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Anguish

We have been here before, as a nation. As victims of this nation’s original sin, we will be here again. What we, as a civil society, choose to do now will determine how bad the next time will be.

Around 225 persons will have been murdered in the United States this week. Each of them had their stories ended too soon, violently and for no good reasons. Each and every one of those lives were treasured by their families and loved ones, their losses keenly felt by them but by few others. We hear about most of them, if at all, only in passing. Seconds of video over a local newsperson’s shoulder. A few lines in the news section of a local newspaper, a few more on the obituary page.

There are only three things that they all have in common with each other. They will no longer grace us with their continued presence, their passions, their souls. Their number will continue to rise. And they will pass and eventually be forgotten with the rest. As a nation, we have come to accept a butcher’s bill of 12,000 homicides each year as normal. We are numb, most of the time. I am, at least. There are too many, too often.

This week, seven of those 200 deaths have shocked me as few others have. One was in Baton Rouge, one in a Minneapolis suburb, and five in Dallas. I am of an age where to hear the words “snipers” “shots fired” “Dallas ” and “Dealey Plaza” together in news reports chills me to the bone. All of these deaths are shocking.

Earlier in the week, we saw yet more sets of cellphone videos showing African American men shot at close range by white American police officers. According to the Washington Post, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are two of over 500 people shot and killed by police officers so far in 2016. So far, this year is on track to match the year 2015, when 990 citizens lost their lives. Of that number, 258 – a little over a quarter – were black, while the majority, 494, were white. However, blacks are shot and killed by police at a rate disproportionate to their numbers, and often in highly questionable circumstances and frequently by police officers with work histories of violent and prejudicial actions against African Americans. That many of these questionable slayings are, upon investigation, not prosecuted as criminal offenses or, if they are prosecuted, do not lead to convictions, can’t be contested. This is what has been happening in America.

For the decade from 2005 to 2015, of the roughly 1000 annual police-related killings, only an average of five officers per year faced charges; in 2015 that number was 18. Fewer still are convicted. According to reporting in the Huffington Post, over that same decade, the average number of convictions for murder or manslaughter per year is one. For 2014 and 2015, that number was zero.

Confronted frequently with images and video such as we’ve seen this week from Louisiana and Minnesota – and the dozens before that in the last year – compounded with the facts of the numbers, is it any wonder that African Americans feel especially vulnerable to death by police, deaths for which there will likely be no accountability? I don’t think so. Which goes a long way to explain the mass of protests, demonstrations and organizing around the country known collectively as Black Lives Matter. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are promised to us in our national Declaration of Independence as inalienable rights endowed on all of us by the Creator. I don’t begrudge the black community for feeling that the first of these might be kind of tenuous whenever they deal with law enforcement. Of course, most daily interactions between police and citizens end, if not always well in the case of those arrested, peacefully.

In the grand scheme of things, in the hundreds of millions of daily interactions we have in this country, most people are law abiding, as most law officers are professional, well-trained and honest in dealing with citizens. But it’s out at the margins, at the bleeding edge, where people can get killed.

Dallas shows us that. A peaceful demonstration in Dallas last night turned into chaos, as at least one gunman and perhaps more assassinated five police officers and wounded several more. Officers Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Omar Cannon, Misty McBride, and Jesus Retana were killed, allegedly by a former US Army Reservist, if current news reports hold up, quoted by the Dallas Police Chief as having “told police he was ‘upset at white people. “The suspect stated that he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

Dallas is still reeling, as the city tries to cope with last night’s shock. The families of officers killed and wounded should be in our thoughts and prayers, as they should be with the families in Baton Rouge and Minnesota coping with the loss of their loved ones. In this, Dallas takes the place in our heart that Orlando filled such a short while ago. Who will be next?

It’s impossible to look at the events this week outside the context of America’s original sin of historical and ongoing racism towards African Americans. The problem predates by a century and a half the independence of this country under the principles of the Declaration, mentioned above, that still remain aspirations for many of our citizens, and not guarantees. After weeks such as this, tempers are raw, racial tensions are high, and we must grieve.

It would be a mistake, in my opinion, to react to the murders this week as proving we are in a new spiral of racially-motivated violence and reprisals, especially focused on police. There is, for example, no “war on cops,” as irresponsibly charged today by Executive Director William Johnson of the National Association of Police Organizations. Policing is an inherently dangerous profession, and always has been. But historical trends over the last 85 years, since the Great Depression, have shown significant decreases in police line-of-duty fatalities. Those decreases, as reported last year in the Washington Post, are in several categories: absolute numbers, fatalities per capita of population and per capita of police officers. Graphs in that report show a major spike in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, but since around 1975, the numbers have shown major improvements. Over the last few years, police deaths have been at low numbers not seen since the 1950’s, when the US population was half what it is now. Mr. Johnson said on Fox News today, “It’s a war on cops. And the Obama administration is the Neville Chamberlain of this war.” But that doesn’t make it so.

In fact, it would also be wrong, irresponsibly so, to call political violence against police as being exclusively or even largely racially motivated by revenge-seeking blacks. Remember that eight federal law enforcement agents – along with 163 others – were assassinated by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in 1995’s Murrah Office Building bombing in Oklahoma City. And it is Cliven Bundy, his two sons and two others who are under Federal indictment for “launching a ‘massive armed assault’ on federal officials, gaining hundreds of followers by spreading lies on the Internet, and encouraging their supporters to take sniper positions on highway bridges above government agents, unarmed adults and children.” In that last incident described in the quote, around 50 federal law enforcement agents were literally under the sights of up to 200 “patriot militia” members, looking for a fight, and ready to kill police. That that day did not turn out as bloody or worse than Dallas last night is only due to the fortitude of the federal agents on the scene, who deliberately avoided any actions that could have turned that day tragic.

As these incidents show, if there is in fact a war against cops, long-running and ideologically intense, it’s almost – but not entirely – directed mainly against the Federal government and its law enforcement agents. And it’s on the part of “Patriot Movements” such as those associated with McVeigh, Nichols, and the Bundys, and many of the 998 anti-government groups identified this year by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It would most definitely not be waged by Black Lives Matter.

So what can be done, after we mourn our dead this week, and dread the next ones to die?

Well, perhaps one place to start is the one suggested by Nancy Tourneau in the Washington Monthly yesterday. As incidents far afield as Louisiana, Minnesota, Texas, and South Carolina show, ours are national problems. Our pain is felt across the country, the blood spilled is spilled from sea to shining sea, and new graves are dug in all 50 states. Tourneau suggests a national approach:

Throughout our history, all of the major gains we’ve achieved in civil rights have come because of federal action. It started with ending slavery via the Civil War, but continued with everything from the Brown v Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court to the undoing of Jim Crow laws via the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. None of these things would have happened if change had been left up to individual states.

Today we must face the civil rights issue of our time – both the over-incarceration of black and brown people and the police abuses that have been capturing the headlines once again. One of the reasons so many people are frustrated is that most of the control over these issues is currently in the hands of state and local governments. Progress is – at best – a patchwork, and tends to come in jurisdictions that are probably already in the lead on addressing them.

If we are to learn anything from our past, it is time to start thinking about how the federal government should be enabled to respond.

It’s a tall order. And one that will take time, and hard work, and good will. After a week such as this one has been, the latter may be in short supply. But it’s the only way that I can think of to make an honest effort to ensure that the anguish caused by these seven deaths this week is not cruelly repeated, again and again and again, into our shared future.

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