Sleeting Justice

Bad weather must be my motivation. It seems like that’s the only time I am moved to write these days. And it isn’t for lack of fodder for writing; there is always plenty of that in this world.

There may be too much. That’s why I feel paralysis so often. I can’t move, and I can’t speak; I can only blink my eyes.

What should I write about today? The father who killed his transgender child? The Christian woman who beat her Jewish friend in an effort to convert her? The atheist who murdered his Muslim neighbors because he didn’t like where they parked?

I could write about my own neighbor, the one who discharged her firearm through her overhead garage door at people she did not see. Her neighbor told on her. The woman told the neighbor that she “heard Mexican voices” and shot through the door. When I contacted the police by email, the cop said the report was confidential because a small child was involved. He also said the garage door was pried up in the corner (Really? That’s quite hard to visualize and must have taken some work.), and since she was home alone with a small child, she had a right to fire her weapon. What happened to leaving the garage, going back in the house, and locking the door while dialing 911? How about calling out, “I have a gun. Leave my property now!”

A few weeks later she was on our HOA Google group complaining about her new neighbors who had not even lived in the house a week. Will she shoot them because she doesn’t like the sound of their truck?

I don’t know if the new neighbors are Muslims, but I know they are black. Almost all of her complaints are about black or Hispanic men or boys. She logged 33 calls to the police in 5 years. But the police don’t think that is excessive. 

That doesn’t count the times she complained or bragged on the Google group. I sent all of those to the police and he said not all matched up to a police report.

She’s the same person I wrote about in my post Profiling Fatality 3: The Demonization of George Zimmerman. She described the intruder from that incident as having “evil eyes.” She also admitted she may have left her door unlocked.

Just like she left her SUV parked on the street with her purse in the front seat. The doors were unlocked then, too.

When the temperature is above 50 degrees, which occurs most days of the year down here, I leave the front door open. I love the extra light it lets in the house. We picked this house because of all the oversized windows. I love a light-filled home. The difference? We have a security screen door. It locks with a huge hook bolt that fits into a slot in steel-reinforced timber. The glass is bulletproof. An elephant might be able to knock it down, but I haven’t seen any of those in the neighborhood. We also own a dog and a security system, and there is a wrought iron gate on my porch – you’d be surprised how many people can’t figure out how to open it. We have motion lights and the yard is open all around the house, no privacy fences or hedges.

We aren’t paranoid, but we understand when the police tell you to make your house an unattractive target.

It’s not that there is a lot of crime in our neighborhood. Including the neighbor that called the police 33 times in 5 years (averages out to 6.6 calls per year), we averaged 7.8 break-in/property damage calls per year in the same period, 2009 – 2014. There are 78 homes in our neighborhood. Suffice it to say that most of the calls were hers.

I’ve called the police 4 times in the almost 8 years we’ve lived here: twice when my car was hit in the driveway (we live on a curve, and after the city installed a sign letting people know there was a curve up ahead, it hasn’t happened again); the third time was when a rabid coyote was rolling around on my front lawn; and the fourth time was when the house next door to me was in foreclosure and I saw two white guys come out carrying the heat pump and loading it into the back of their pick-up.

I suspect the white guys were members of the construction crew because that heat pump was well hidden in an attic crawlspace inside a closet.

We live in the city. There will be crime. That’s what happens when there are a lot of people living fairly close together. The economy down here is terrible, too, and the state government has removed or shortened the term of just about every safety net. Some people will turn to crime out of desperation and some will turn to crime because they are bad people. Remember all the rat experiments we read about in psychology class?

But city living is a choice. I prefer the city. There is more going on, more people to run into, services like trash collection are better, and the fire departments are full time, not volunteer.

Living out in the country is a choice, too, and lots of ultra-conservatives choose that option because they don’t want to be around people who are different. Why doesn’t my neighbor move? She keeps talking about it, as in, “I mean I was ready to pack up and go yesterday over break ins but this unnecessary noise has got to stop!”

