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Thursday, January 29, 2004living while black proves to be fatal
I don't even think I have the words to describe how awful this is. Timothy Stansbury, a nineteen year-old high school student and part-time McDonald's employee, was gunned down in the stairwell of his housing project as he went to carry more CDs to a party he was attending. He was shot by a Housing Authority police officer.
A Newsday article by Sheryl McCarthy pretty much sums up my feelings on the situation.
As usual, I've included the text of the article in case it disappears. link via freedom rider
This is the kind of column that I'm really sick of writing: about yet another unarmed, law-abiding black male who was shot to death by a white police officer because the cop panicked. This time it was 19-year-old Timothy Stansbury Jr., a high school student and amateur rapper, who worked part time at McDonald's. But there've been too many others.Stansbury was killed by Officer Richard Neri when Neri and his partner, conducting a routine rooftop inspection of the Brooklyn housing project where Stansbury lived, opened a door onto a darkened stairwell that Stansbury and two of his friends were climbing.
When I write about the insanity of incidents like this one, I can always count on receiving a rash of e-mails from people defending the cops:
"What was the poor guy supposed to do under the circumstances?" they ask me.
"You know how 'these neighborhoods' are, how much crime is committed by 'these people.'"
"He was justified in believing he was in danger and firing his weapon. The poor guy just made a mistake."
The truth is this is no justification at all. Because the killing of an unarmed, law-abiding black citizen can never be written off as the price of doing business as a cop in this city, or in any other.
The argument that's used to explain these shootings is that the crime rate tends to be higher in black neighborhoods, so the cops are justified in feeling threatened. But it's just not acceptable to gun down peaceful black citizens for the misdeeds of a few. I'm constantly amazed at the ease with which those who are not black write off the lives of African-Americans who are abused by the agents of law enforcement. Whether they've been killed unjustifiably by the police, imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit or over-prosecuted for crimes that deserved far lesser charges, it's rationalized.
"Well, he must have done something wrong, or he must have looked like he was about to do something. And if he didn't commit this crime, then he probably committed another one."
I have no way of knowing what was in Officer Neri's mind on the night he shot Timothy Stansbury. But I know that he and his partner were not pursuing a potentially dangerous perpetrator who had run into the housing project to hide. They were doing a routine inspection. And they were far more likely to encounter children or peaceful adult residents on the stairwell that night than a dangerous criminal.
The problem is not simply the crime rate in black neighborhoods. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, as in virtually all of the other neighborhoods in New York City, the crime rate has been plummeting for decades. The crime rate in this precinct is lower than in a number of others. The problem is that many whites have an irrational fear of blacks that is based more on stereotype than on reality, and it brands every black neighborhood as a dangerous one and every black male as a potential perpetrator, whether he is or not.
The proof of this is that while there are plenty of white criminals, these "accidents" don't happen to whites. On the same day that Stansbury was shot by Officer Neri, Kevin Tester, a 38-year-old white security guard, fired three shots at police officers on an elevated subway platform in Brooklyn, after another subway rider reported that Tester had a gun. He actually shot at the cops with his .38-caliber revolver. Yet these police officers managed to subdue him and relieve him of his gun before taking him into custody, where he was charged with attempted murder and illegal possession of a weapon. Meanwhile, Timothy Stansbury is dead.
Police officers, who carry the power of life and death in their guns and nightsticks, are supposed to respond reasonably to the situations they encounter on the job. And if they're so nervous, so jumpy, if they feel so frightened in black neighborhoods that they respond to every little start, every turn of the head, every movement of the hands by opening fire, then they shouldn't be on the streets.
09:45 PM | Permalink
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Comments
never mind stupid people's arguments about why the cop was justified in the shooting. let's talk about how his family won't get a drop in the bucket when they file a lawsuit. just like amadou diallo...they sued for several million dollars and i feel they should have received every penny and then some...they walked away with like 3 mil. you kill my son and then spit in my face in court. this type of thing drives me insane to the point of uncontrollable hatred for white folk and esp. cops.
Posted by: raven at Jan 30, 2004 10:50:50 PM
