While the South gets a lot of attention when it comes to racism, and not completely undeservedly so, it is also fallacious to pretend that this is about one backward-ass town.
If the Jena 6 case wasn’t black and white enough for you (pardon the pun), there’s this horror story out of Oakland:
Gary King and a group of friends were walking out of East Bay Liquors. A patrol officer, Sgt. Pat Gonzales, was headed southbound on the other side of MLK, near the 55th Street light. The officer claims to have identified King as a potential suspect in a murder that had occurred nearby a month prior (note here the words “potential” and “suspect”). For anyone that knows the geography of the incident, this “identification” was quite a feat: a full block away, looking diagonally across six lanes and between the thick pillars supporting the BART tracks, Gonzales was allegedly capable of identifying King.
The officer crossed under the tracks, tires squealing, to confront the group of teens in front of the liquor store. According to witnesses, Gonzales grabbed King by his dreads, while it remains unclear if the officer was attempting to carry out an arrest. After King pulled away from Gonzales, the officer used his Taser to try to incapacitate this “potential suspect.” When this didn’t work, King took off fleeing across the MLK crosswalk. Before even reaching the divider, Gonzales had shot him twice in the back. No fewer than a dozen witnesses corroborated this to me, which isn’t surprising since the shooting took place in broad daylight on a busy street.
According to a witness, who identifies himself as King’s cousin, after shooting King, Gonzales grabbed him. “He held his gun in my face and told me I better watch it.” The officer then approached the dying King to handcuff him, before leaving him lying in the street to call backup. According to witnesses, it was only after the backup arrived that an ambulance was called. After being left bleeding, handcuffed on the pavement for nearly 15 minutes, Gary King was dead by the time he reached Highland Hospital. He was the third fatal victim of an “officer-involved shooting” this year, a polite term the OPD likes to use when it kills people.
Dozens of police cars then maintained a blockade, shutting down the six-lane street for more than four hours. According to one witness to the shooting, this was “to prevent a riot,” and also to give the officers a chance to cover-up the details of the killing and, according to some, plant a gun on the victim. King’s cousin is clearly suffering when I speak with him: “They shot my cousin right in my face We traumatized, we fucked up.” The victim’s brothers, too, are paying their respects. One is a teary-eyed 17-year old wearing a sweatshirt with pictures of King and the message “R.I.P. G-Money.”
According to Gonzales, via a statement from the OPD, the officer felt a gun in King’s pants, and after the young man attempted to flee, Gonzales claims that he was seen reaching into his waistband. The press has largely reiterated the official story: King was an “armed suspect” who threatened an officer. Case closed. One local news outlet even went out of its way to outdo the Police statement, writing that King had “pulled a gun” on the officer. Perhaps most shocking is the fact that King is consistently reported as a “murder suspect,” without qualification. Even the police department had argued that he was merely a “potential suspect,” that is, Gary King was suspected of being a suspect. Most shocking is the fact that, days after the fact, the OPD downgraded this initial statement: King is now posthumously considered to have been a “person of interest” in the murder, not even a suspect.
But the police story, repeated by the mainstream press, doesn’t square with the numerous witnesses who described the shooting to me. Firstly, everyone on the scene denies that King was carrying a gun, or that a gun was found on the scene as the OPD is claiming. “He ain’t no gangbanger,” an aunt tells me. Moreover, even “neutral” witnesses like the cashier at East Bay Liquors (who nevertheless claims that King was friendly and well-liked) never saw King reach for a weapon: as he fled, they say, he was holding up his pants by his belt, and the officer shot him in the back without provocation.
As the train passes overhead, a woman who identifies herself as a senior financial officer at UC Berkeley asks, “we hear so much about Black-on-Black crime, why don’t we hear about white-on-Black crime?” It has emerged since the shooting that Gonzales has been involved in two other shootings in recent years, one of which resulted in a fatality. On that occasion, the officer was cleared of any wrongdoing. He has now been placed on “paid administrative leave,” standard OPD procedure, while he waits to be cleared once more.
If, for some miraculous reason, this story were to gain national coverage (which I doubt since this happens all the time, in every part of the country), I can’t wait to read Jason Whitlock’s column on how this was the result of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and black fathers. Maybe he’ll tell us that he shouldn’t have been standing out on the corner, he should have been with his father fishing or something. Or maybe if he didn’t have dreads, he wouldn’t like a ‘black thug suspect’ or something like that.
Even if we take the radical position of dismissing all of the circumstances surrounding the shooting, the very fact that the ‘officer of the law’ left King dying on the sidewalk for 15 minutes in the middle of a busy intersection should tell us what we need to know about his mindset. And if you think this is the only case of its kind, you haven’t been paying attention.
This case reveals the awful truth: A black life is worth less in America than a white life. Similarly, giving a black person 20 years for an assault charged as an attempted murder is the rough equivalent of 1, 5, or even 10 years for a white person’s assault charged as an assault. There have been numerous studies demonstrating sentencing differences if you won’t take my word for it. This also explains why certain missing persons get more attention than others. Exposed to this dis-proportionality by the media all of the time, what else are we to believe?
You don’t need to have KKK lynchings to have racism, just like you don’t have to be drunk to get into an accident. It is systemic and as subconscious as it is conscious.
