White Pride

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

When my son was four years old, one early morning he came running into our bedroom in some distress. He cried out to my wife and me, tears in his eyes, to hurry, come and see. We followed him to the front window. He pointed out.

“Look!” he wailed, “they’re stealing our trash!”

It was Thursday: trash pick-up day. 

Where I live now the other day, in Boulder, Colorado, a man was accosted, not by a toddler just learning how things are done, but by a half-dozen police, hands on their guns, for much the same thing. He was picking up trash. He didn’t work for the trash company. He lived there.

He wasn’t treated as if he lived there. He was a black man in a white neighborhood.

The video a neighbor took of the encounter isn’t quite “Jews will not replace us” caliber, but is chilling.

An officer stands, hand on his gun, confronting the man. A neighbor implores the officer: “Go home. There’s a camera on you officer, take your hand off your gun. He’s picking up trash, and you have your hand on your gun?”

The black man is enraged, though not confrontational. He’s holding a bucket in one hand, a trash grabber in the other. To anyone who isn’t legally blind, it isn’t threatening in the least. He’s not even pointing the trash grabber at the officer. “You’re going to shoot me? I’m standing on my own property, and you have your hand on a gun, threatening to shoot me, because I’m picking up trash. I’m pretty upset.”

The neighbor cries out, “What am I watching? Oh my GOD!”

More officers arrive. More threats that another unarmed black man will be slaughtered by another ill-trained cop who perceives dark skin as a threat in itself.

“We live here,” the neighbor implores.

And then the officer uses the phrase that countless unarmed black men have heard just before they died: “Drop the weapon!” the officer commands while pointing to the plastic trash grabber.

“I don’t have a weapon,” the man says. All he needs to do now, to end his life, is to make some move this idiot cop can interpret as furtive or sudden; that’s all he needs to end this man’s life.

The neighbor continues to implore: “He lives here. This is family.”

The black man says he lives in the building, goes to school here, that the cop has no right to be doing this.

The neighbor now begins to scream at the cops, and if I were the cop I’d be more scared of the neighbor, but the neighbor is white, and all the focus of bringing deadly force to bear is on the black man. “NO RIGHT AT ALL!” the neighbor screams.  “WE FUCKING LIVE HERE! PICKING UP GARBAGE!”

There are now eight officers surrounding the black man, at least one with his weapon drawn.

“Eight officers of the law, with guns drawn, for picking up garbage on our property,” the neighbor says unbelievingly, “on our property, where we live. 

“(He) has a clamp, and a bucket,” he adds disgustedly. 

Another officer wields a shotgun. Shotgun vs. trash grabber. Mexican standoff. The officers are in contact with the watch commander at the police station, who advises that maybe they should simply walk away, leave the man and the neighborhood in peace. Apparently there is nothing in the Colorado Revised Statutes where a bucket and a trash grabber implicate a crime.

And so they gather their pride, and their guns, and they leave.

The black man needn’t die today. Not today.