Blake Shuart: Justice reform is needed more than ever
What exactly caused George Floyd’s death? We know the knee of an unhinged policeman restricted the flow of oxygenated blood through his body, causing asphyxiation. But the brain is the body’s central command center, so what was going on in this officer’s head that led him to take such senseless action?
Was it fear, paired with the human instinct to fight for survival? Couldn’t be — the gentleman posed no risk.
Was it suppressed anger that finally boiled over during this one encounter on this routine shift — the type of bottled-up rage that would have ended any man’s life at that moment, regardless of his race? It’s possible, but unlikely.
Was it racial prejudice: an overwhelming hatred for the black race causing uncontrollable desire to end a life? Or was it a misplaced sense of power and entitlement feeding a callous desire to kill? These last two theories seem the most viable.
Both have to be factors, really. People don’t go around all day committing murder based solely upon racial prejudice — there is usually some additional inciting factor. And we’ve seen this happen too many times to believe the officer was colorblind.
Entitlement and prejudice likely told this officer to kill George Floyd. Both of these mindsets are acquired, not genetic, and eliminating them from our planet is an urgent and boundlessly important task. And while we work in earnest to banish these evils from the Earth, we should consider another aspect of the Floyd occurrence — his custodial arrest.
In his speech on Floyd’s death, Democratic presidential challenger Joe Biden — a key player behind the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (the “crime bill”) — remarked:
“Most cops meet the highest standards of their profession. All the more reason that bad cops should be dealt with severely and swiftly. We all need to take a hard look at the culture that allows for these senseless tragedies to keep happening.”
Biden is right on all three fronts. And when he takes a hard look at the culture which allows these tragedies, he ought to define “culture” to include mass arrest and incarceration. Biden was a primary architect of this culture. We can fight to end racial prejudice. We can reform police policies on hiring and training. But if our ultimate end is justice, we must include the letter of the law in our plan.
If each U.S. state was treated as a country for the purpose of data analysis, the top 32 “countries” in the world for rates of incarceration would be 31 U.S. states plus the U.S. Leading the way is Oklahoma — a state that locks up 1,079 people out of every 100,000.
The United States is the world’s largest jailor by a wide margin, with 698 people locked up per 100,000. We arrest someone every three seconds in America — over 28,000 arrests per day and over 10 million per year. An unduly high percentage of these arrests are for minor offenses such as drug possession — arrests which occur in disparate rates within the black community.
It is often these same arrests for minor offenses which facilitate the types of encounters that escalate into tragedy. When this officer suspected that George Floyd had counterfeited a $20 bill to buy cigarettes, his cop instincts told him — and the law directed him — to place Floyd in police custody. A jail cell could well have been his next destination.
Maybe this is the action we want our officers to take in America. But what is our society gaining from it? Are we better as a country when our pastures are blanketed with overflowing jails and prisons? Maybe we want to remain tough on crimes like theft while diverting drug offenders into treatment, but the two offenses are often interrelated for obvious reasons, which makes it necessary to view street-level policing through a broad lens.