Wake-Up Call?

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I remember the first unarmed black man I saw shot in the back by a white cop.

He was facedown on the street, one arm twisted beneath him, the other flung forward over his head as though trying to grab the pavement to pull himself further from the cop who’d just shot him. So still in the midday light. The hole in his back, south-west of his right shoulder blade, must have shut down his heart at once: it showed barely red at all through his ruined shirt.

At first I thought he must be a car mechanic, the back of his hand black with grease. When they turned him I saw he was black all over.

When I wrote about it I don’t remember it as a big thing: white cop shoots unarmed black man. The cop didn’t know whether he was armed or not; the guy had just robbed a bank and was trying to get away, and in those days — somewhere around 1973 — you shot bank robbers, armed or not, who were trying to get away.

Jacob Blake wasn’t a bank robber trying to get away. He was a father attacked by cops and in stunned shock trying to walk back to the sanctuary of his car and his three young children inside. Followed by a cop with drawn weapon who, when Blake tried to open his door and sit down, grabbed him from behind by his tee shirt and without warning or hesitation shot him seven times in the back. Two seconds to shred his kidneys, liver, stomach, and colon; to sever his spine.

George Floyd wasn’t a bank robber trying to get away. Neither were Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, nor Eric Garner, all and more of whose unjustly taken lives are writ large in these pages.

“America is not a racist country,” Nikki Haley said at the Republican National Convention, urging support for perhaps the most blatant and obvious racist president in the history of the country, who describes neo-Nazi white supremacists as “very fine people,” warns that blacks will infest our suburban white neighborhoods, and tells U.S. Congresswomen of color to go back to the shithole countries from which they came. Who welcomes white neighbors from the north and meets brown ones from the south with a beautiful wall. Who bans Muslims. A nation is personified by its leader: One Nation under Trump is all-in racist.

One Nation Under Trump would have us be asleep to the disproportionate killings, brutality, and arrests of people of color by our police, to simply close our eyes and pretend it isn’t so.

Asleep, we don’t see that Hispanic Americans are nearly twice as likely than white Americans to be killed by police; black Americans about two and a half times as likely. Police in the United States shoot and kill about one thousand people every year. Overwhelmingly, the cops who shoot them face armed threats to their own lives or to the lives of others.

But asleep, we don’t see that thirteen unarmed black men, and one unarmed black woman, were killed by our police last year, and this year’s similar pace is about one unarmed black man or black woman homicide by cop every month.

The Atlantic called Jacob Blake’s shooting a wake-up call.

But how many wake-up calls do we need, before we actually wake up?