Ferguson to Baltimore

From Ferguson to Baltimore

Reduced to Uncertainty

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Last year I found myself thinking thoughts I had never thought before when the Ferguson civil disturbance took place. I think I imagined I knew the truth of the matter when I watched the Ferguson situation mostly through internet connects. These last few days with the eruption of events in Baltimore I am less certain and I desire to be more careful with any attempted analysis. Let me express realities which seem important to me and I don’t always know how to hold them together.

            One reality is that somewhere near four hundred unarmed African-Americans died in police confrontations in the United States of America last year. The figures are rough estimates. There has not been a reliable nationalized statistics of deaths resulting from arrests. The death statistics are collected from newspaper reports and separate jurisdictional reports. There can be arguments regarding the actual number. But if four hundred is close to correct then roughly one unarmed African-American is killed in a police confrontation every day. It may well be true that many of these can be explained by the dynamics of the situations. But can they all? Is this a high enough number of deaths to begin wondering if this should be a national concern?

            In fact perhaps this is the only real important paragraph I have to write today. This paragraph right here right now is the important one of this blog. How do we as people process this reality and interpret it? We all process it with similar means, but the means chew on different perceptions of reality. We understand what was taking place last year in Ferguson and this year in Baltimore by our linking together perceptions, information and logic. That is where everything differs with different people.

            For some the perception is filtered through a history of animosity between people of color and blacks and the police. History matters. For many Americans, there is this idea that America was mostly over its race problems, after all we have elected by large majorities a black American president twice. But there is a history of a people who knew law officials were the people who enforced Fugitive slave return laws, as well as segregation laws. There was a sense of ambiguity between African-Americans and law officials. There was hope that law officers were seeking to police in search of justice. But there was a history of concern.

While I am white, I was sort of raised with a lesser degree of a similar view of law officials within my family. My father had gone to work in the 1930’s at a time when worker rights were evolving in an undefined manner. My Dad, never consistently, but sometimes felt it important to take a union stand. Local industry had a big say in local politics. Strike breakers that came to town to break a union often remained in town and were often recruited to serve as policemen. That led my father to teach us to respect law officials but you always sensed that he wasn’t telling the whole story. He would on occasion talk of a law officer who was someone who sought to be fair. He less seldom commented about the sort of officer who only wanted a badge, a gun, and some authority. Those union busting days had an impact on how we were raised to think of the police.

This is what I mean by how we process these events like Ferguson and Baltimore by perception, information, and logic. I am pretty sure if I were someone who believed that someone unarmed in my race was killed every day by police in the country I lived that I would perceive a situation in my town differently than if that seemed like some superstition held by someone that was over reacting.

Back in the days of Ferguson I was ready to be radical. The thoughts were fresh and seemed to overwhelm everything else I had before believed. Now I am more cautious. I know good policemen. They are human. They have flaws. But they earnestly desire to apply the law with fairness and equality. I don’t want to run such law officers under the bus. Nevertheless I do suspect that some real problems exist within law enforcement. Wherever there is authority there are those who seek to dedicate the use of authority for good and those who are less than noble. That seems to be a reality in every generation and every land.

The only thing I have figured out is that I cannot expect to understand what is taking place without a broader base of perception and information upon which to build my logic that will lead to how I analyze what is taking place in our American cities. One of the things I plan to do soon is to go to a church on a Sunday evening that I pass on my way to work from home nearly every day. I want to sit down with some of the people who I see coming out of the church building and listen to what they feel and experience and what they perceive. Their church membership is mostly black. I am pretty sure that I won’t be able to analyze what is happening in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, until I have listened enough to understand within me the perceptions, information and logic that is presently mostly foreign to me.