officers caught up with the vehicle ... and turned on their emergency equipment to conduct a traffic stop. The black pickup truck continued ... refusing to pull over for one-half mile. The truck finally pulled into the parking lot of a gas station on the southwest corner of Shields Avenue and Armstrong Avenue." The statement continues, "During the traffic stop, the driver refused to show his hands to the officers, making a conscious effort to conceal one hand behind his back, then in his waistband, as he exited the truck and walked away from officers. The officers, believing the driver was armed, repeatedly asked him to show his hands and get on the ground. The driver then turned towards officers with one hand concealed behind his back, and told officers he hated his life." This is when the altercation became tense. "As he continued to advance towards officers, an officer-involved shooting occurred," reads the statement. "A total of four shots were fired during the incident."

An officer-involved shooting "occurred." And a cloud drifted across the sun, and a bird sang in a maple tree. Life just "occurs." Whatcha gonna do?

In death, Dylan Noble is being used as some kind of idiotic counterweight to the Black Lives Matter movement, in many cases by people who firmly believe that Black Lives do not Matter. (All Lives Matter, alas, remains a dodge.) Noble's memorial service was enlivened by the presence of the Confederate flag, which Noble's friends insisted was something that would have appalled the unfortunate young man, as The Guardian's reporting makes clear.

In a standoff with Fresno officers at an emotional vigil Sunday night, friends of Noble, who was white, and other critics of the police department took to the streets, some carrying a Confederate flag and others promoting a "White Lives Matter" sign. The message was an appropriation of Black Lives Matter, the civil rights movement that emerged in response to the killings of African-Americans, and the Fresno protest was swiftly mocked as racist and offensive on social media and in news reports. But in the sweltering heat of this suburban city in the Central Valley of California, 200 miles south-east of San Francisco, Noble's friends say the mainstream media and others deriding their protests have deeply misunderstood their way of life and message…They insisted the Confederate flag, which many in the US deem to be a racist symbol associated with slavery, is a nod to their cultural heritage and lifestyle.

(This is, of course, a bullshit excuse when it's used by some ancient unreconstructed Confederate in Alabama, let alone when it's used by young people in California, whose cultural heritage and lifestyle have little to do historically with that odious swatch of fabric, although California's record in the Civil War is a fascinating one.)

Here's why All Lives Matter is a dodge.

In most cases, it has been used by white people who are perfectly willing to admit that all their lives matter while, simultaneously, breaking a lot of rock to support and excuse (largely white) police officers who have been shown to be quick on the trigger to shoot black people who are selling CDs on the street, or breaking neck of black people who sell loosies on the sidewalk.

By using this dodge, they avail themselves of the privilege of their own cultural paranoia and of the protection against imaginary predators that their cultural paranoia concocts for them. This cultural paranoia, of course, is what keeps Wayne LaPierre in the luxury to which he has become accustomed, and it is also the reason that Philando Castile was killed for doing precisely what LaPierre has advised all his audiences to do since the day Adam Lanza shot up an elementary school classroom in Newtown, Connecticut.

Too much All Lives Matter rhetoric has argued, sub rosa, that the police should be licensed to use any means necessary to eliminate the imaginary terrors against which most "decent people" arm themselves. Too much All Lives Matter rhetoric has been shot through with excusing even the most egregious and deadly police misconduct because of the "dangerous job" that police have in controlling not only actual criminals, but the spectral predators in the common mind.

And, worst of all, it blinds the country to the obvious fact that neither Dylan Noble nor Philando Castile should have been shot, but that they were shot because the police in this country are in too many cases out of control, and that the police in this country are in too many cases getting further out of control the more people they kill and the more criticism they get for having done so. You can't weep for Dylan Noble and look for excuses for Darren Wilson. You can't be outraged at what happened in Fresno and cheer the acquittals in Baltimore. And this is a damn shame because we have a crisis in American policing that needs addressing, and that needs addressing fast.

As Radley Balko never ceases to remind us, American police forces are now militarized in mind and in materiel. Police officers are trained to an edge that is far too close to believing their fellow citizens to be enemies. Because of obvious cultural and racial biases, this belief is stronger in the case of some of their fellow citizens than it is in others. As technology has become more readily available, those beliefs no longer make a prima facie case for the defense of random police violence.

And while that technology is far from a panacea, it allows us all to know what is being done in this country in our name by the uniformed representatives of what we all ought to demand—equal justice under the law, not frontier justice masked by casual deceit as thick as body armor, not death by the passive voice or euphemism in which mistakes are made and officer-involved shootings simply occur. This technology is why we all know that none of the three of them, not Alton Sterling, nor Philando Castile nor Dylan Noble should be dead at all.

But technology is a mute witness. The rest of the work needs all our voices.

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Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.