ACCORDING to media reports, gun sales in American city of Charlotte, North Carolina, have surged in response to last week’s violent protests. Residents in and around the Charlotte area, we are told, were lining up to purchase firearms after a second night of violent rioting on Thursday.
The irony will not be lost on Americans, especially blacks. What triggered the protests in Charlotte was the killing of Keith Lamont Scott, a black man, by police. Scott lost his life because he had, or police thought he had, a gun in his hand during his interaction with police. He was fatally shot on Tuesday afternoon. This was the second recent police slaying, proving that laws permitting people to carry handguns apparently do not apply to African-Americans.
We should remember that this has happened in North Carolina which is an open-carry state and as such a citizen has the right to walk around armed if he or she chooses to do so.
The Charlotte riots may be local, but the issues raised by them have nationwide relevance. First, there is the question of transparency. People no longer take police at their word when it comes to justifying lethal force against black men in questionable circumstances. In this case, there is wide divergence between the versions of police and that of Scott’s family.
Family members will, of course, dispute the police’s narrative. It is also true that a police video won’t necessarily provide definitive proof of whether an officer’s shooting is justifiable. But the initial refusal by authorities to release the police body camera and dash camera videos showing the circumstances of
Scott’s death, in spite of persistent demands by protesters, raised doubts about the conduct of the police, especially after the release of a new video showing the killing of Scott, filmed by his wife Rakeyia. The video shows police warning Scott to “drop the gun” as his wife screams that he did not have a weapon. The Scott family insists he was unarmed.
The question is not whether he was armed or not. The question is whether police can take action just because someone has a firearm. In the ultimate analysis, everything is a result of racial disparities in law enforcement. Much research points to the widespread existence of unconscious bias in criminal judicial system in America despite the advances made by blacks in education and other sectors. Figures show that African-Americans are being shot by police or arrested at more than twice the rate of white Americans.
President Barack Obama has been calling on law enforcement to root out bias in its ranks and expressing concern at frequent police shootings of blacks and Hispanics. These shootings are symptoms of a “broader set of racial disparities” in the justice system that aren’t being fixed quickly enough. Despite Obama’s efforts to bridge misunderstandings between African-Americans and the police, the problem clearly persists. In 2014, the president created a task force to develop modern policing guidelines, and he urged local communities and policing agencies to implement those recommendations drafted by the Justice Department.
The White House task force has called for teaching officers new skills to de-escalate volatile encounters. Hundreds of police chiefs also pushed new policies for dealing with the mentally ill. And thousands of departments began outfitting officers with body-worn cameras hoping this would curb the use of excessive force.
To this added the serious debates now taking place about how law enforcement personnel can relate to the communities they serve, about the appropriate use of force, and about real and perceived biases, both within and outside of law enforcement. There has been considerable progress in some areas but much needs to be done. Some 18,000 police departments in the US have much work ahead to rebuild trust with the black community. In the particular case of Charlotte, the police did the right thing by releasing videos showing the circumstances of Scott’s death.
