On Sympathizing With the Killers

The outrageous Sean Bell verdict is still weighing on my mind. And I am getting really, really sick of people in the media and in person falling all over themselves to have sympathy for the undercover detectives who shot an innocent black man 50 times.

They say it is SUCH a hard job to be a police officer. It is just so SCARY. They were just SCARED, and DISORGANIZED. The implication is: wouldn't ANYONE be SCARED of an (innocent unarmed) black man?

We always hear this after incidents of police brutality. dNa sums it up at Racialicious ("On Sean Bell: fear is cause for slaughter only when victim is black"):

The Bell verdict will only cement the NYPD’s indifference to wasting black life. They simply aren’t held accountable. All they have to do is say they’re “scared”, and the media sympathizes, because they’re scared of us too.

You know, if being a cop is such a hard job, why not take one of those nice easy jobs?

Like the EASY job of being the mother or father of a (murdered innocent unarmed) black man?

Like the EASY job of being the fiancée or daughter of a (murdered innocent unarmed) black man? (see above photo)

Or the EASY job of being a little black boy who will someday grow up to be an innocent unarmed black man?

Doing a search on some of the history of police brutality cases in NYC, I came upon a moving NYTimes piece ("Police Shooting Reunites Circle of Common Loss") about the way that the families of the victims have formed a friendship network based in shared pain, and the Sean Bell funeral was cause for a painful reunion:

“I don’t know what I would have done without them,” Mrs. Dorismond, a Haitian immigrant who came to New York at 18 to study nursing, said of the relatives of Amadou Diallo and others who died in encounters with the police. “Nobody can understand that pain but me, Mrs. Diallo and the others. When it was my turn, everybody came.”

They had come and been there for her, rushing to her side to introduce themselves — at her son’s wake, at his funeral, at the protests on the streets. Amadou Diallo’s mother, Malcolm Ferguson’s mother, Nicholas Heyward Jr.’s father, Abner Louima himself.

Save your sympathy for the real victims, please.