‘He Deserved It’: The Punditry of Black Death

There was no knee on Rayshard Brooks’ neck when he died last Friday night.

And so the nation’s arbiters of justice (anonymous YouTubers) — sensing an opening in what they’d experienced as an oppressive, two-weeks-long national dialogue — swiftly descended on the comment sections of the released security and body cam footage, only to declare repeatedly, righteously, that the intoxicated 27-year-old Brooks — unlike George Floyd — deserved it. He deserved it because while those two officers were just doing their job in attempting to arrest him for drunkenly falling asleep at the wheel in a Wendy’s parking lot, he grabbed one of the officer’s Tasers, made a run for it, and, while running, aimed said Taser backward haphazardly (drunkenly) in the general vicinity of his pursuers and squeezed the trigger. Which means the guy obviously had it coming. He deserved to be shot in the back three times, mere steps away from a line of fellow civilians — hermetically sealed in their respective automobiles — waiting to pick up their Homestyle Asiago Ranch Chicken Clubs, their Garden Side Salads, their Chocolate Frosties.

Sometimes you pay a little extra for your Wendy’s — the price of freedom, I suppose.

It didn’t take long for media outlets to swoop in and ask U.S. Senator Tim Scott and Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Dr. Ben Carson for their thoughts, because who better to comment on Rayshard Brooks’ death than two prominent Black Republicans? The sheer drama of seeing whether, when shown a new police killing video with a fresh (yet somehow all-too-familiar) set of circumstances, they’ll hold the party line or stumble into expressing some doubt about whether another Black man needed to die!

On CBS’ Face the Nation, Tim Scott argued that Rayshard Brooks’ death was “far less clear” than George Floyd’s death.

And on Fox News Sunday, Ben Carson said, “We don’t know what was in the mind of the officer when somebody turns around and points a weapon at him. Is he absolutely sure that’s a non-lethal weapon? You know, this is not a clear-cut circumstance.”

Never mind that the officers had already patted Brooks down. Never mind that the Taser is commonly touted as a life-saving, “non-lethal” (technically “less-lethal”) weapon (despite there having been 1000+ police-related Taser deaths in the U.S. since 2000). I don’t know if those parenthetical notes help or hurt whatever point I’m trying to make. Probably both.

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News coverage of these killings isn’t all that different from the post-game analysis we see on Sundays in November. The slow-motion replays. The Xs and Os. The mind-numbing debates between pundits.

“Look, Terry — if Brooks hadn’t grabbed for the officer’s Taser, and if only he’d run a slant route instead of trying to go deep, we may’ve seen a completely different outcome.”

“I disagree, Rod. If Brooks had simply surrendered like George Floyd did, chances are he would’ve come out unscathed. It’s clear that police have learned their lesson since Minneapolis, and Brooks should’ve recognized that. He should’ve known that trusting his arresting officers would’ve been the safer bet.”

[Cut to a DORITOS® JACKED™ Ranch Dipped Hot Wings Flavored Tortilla Chips commercial]

For whatever reason, we keep treating these killings as if they’re isolated sports plays, and we reduce the “players” involved to single choices that somehow justify their respective fates.

It may sound trite, but instead we must lead with the acknowledgement that Rayshard Brooks was a human being and that his life was worth something. And we have to recognize that if police officers truly cared about making communities safer, they’d be open to community engagement strategies that could someday put themselves out of work. In other words, they’d be open to institutional transformation, even annihilation. (Hint: One particularly alienating and trust-dissolving strategy that’s proven NOT to work is abusing and killing people they’ve been tasked with serving and protecting.)

But that’s not all. We need to zoom out and reckon with the bigger picture: The fact that American police kill civilians at a far higher rate per capita than police in other wealthy countries (over 3x the rate of Canadian police, 4x the rate of Australian police, 25x the rate of German police, 67x the rate of English and Welsh police, and 167x the rate of Japanese police). The fact that Black Americans are 2.5x more likely than white Americans to be killed by police. The fact that America imprisons its citizens at a far higher rate than any other country in the world (2.3 million Americans are in prison, which comes out to over 700 per 100,000 people). The fact that Black Americans are incarcerated at over 5x the rate of white Americans. The fact that inmates in federal and state-run prisons (not just private prisons) are forced to do factory/farm/call center labor for pocket change, while the corporations who profit from that labor are laughing all the way to the bank.

When we face these indisputable realities, we see not only that our “justice” system is in many ways an extension of slavery and Jim Crow, but also that policing, in many communities, has never been about making those communities safer. Historically, it has actively torn some of those communities apart. So why do the leaders of those communities continue to fund it? When a public institution fails to earn the public’s trust, continues to break the public’s trust, does it really deserve the public’s tax dollars?

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When I watch the Rayshard Brooks body cam footage, I can’t help but zero in on the minutes before the shooting. The subtle condescension of the officer — even after he’d administered the breathalyzer test — repeatedly asking Brooks if he’s had anything to drink tonight. As if they both don’t already know.

The encounter was never about building trust with Brooks; rather, it was about the satisfaction of catching him in a lie. I wonder how this impacted Brooks’ mindset, pushed his thinking from “maybe I should cooperate” to “maybe I should run?”

I also wonder how Norwegian police, who killed a grand total of 0 civilians in 2018, would’ve handled the same encounter. (Only 10 Norwegian police officers have been killed in the line of duty since 1945, by the way.) I have no doubt that some eager, fallacy-finding beaver will pounce on this article, pointing out that “the situation” in Norway is much different than it is in America. And they’ll be right. Norway, of course, isn’t haunted by a largely unacknowledged legacy of centuries of slavery, and Norway doesn’t have more guns than it has citizens, and their police officers don’t carry guns on their person, and the guns those officers are issued are locked down inside their patrol cars, and in order to use those guns, the officers need to receive permission from their police chiefs.

But isn’t that a system we should aspire to? Shouldn’t it make us wonder: Did Rayshard Brooks need to die? Did all 1,099 American civilians killed by police last year need to die?

Astute commenters will bristle and gruffly reject these questions, pointing out that Norwegian officers still have knees, which means they can still still kneel on people’s necks. And once again, they’ll be right. The pundits are always right.