The pioneering hip hop group NWA obviously had a point in 1988 when they famously rapped "Fuck the police." That song sadly remains as relevant as ever now, with violent protests erupting this week after the shooting of an unarmed African-American, Jacob Blake, by a white policeman in Wisconsin in the US. Following on from the George Floyd protests that swept across America earlier this year, these new protests are too familiar but also (whatever you think of the tactics being employed in them) all too understandable, if that's acceptable for me to say as a white Australian.
Now, yes, Blake allegedly had a criminal record, and a knife in the car he was entering when he was shot. But even if he was planning to grab and then use it, the officer shot him seven times in the back, when surely shooting him just once in a leg, or (better still) handcuffing him, would have adequately subdued him. Instead, the trigger-happy option was chosen and in front of Blake's three young children who were in the back seat, no less, and had no involvement in whatever misdeeds he's alleged to have committed.
I am not trying to tar all police here as corrupt and racist, or all POCs as criminals for that matter. To make either of those generalisations would be discriminatory and unhelpful. The media's reportage of such occurrences often exacerbates and sensationalises them, too. But as I've said many times before, just because you enforce the law does not mean you are above it, and if law enforcement authorities want these angry demonstrations to stop, they simply need to accept how often they cause them, and then find ways together to collectively overcome the attitudes and views that make them guilty.
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