Under siege: on Oscar Grant and other victims

Cold. Blooded. Murder.

What else can you call what occurred on New Year’s Day in Oakland? A BART officer caught on tape shooting transit passenger Oscar Grant in the back, while Grant lay flat on his stomach, restrained, prone and defenseless. Kinda difficult to argue self-defense, or ‘excited delirium‘ (or whatever they’re calling it this year) when the victim isn’t even facing his assailant (let alone upright) and the cause of death is a police-issue lead projectile that sliced through flesh and bone without prejudice.

So, what next? Oscar Grant is but the latest Fatal Attraction video victim of a growing siege mentality within law enforcement, one that transcends the traditional boundaries of race, gender, orientation and class (though make no mistake–those factors still greatly affect the conduct of law enforcement officers, on both an individual and systemic level, to say nothing of the marginalized communities forced to live day-to-day with the consequences). Thanks to a pop-cult fetishization of get-tough law enforcement (with new reality TV star Sherriff Joe Arpaio serving as the latest darkly cartoonish personality cult) and the (largely erroneous) notion that “criminals” are increasingly coddled by a too-soft justice system, the general public is often all-too-quick to give the benefit of the doubt to overzealous officials who, whether through malice, fear, or out of a warped sense of duty, cross the line that separates upholding the law and undermining it.

More and more, contemporary law enforcement officials throughout the so-called ‘civilised’ world seem to view the public they purportedly serve and protect through a clouded prism of reflexive suspicion and militarized paranoia. Under this distorted reasoning, anyone–be they a pregnant woman, a wet naked man with a hearing impairment, or a frail 92 year old grandmother–is automatically deemed to be a potential threat; all options, therefore, remain on the table, to be utilized at the official’s discretion. Above all, obedience is paramount; when this principle is not sufficiently adhered to by civilians (especially marginalized segments of the population), the consequences can quite literally be fatal.

Until we collectively address the broad systemic and societal conditions (including and especially the War on [Some] Drugs) that encourage and enable law enforcement officials to act with reckless–at times lethal–impunity and willful indifference, there will continue to be a fresh new slate of Oscar Grants, Hope Steffies, Robert Dziekanskis, and on and on and on. We are all, in a sense, responsible for what has happened to them and other victims of ‘excessive force’ (an anodyne term, banal in its innate reductiveness) who weren’t afforded the perverse luxury of having their assaults (or killings) captured on tape for grim posterity. By virtue of apathy, paranoid insecurity in the wake of overblown and misrepresented crime statistics, race and class-based stereotyping, and, above all, a misguided, unquestioning reverence for uniformed authority uber alles, we have collected overflowing buckets of blood–more than enough to stain every pair of hands in the ‘free world’ several times over.