April 22, 2021

Without pause or time to process, we went from relief that George Floyd’s murder received the bare minimum of justice to immediately learning of the police killing of a sixteen-year-old Black girl, Ma'Khia Bryant, in Columbus, Ohio. The Columbus police released the bodycam footage of this shooting quickly in order to quell outrage and to show that she was holding a knife and trying to stab another girl. This is proof, apparently, that they were justified in shooting her four times in the chest.

This is the distortion of American militarized policing under which we live. It’s part of the intoxicating spell we hear every day: this is normal, this is the way it is, this is okay, go back to sleep.

When sixteen-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant was shot and killed by police because she was acting violently, we the public are encouraged to think: “What else were the cops supposed to do?” Same when thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo was shot with his hands up in Chicago last week, having just dropped a gun: “What else were they supposed to do?”

America is the only country among our allies that kills its citizens, no matter their age—Black, brown, white, Native, Hispanic, and Asian—literally daily with a sense of justification: What else are we supposed to do? They were acting violently, they wouldn’t stop running, they had a warrant out for their arrest, they were trying to drive away, they were resisting arrest.

But we have got to stop thinking that within the American justice system cops are the judge, jury, and executioner. They are not. They do not exist to decide who is guilty and whose deaths are justified. Violent or not, crazy or not, holding a gun or not, it is not their job to kill people. It is their job to show courage in the face of violence, compassion in the face of fear, and restraint. It is their job to show more restraint than the average person and to deescalate, not to kill.

We need to do better as a society. This can’t continue.

When it comes to what community policing can look like, we have, as author and professor, Dr. Brittney Cooper, calls it “a failure of imagination.” It is a failure of all of our imaginations if—in one week alone—we think it’s normal for children and young adults to be shot by adults in uniform “because” they had a gun (Adam Toledo) or a knife (Ma'Khia Bryant) or got back in the car (Daunte Wright).

“There are questions we can ask. But we’ve got to work from the baseline that a Black girl engaged in conflict with other teenage girls should not be dead. And that the cops are supposed to be the adults in the room, they are supposed to be the people who can assess the situation, and the reason that they are supposed to move with that level of precision is precisely because they have been endowed and invested with the power of lethality, the power to kill citizens.” — Prof. Brittney Cooper, Ph.D.

It is a failure of imagination regarding what our society should be doing with mental health crises, traffic tickets, homelessness, domestic violence, theft, and street fights. We can do better.

Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies