One of the officers who died in Baton Rouge today was Montrell L. Jackson, an African American, a husband, a father of an infant son, a 10-year veteran of the police department who in 2007 suffered smoke inhalation after going unto a burning building to try to save a baby.
The New York Times reports he’d posted this on his Facebook page the morning after the police shooting in Dallas:
“I’m tired physically and emotionally.”
“I swear to God I love this city, but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform, I get nasty hateful looks, and out of uniform some consider me a threat. I’ve experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core.”
“This city MUST and WILL get better. I’m working in these streets so any protesters, officers, friends, family or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer. I got you.”
He was ready to embrace anyone feeling lousy and freaked out about the tension and violence in our country right now. I think we all owe it to him to hear his words and try to take them to heart.
On Friday, Black Lives Matter activists DeRay McKesson, on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, said protests are a way of forcing a conversation in public. I thought that was a great definition.
“When I think about protests, I think of it as this idea of telling the truth in public,” he said, adding how victims of police violence like Philando Castille and Alton Sterling should still be alive. “And what’s powerful is that these conversations, I hope, are leading to better conversations about solutions.”
Stephen asked if -- as President Obama urged us all to do in his speech at the memorial for the slain Dallas police officers — McKesson could imagine how police officers do after the ambush in Dallas. McKesson said:
“We can accept that policing is hard, we can accept that people wanna wake up every day and they wanna go home alive,” Mckesson said. “We accept those things. When I think about the medical profession, right? I’m not a doctor, but I have expectations about how doctors function. I’ve not been a policeman, but I have expectations that they don’t kill people as a condition of their job.”
Black Lives Matter has been trying to force us as a nation to notice the unarmed black people are being killed by police — by what I’m sure is a small percentage of police officers. BLM has been trying to force us to to have a conversation and make changes.
We need to have that conversation. We need to admit there’s a problem and work to address it, because there’s a ton of hate in our country, of racism and a ton of guns. It’s a bad combination. It’s a dangerous one.
Some of us have been hoping to have a conversation about reasonable gun regulations. I don’t think we’ve done enough to try to force a conversation in public. Sounds scary to even try that right now, but we certainly need to address the problem.
Baton Rouge officer Montrell L. Jackson said he felt the hate when he was in uniform, because he’s a policeman, and he felt that out of uniform, some people saw him as a threat (because he’s black, he meant). He could see both sides of the problem. He knew things need to change.
We can start to work toward change now or we can wait until the situation gets worse. I fear it will get worse.
Never, ever thought I’d quote George Bush in any way but mockingly, but whoever wrote his speech for the Dallas memorial service said, brilliantly I thought:
“Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.”
We have to stop doing that, too.
We’re all capable of doing better. I remember seeing a bit of the protest in Baton Rouge after the Dallas shooting and saying to my husband about the police in their riot gear, “They look like idiots. They look like robots in a sci-fi movie.” It seemed like a terrible overreaction.
In the days after that protest, the Baton Rouge police said a pawn shop had been robbed of guns and/or ammunition, and one of the suspects they’d picked up had said they wanted weapons because they wanted to kill police officers. They’d picked up three people on weapons charges, but so far hadn’t charged anyone with plotting to kill police officers.
I didn’t believe them. I thought they were trying to cover their ass over the protests where they’d worn their riot gear and arrested so many protestors.
And now we have dead police officers in Baton Rouge. So, I’m beyond feeling like an idiot. I just feel terribly sad and fearful of where we’re going as a country. (God, I sound like a Republican now.)