An apparently disturbed man is wielding a knife on a St. Louis sidewalk. The odd thing about it is people are walking by him as if nothing much is happening, proceeding as an ordinary day. It is not ordinary. Somebody is recording on their phone. The police have already been called. A police cruiser pulls up and two cops emerge and confront the disturbed individual who paces back and forth, jumps up onto an elevated lawn, approaches the officers, apparently shouts, "shoot me, just shoot me," and they do. They kill the man dead on the spot to the shock of the witnesses who lingered.
I've been thinking about this for days.
I still cannot comprehend it.
I suppose the police do not know what we know that people walked right by unharmed, almost as if, "Eh, there goes another nutter," but still unharmed. Witnesses are uncomprehending of the shooting as I.
Comments to the video are not helpful in understanding. The comments I got through say police are trained shoot to kill not to disarm, not to harm. But that does not answer why the police did not tase and arrest the man. Why did they have to kill the man dead on the spot? Was he so threatening to them in their moment?
They most likely said, "Drop the knife," and the man disobeyed. Taking just a few steps in the direction of the armed and ready police is all it took to kill him.
Kill him.
It's over. Just like that. Dead on the sidewalk. A life for a simple act of non compliance.
This is what people of St. Louis mean when they riot to demand justice. This makes sense of their disjointed speeches. Their argument does not make sense in isolation of the riots but it does make sense in context of this larger experience of their whole lives. Justice generally, to treat mental disturbance as such. Not everything is a criminal act deserving of instant death.
We are shown the video of Michael Brown stealing some small package of come type of cigars and stiff-arming the store proprietor and viewers of that incident outside of this context of widespread unemployment and little hope for advancement and general injustice regard Michael Brown as obviously criminally minded. Not deserving of death for stealing cigars, but later, not interacting with police as we've all been taught. You do not approach cops in a threatening manner, Ever. That's just a plain simple fact. But that is not deserving of instant death either.
That is how the people there see the whole situation as living inside it. Bashing in the policeman's eye socket does complicate the narrative greatly. Goofs up their grievance. But so does this video complicate the narrative greatly, and I imagine many other incidents too like this that are not recorded but known without video proof, and lived every day, experiences lived and real and then additional narratives imagined, the unknown details filled in by what is known by experience.
By what I see here in this short video, this strikes me as quite slobbish, careless and ruthless police work. This is the injustice that is lived every day and protested. This is what causes rioting. This is what causes what is termed riot tourism, outsiders swarming the town specifically to act out and tear up the place in riot -- make their own justice, absurd as it seems to outsiders they are protesting this and incidents like this that they live and are not recorded, so not known to people who do not live it.
Convince me otherwise. I won't argue.
