The Walls, the Bars, the Guns, and the Guards
While justice has yet to be served, some vindication has. Aaron Bowman of Monroe, Louisiana became the latest victim of the Louisiana State Police in May 2019 as he was hit with a flashlight eighteen times while laying on the ground shouting that he wasn’t resisting. His broken ribs, jaw, and wrist have recovered, but his fate hasn’t been decided as he still faces charges for the incident, including battery against a police officer despite the footage of his beating absent of such a crime. Police brutality is as old as policing itself, but even roadside slayings, including with flashlight bludgeoning, is not a novel violence.
"I kept thinking I was going to die that night” — Aaron Bowman
In December 1979, Arthur McDuffie was driving his cousin’s motorcycle in Miami. He was spotted speeding by police, and as they began their pursuit, Arthur, with a suspended license, decided to make a run for it. After a short chase, Arthur decided to surrender. In court, Officer Mark Meier testified that Arthur even declared “I give up” before another officer took him off the motorcycle and removed his helmet. Despite no aggressive movements, the surrounding officers began hitting him with nightsticks and flashlights. These were Kel-Lite flashlights, the heavy duty aluminum ones police carried that preceded the popular commercial brand Maglite. During the beating, Arthur was reportedly laying on his side with his hands behind his back.
As told by an officer in a deposition, “He looked like somebody painted his face with a can of red paint”. The medical examiner described his skull as appearing like a shattered egg. Arthur was only 33 when he was killed by the blows to his head. That wasn’t even the final indignity.
Naturally the officers on scene attempted a coverup that involved running over the motorcycle with a police cruiser to make it appear Arthur had crashed. Varied reports from officers initially made the episode suspicious before some officers, under the weight of guilt, came clean. Officer Charles Veverka recalled “I got splattered with blood” and that another officer halted the melee to say “easy, one at a time” before delivering more blows to the bloodied body before them.
The following year, five of the officers involved (out of eight) went on trial. All were acquitted by a jury consisting solely of white males. The uprising began, mainly in the Liberty City and Overtown neighborhoods, leading to the National Guard being called in to suppress it. When the smoke cleared, half a billion dollars in property damage and eighteen dead lay in the wake of the three day rebellion. Veverka eventually went on to a civil rights trial. He was again acquitted.
Eleven years later the world would witness a vivid retelling of the stories of black America as Rodney King nearly suffered the same fate as Arthur. Los Angeles would erupt, not for the first time, after his torturers were also acquitted.
These incidents represent just the most vicious end of the power wielded by an ever increasing militarized and funded police state. After yet another police killing that vanished another black body with no subsequent justice to speak of, a DOJ investigation of the Ferguson Police Department found between 2012 and 2014, black citizens constituted 85% of people stopped by police and 90% of those who received a citation. This despite 67% of Ferguson’s population being black. The same report found that 13% of municipal budget was through fines and fees in 2012, which went up to 23% in 2015. Affecting the poor, failure to pay only compounded the debt. This of course has the tendency to more strongly affect minority communities across the nation.
This results in a multiplier effect, where citizens don’t have the money to pay fines, more penalties get added at their deadline, they can’t afford representation to fight any of the targeted police harassment, and economic hardship through underemployment and unemployment make court appearances difficult. This can result in jail time, which subsequently makes getting meaningful employment more difficult, parents are taken away from their children, and families starve for income, or literally starve. Instead, this bloody merry-go-round gets fed.
The DOJ found that 93% of people arrested in Ferguson between 2012 and 2014 were black. Black Lives Matter was initiated in response to Trayvon Martin’s targeted murder, but rebellion in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s exploded the movement and deeper racist underpinnings of policing into public consciousness.
It’s a miracle the murder of Walter Scott was filmed, lest another tragedy go unpunished. Eight rounds were unloaded at him, five of which struck and killed him. His death was captured on a cell phone recording as his back was to the officer that had pulled him over. He was running away, twenty feet out from his murderer. The officer, Michael Slager, claimed there was a struggle for his taser. But after he killed Walter, he picked it up off the ground and dropped it by the body. The man who filmed the incident contradicted Slager’s story.
Subsequent years would continue to see backlash to the new civil rights movement have more anger inspired by a Colin Kaepernick kneel than one from Eric Casebolt, the McKinney, Texas cop that restrained and held down a 15-year old black child at a pool party she was attending. Despite then pulling his gun on the rest of the unarmed teenagers, a grand jury didn’t indict him. He did eventually join Kaepernick in the ranks of the unemployed when he resigned days later as an investigation was getting underway. Yet one of these is not like the other. And not until Derek Chauvin’s kneel was some vision of justice in an extrajudicial black death extracted. Video evidence procures no guarantees.
The macabre tapestry that makes up the terror and subjugation of the black community has much further reaches. The American poor suffers these fates to varying degrees, and the intersection between gender, class, and race have been a focus for some corners of civil rights movements since the 1960s. Even with imperfect records, groups like the Black Panther Party recognized this truth. Angela Davis maintained her faith in the Party despite the male face it has usually held, as her commitment to this intersectionality was part of the social platform advocated by the group. But the Panthers still never lost sight of the unique nature of the black experience with the police state, and their Ten-Point Program called for resources to uplift and maintain their own community as an alternative to the failures achieved by feckless politicians, capitalism, and imperialist focus of the State. But I repeat myself.
The incongruous nature of criminal justice in the United States is not a revelation, but events and investigation since the dawn of Black Lives Matter have helped illuminate how deeply entangled it leaves black lives through various facets of American life. So now, as Aaron Bowman attempts to secure a better fate than Arthur McDuffie and Michael Brown, hope begins anew that justice will see its day. However, this justice cannot remain isolated, where a cop or two looks through bars for a while. The system needs its day in court as well. The economic circumstances, often overlooked and often entrenched with vicious purpose, must change. From the aforementioned to Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Botham Jean, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, and the innumerable others, the vice grip of un- and underemployment, derelict housing, incarceration, and simple murder must have its cycle broken.
