Samuel DuBose's killing is a dark cloud with a grim silver lining
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Version 0 of 1. There is nothing good, but there is much bad and ugly, about the fact that Samuel DuBose’s killing at the hands of University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing was caught on video by a body camera. He is still needlessly dead. But there is a silver lining in what it can mean going forward, as Aubrey DuBose, Samuel’s brother, articulated at a press conference on Wednesday. It’s a silver lining when a white prosecutor, Joe Deters, got up in front of the Cincinnati press and unequivocally denounced the “unnecessary” but “purposeful” killing of DuBose as “murder” – without any of the usual equivocation which makes black victims have to defend themselves from beyond the grave. There’s a lining in Deters, the representative of his city, saying that he feels “sorry for his family” and not expressing something crude like, say, blaming him for his death, as the City of Cleveland did with Tamir Rice. There’s a lining in that, unlike Ferguson Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, Deters seemed to want an indictment, got one from a grand jury and swiftly had Tensing in custody. And there’s a lining in that Tensing and Officer Phillip Kidd, who reportedly corroborated his story, will not get away with filing an incident report which made DuBose out to be a someone trying to harm an officer. But these tiny victories are achieved only by having very low expectations of what justice should be and what it should look like for African-Americans. Police have killed 664 people in the US as of Wednesday, but only a handful are indicted in any given year. So, there’s a lot of bad revealed by this video, and the reaction to it, which outweighs anything vaguely optimistic. It’s bad that we are, yet again, being inured to the image of black death. It’s bad that the University of Cincinnati (whose cop killed DuBose) cancelled classes in advance of the grand jury decision out of “an abundance of caution” – in other words, they feared a riot. That’s an insulting presumption further perpetuated by both Deters and Mayor John Cranley. And it was was really bad that Deters denied reality when he said: “This doesn’t happen in the United States. This might happen in Afghanistan.” For Deters to say that Americans don’t die because of a routine traffic stop was particularly egregious the week after Sandra Bland’s funeral; and, his implication that unjust, inhumane torture and death in Afghanistan are somehow unrelated to the United States was laughable. It was ugly that University of Cincinnati police have such a “culture of wanting to control your environment all the time,” as Deters put it, that their cop felt a deadly entitlement, on campus or off. It was ugly that Deters called the killing “asinine,” which was woefully inadequate. And it was was ugly that the Cincinnati journalists at Deter’s press conference seemed to be as scared of potentially angry black people as Ohio officials: one of the first questions Audrey DuBuose, Samuel’s mother, grotesquely got asked was whether she was ready to forgive, and one of the first his brother, Aubrey, got was asked was about whether he would endorse peace, which he did. Black people are expected to forgive (and endorse the status quo) before we grieve, feel anger or even recover from the shock of the death of a loved one. I don’t recall a 9/11 family being asked if they were ready to forgive Mohamed Atta in September of 2001, but black people are asked to forgive and forgo any sense of accountability quite regularly. Dubose’s mother and sister rose above all of this to share a sense of gratitude but also defiance. Audrey gave thanks that the murder was videotaped, and asked that people “just lift up their heads in prayer, and thank God because this one did not go unsolved and hidden.” But she was not at all passive, thanking the “soldiers” who had stood by her before the video came out and saying “I am ready to join the battlefield.” Similarly, his sister, Terina Allen, said that she was angry but also appreciative that some level of justice was conceivable. After hearing accusations she knew were untrue but seemingly unprovable about her brother, she said didn’t think justice would have been possible without the camera – and knows it isn’t for many whose encounters aren’t recorded. I feel far more angry than celebratory by this video. I am angered that without the video, DuBose would have been written off as a murderous thug who deserved to die. I am angered that Cincinnati officials placed suspicion on black people citywide for the actions of a police officer. And most of all, I am angry that even wearing a body cam did not stop Tensing from shooting DuBose in the head. |