Police have a hard job. What they do is something I couldn’t ever do. But you know what they rarely have? Accountability. In this case, the prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, always gets indictments — unless it’s a cop. He’s had five cop-involved killing cases and zero indictments. Again, five cases against police haven’t made it to trial at all. He could get an indictment if he wanted one.
Don’t believe me? Ask a public defender.
Don’t believe him? Ask another lawyer.
My dad was a prosecutor. I’m an attorney. I worked in the DA’s office. I’ve never seen a prosecutor work so hard to exonerate a killer.
— Chris Sacca (@sacca) November 25, 2014
The fact that this didn’t at least get a trial infuriates me. But my being upset isn’t that interesting. I’m white. People will take me seriously because I don’t have the “bias” of being black. But actual black people, who live with this every day, are constantly second-guessed because they are somehow “biased.” As though not wanting to get shot by police at a 21x higher rate is a bias. It’s a daily reality of being black in America.
Danez Smith experiences this every day. He is 21x more likely than me to be shot by a police officer. And so he wrote “Not an Elegy for Mike Brown.”
I could never imagine having to think this every day of my life. And I don’t have to. Danez will, though. It’s his and many other Americans’ reality. There will be more unarmed black kids being shot by police. 21 times more. There’s no question about that. The question is: How long will you tolerate it, and what are you willing to do to try to prevent it in the future?
