I’m not a reflexive defender of the police. Cops can be paranoid and defensive, and when they’re under pressure, they can do bad stuff. How could it be otherwise? They’re only human, with breaking points when their tolerance is exceeded beyond endurable limits.
We ask the impossible of them: to retain their composure under the most stressful circumstances. In the far future, I guess, cops will be robots, impossible to rile. But today and for a long time to come, they’re men and women, with blood in their veins and enzymes that rage during crises.
When cops do stupid stuff, as Derek Chauvin did that awful May day in Minneapolis, they should get the book thrown at them, the way Chauvin was (he’s serving 22-1/2 years in prison). But much, if not most, of the rancor directed at cops from their critics is undeserved. And like the rest of us, they have the right to fight back when they’re being discriminated against.
For example, there’s this situation down in Palo Alto where five cops are suing the city for putting up a mural depicting and celebrating a woman, Joanne Chesimard, whose 22 aliases include her nom de guerre, Assata Shakur. Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army, was convicted in 1977 for the murder of a New Jersey State trooper. Sentenced to life in prison, she escaped to Cuba and is still wanted by the FBI, with a reward of $1 million for information leading to her apprehension.
Regardless of your views on Black Liberation or its modern version, Black Lives Matter, the fact is that Shakur killed a cop in cold blood, was found guilty by a jury of her peers, and was serving her punishment in jail as required by the law.
That police officers today should be offended by a celebratory depiction of a cop killer, at a place they have to see coming and going to work every day, is understandable. (How would a Jew feel if there were a celebratory depiction of Hitler right outside her synagogue?) This is exactly why the Palo Alto police are suing the city. Here’s how Palo Alto Online describes their lawsuit:
“The officers are specifically objecting to the city's failure to promptly remove the image of Chesimard...The five officers are also taking issue with the mural's depiction of a portion of a logo that they say is attributed to the New Black Panthers, a political organization that was founded in 1989 in Texas and that is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "virulently racist and anti-Semitic”…The complaint from the five Palo Alto officers includes a quote from King Samir Shabazz, former head of the party's Philadelphia chapter, who according to the Southern Poverty Law Center talked about this hatred for white people in a 2009 documentary. ("You want freedom? You're going to have to kill some crackers," he said, according to the nonprofit).”
I have strong empathy for the Palo Alto 5. Shakur was a bad person, a murderer who took another human being’s life and deserved to be punished for her capital crime. It’s clear that the Palo Alto cops were subjected to a form of harassment in having to look at that mural, which made their workplace a hostile work environment, especially since the city that employs them, Palo Alto, paid for it. We should all feel empathy for them.
Unfortunately, the mural’s defenders don’t see it that way. One of them is a Black man, Kaloma Smith, chair of Palo Alto’s human rights commission. He advances an old meme: Shakur was “railroaded” due to “systemic racism.” Rather than feel empathy for the cops (or for the murdered State trooper), Smith blames the Palo Alto 5 for their insensitivity in filing a lawsuit while echoes of George Floyd’s murder by Chauvin still reverberate around the country. At the same time, as he explained to the San Francisco Chronicle, his own sensitivities are frequently stirred up whenever he feels disrespected by “remarks and statements…in the public space” which he interprets as racially hostile.
If Smith can complain about his injured feelings, why can’t the cops?
Look: We’re not going to relitigate a 44-year old criminal case. You can believe anything you want; it’s a free country. But these truths remain: Shakur murdered a cop and was convicted. The City of Palo Alto, in its wokeness, decided to celebrate a cop-killer with a mural close to police headquarters. How would you feel if you were a cop—subject to the insults and smears hurled their way every day, not to mention the constant threat of injury or death—and you had to endure that slap in the face? I know how I’d feel: insulted, disrespected and pissed. It was wrong for Palo Alto to permit and pay for that mural in the first place, and they should get rid of the damned thing now.
Steve Heimoff