Let’s call it what it is. The Police State

Ever since Oscar Grant got shot in the back while lying down, not resisting on New Year’s Eve by a BART cop, I knew we have a police accountability problem. Officer Johannes Mehserle just pulled out his service revolver, stuck it in Oscar’s back and pulled the trigger. It was recorded by like three cameras. Days later, the BART and Oakland Police (who had jurisdiction) couldn’t figure out what to do or say. It took a full 30 days for the officer to be charged. That was the beginning. Since then there has been a list too long to put in a blog post from Michael Brown to Walter Scott to Eric Garner. Women and men of color are randomly stopped for various reasons and end up dead the hands of the police. The common factor: their skin isn’t light enough.

A few weeks back a writer friend of mine reposted an article on Facebook about Fay Wells. She’s an African American resident of Santa Monica that was extracted from her own home at gunpoint. The extractors: nineteen members of the Santa Monica constabulary. They had a report a “Latino” was attempting to rob the place. It was unclear who the Latino was (a locksmith she had called) or Fay Wells herself. The police seemed to have pursued the event like an insurgent rout out in Fallujah. She was pulled from her home and made to submit publically at gunpoint and at no-time was she treated with the dignity of a innocent citizen of Santa Monica. She was asking for an apology. She didn’t get one. Kevin (my friend) of indigenous ancestry, took a fairly radical posture on the subject. (From a white boy’s perspective) He condemned the cops in a cross between professorial intellectual dissection and general “I’m fed up with this” that has led to “Black Lives Matter.”

I elected to comment focusing on whether Fay Wells had a reasonable expectation of getting an apology from the police. I pointed out I know a few cops and gave a couple examples from my life of why that wasn’t going to happen.  The examples were watered down and edited for all my friends on Facebook. (Cops included.) I got called on my “White Boy” shit. Basically told, I can’t know what it’s like to worry about getting shot by police on a regular basis from my privileged first class suite riding white butt flying high over the rest of the populace. He was right. I don’t. I have never had a gun pointed at me, or billy club or cuff applied. Worse part is, I started writing this from a First Class Suite on American Airlines on the way to Tokyo.

I spent eleven days in Japan. During which time the Planned Parenthood and San Bernardino mass shootings occurred.  (I know, not related you think.)  After San Bernardino, I read an article by Max Fisher on the plane back from Tokyo explaining why no mass shootings occur in Japan. The Japanese banned guns and swords in the late 1950’s. The result, only 11 people were killed by gunshot in a country of 80 million last year. The U.S equivalent would be about 30 people.  Max stated the reason the Japanese have succeeded in this is they have a higher tolerance for living in a police state. Having been overwhelmed with the politeness of the Japanese policemen and knowing the incarceration rate there is 10 percent of America’s, I wondered if Max had ever been to Japan?

I got home to watch the video of five San Francisco police officers shoot Mario Woods. This left me wondering who really lives in a police state? Certainly not the citizens of Japan whose cops are unarmed. The Japanese police couldn’t instantly seize such power over life as they don’t have the weapons. They don’t need them because Japanese don’t have guns.  

Over 100,000 people are shot in the United States each year. We always focus on the number killed, about 33,000, and discount the other 67,000 as immaterial inconveniences. Much like the five cops treated Mario Woods.  It’s interesting, I know fourteen people who have been shot. Quite a bit for a top three percent white boy. The circumstances vary, four of the shootings were teenage boys fucking around with their father’s guns they didn’t realize were loaded. One was a bird hunting mishap involving teenage brothers. They knew the guns were loaded, but one brother still managed to shoot the other.  One was a suicide. Another a husband murdering one of my college professors who left him, then killing himself.  Two were out and out murder attempts. Lovell Mixon succeeded in killing my friend Mark Dunakin,  and three other Oakland officers.  (They are not in the count as I didn’t personally know them.)  The second murder attempt was a friend who was shot walking in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland one night by an estranged boyfriend. Two of the other people were just standing on streets in Oakland and San Francisco and got hit by stray bullets. The final guy was shot at an intersection on his way to work in the morning. Only five of the fourteen are still alive. They all had to be responded to by police, rushed to a hospital trauma unit, operated on, and spent quite a bit of time healing.  Never mind the hospital expense. I know the Hell the five who survived went through. I always wonder how America sweeps 67,000 such events under the carpet each year. I mean people who die from gunshots, like soldiers who die in war have finished the trauma. The survivors live with it for life. You know who else lives with it? The cops. They go out and face guns on daily basis, like the fourteen people I know that have been shot. It takes a toll.  Mario Woods, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Michael Brown were on the wrong end of that toll. That doesn’t excuse what the five San Francisco police officer did to Mario Woods or the inability of the San Francisco police department to take action. Basically the five need to be fired, and charged with negligent homicide. 

But that’s not the root of the problem. Our problem is we let guns loose in our society. The result is 100,000 shootings annually and cops we are all afraid of. Why are we afraid of cops?  Because they are afraid of us: the armed citizenry. Everyone buying guns after mass shootings only makes everyone more paranoid. So we buy more guns. There are over 300 million in the country now. Annually 467,000 crimes are committed with guns in the United States. So that’s only one in six hundred of us that will end up with a gun pointed our direction next year, and only one in six of those people will get shot. So you only have a one in 3600 chance of getting shot next year, and a 1 in 360 in getting shot in the next decade. To keep this in perspective, you have a one in 6700 chance of dying in a car crash next year. That’s if you are the average citizen. Reside in a poor neighborhood and your chances go up few hundred percent of guns being pointed at you. Get a job as cop in those neighborhoods and well…