Held to answer

While an American city’s municipal government was held ransom in a cyber attack, our national obsession with race took priority: Another black martyr was born, this time in a Sacramento backyard.

The timing of Stephon Clark’s death couldn’t have been better for the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been capitalizing on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.

Clark, a felon who had been convicted of domestic violence (among other crimes), is no King.

Clark – and his brother, Stevante – better represent the young black men who turned King’s final march in Memphis into a riot.

Even NPR in its revisiting of MLK’s assassination noted that King’s peaceful march in Memphis on behalf of sanitation workers was ruined when “a group of young men broke away … and started breaking into the windows of businesses and taking sticks and breaking the windows out.”

These young men turned King’s march into a melee and gave police a legitimate reason to respond with tear gas and nightsticks. A 16-year-old was killed on suspicion of looting, and roughly 250 people were arrested.

“It came apart, and Dr. King was very disappointed,” Fred Davis, one of Memphis’s first black city councilmen, told NPR.

As a result, King said he would have to spend more time in Memphis than he originally planned.

What if there hadn’t been a riot? What if those young men had followed King’s example and marched nonviolently to make their point on behalf of a worthy cause for the sanitation workers?

Fifty years later, there are black Americans who quickly turn to violent protest when things don’t go their way.  More than anything, the protests have changed how the media report officer-involved shootings. They are covered as a race issue. Whatever crime may have been committed to involve police in the first place becomes irrelevant.

When I first heard news reports of “an unarmed black man” shot by “Sacramento police officers,” I wondered if one of the cops was non-white because otherwise the reports would have automatically said “shot by white police officers.”

Later when the news was that Clark’s family hired its own expert to analyze autopsy findings and found he had been shot several times in the back, there was little effort on the part of media to explain how the force of a gun shot to the front of a body can spin it around.

This is how the American media fashion the news to appease certain groups.

Because of the overwrought coverage of all officer-involved shootings involving a black person, it’s hard to sort the questionable shootings from the justifiable. To Black Lives Matter protesters, all black deaths at the hands of police are cold-blooded murder. In this distorted view, Quanice Hayes and Stephon Clark are as innocent as Tamir Rice and Philando Castile.

The general public is learning to read between the lines. When people are skeptical of police behavior (in some cities you’re lucky to get any police response to reports of vandalism, which led to the confrontation with Clark) it comes down to gut reaction: Did the dead guy sound like someone you would want for a neighbor?

There will be no police reform until there are reforms in the black community. Consider the scene when Stevante Clark and his mob took over the Sacramento City Council chambers.

How many people, in the privacy of their own minds, watched that TV footage and thought Stevante Clark looked like a looter out of central casting?

I watched it and thought of Linda Brown, the young black girl whose father’s lawsuit in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka struck down school segregation. Linda Brown recently died at age 75, and old photos of her surrounded by white classmates show an adolescent girl with far more comportment in tough circumstances than Stevante Clark’s mob.

Americans are not going to turn over their criminal justice system to the BLM crowd without a fight. People are not going to stop calling police just because a suspect might be black.

If police are forced to bow to political pressures in some communities, there could be unintended consequences.

In Portland, Ore., last year the police purged its directory of designated gang members to the approval of black community leaders and the ACLU. Recently, a city audit found that the Portland Police Bureau still maintains an informal list of active gang members.

This would seem to be common sense. A police department should keep tabs on gang activity. But because a disproportionate number of gang members are black, there has been criticism that blacks are on the list because they were racially profiled.

A perfect illustration of this absurdity was on display April 3 in the Portland Tribune. On one page was a “clarification” in which Mayor Ted Wheeler twists himself into a progressive pretzel explaining that when he previously made reference to the “skewed demographics of gang-related shootings” he didn’t mean African-Americans.

Two pages over, there’s a brief story about Portland having a surge in gang violence (no mention that it might have something to do with gangs becoming emboldened after last year’s public purging of the gang list).

Then a few pages over from that is an op-ed by Daryl Turner, president of the Portland Police Association – and a black man – explaining that the Gang Enforcement Team doesn’t racially profile black drivers. Officers are too busy handling calls involving actual gang violence (including gunfire).

What is really skewed in Portland and the rest of America is our obsession with race – fueled by the media and one political party in particular.

It reminds me of the frenzy in the two years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001. Then, we were obsessed with a stain on a White House intern’s blue dress. Meanwhile, a band of terrorists had other things on their minds.

Now we have cyber attacks that barely merit a yawn. A hospital in Indiana paid roughly $50,000 to retrieve patient data held ransom. In Baltimore, a cyber attack took down the city’s computer-aided dispatch system for 911 calls. The Atlanta cyber attack briefly seemed to kick up concerns.

There was this hopeful story in Scientific American: “Urban Bungle: Atlanta Cyber Attack Puts Other Cities on Notice.”

But a visit to the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s website yesterday had barely a mention, even though the attack has still crippled some public services.

However, there was this familiar story: An ex-commissioner used a racial slur during a Confederate History Month address.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

From the Archives:

Rodney King’s “Junkyard of Dreams”

NPR’s Racial Profiling

The Tail Wagging the Police Dog

Oh Darn, Please Drop the Gun