My husband said, “Then go already.”

He was ready to go over to the new neighbors and warn them. I emailed and warned their landlord instead. I didn’t want my husband (for new readers, he is black; I am white) walking near that woman’s house, and I don’t want to read in the paper that a neighbor was shot and killed because another neighbor thought his truck was loud (she could hear his music as he pulled into the driveway). It reminds me too much of the atheist who didn’t like where his neighbors parked.  When did that become a reason to kill someone?

When did the pried edge of a garage door become a reason to discharge a firearm in a residential city neighborhood?

The cop I sent my complaint to reminded me of our 2^nd Amendment rights. He said I was judgmental and my statements were inflammatory.

Protect and serve. I’m glad my neighbor, whose husband is a deputy in another county, is getting the full benefit of the city police service while the rest of us worry about our right to walk and drive our neighborhood streets and live in our homes safely.

I reserve my right to wonder if that garage door was truly pried at the corner or if what the other neighbor related is really the truth: the woman “heard Mexican voices,” never laid eyes on anyone, and shot blindly through the door. One of the NRA rules of gun safety (Yes, I went to the “experts.”): Know your target and what is beyond.

I just hope I don’t read about her in the paper.

The sleet made last night's storm worrisome

This is What Apartheid Looks Like in America

Words failed me because America failed in race relations again.  I spent a sleepless night after Prosecutor McColloch spent half an hour defending the grand jury process even though his use of it was far outside standard procedure. He spent most of the time bashing witness credibility and Michael Brown’s character while defending Darren Wilson, the man he was supposed to be considering charges against. With nine whites and three blacks on the jury, there was no other outcome possible. I knew this even as I held a glimmer of hope.

Then I watched the streets of Ferguson swirl into chaos, fire, anguish, rage, and hopelessness.

AP photo of Ferguson protests

This is what Apartheid looks like in America. This is the systemic implementation of racist and biased policies, laws, and actions in our courtrooms, in our neighborhoods, in stand your ground laws that seem expressly written for the protection of white Americans, and in the ethnic and racial makeup of a militarized police presence.

CNN reported, “Wilson called the area where Brown was shot a "hostile environment."

Wilson testified, "There's a lot of gangs that reside or associate with that area. There's a lot of violence in that area, there's a lot of gun activity, drug activity, it is just not a very well-liked community. That community doesn't like the police."

Why is the community suspicious of police? Because the police and the city used the community as a source of income, issuing tickets and fining people based on petty charges. The police presence was not a positive presence but a force of containment and oppression.

I believe it is a high crime area. There is a lot of poverty with few paths out. That causes an environment where some believe crime is an acceptable way of life. But not all citizens who live there believe that and live good, honest lives. They should be afforded the same police protections that the rest of America, white America, enjoys. They are there by circumstance, not necessarily by choice. Why do the police, officials, and the media impugn the whole community and not just the criminals? How can a police officer adequately protect and serve a community he doesn’t like?

He can’t.

Justice is bankrupt, and racism prevails.

While we argue causes and fling hatred and suspicion back and forth, more black men and boys die.

Including Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old carrying a toy gun. Look at his face. He is a child. Why did the man who called 911 call him a man and why didn’t the police acknowledge that he was just a kid and treat him as one? Racial bias blinds them.

Tamir Rice

Ronald left the house twenty minutes before the verdict was read. We had already watched four hours of coverage, and he said he didn’t want to see the verdict. He did not want to relive the George Zimmerman verdict. We had watched that verdict together. I cried; he got angry, then silent.

I knew I had to watch the grand jury announcement even as I understood he could not. I kissed him good-bye and told him to be careful. He already knew the verdict, and my silence when he got home, and again this morning, told him he was correct.

I understand hopelessness. I see it in the faces of the protestors, in the tears shed by Michael Brown’s family, in the comments on my Facebook page, and in the way Ronald grows more introspective daily. I suffer the same hopelessness.

If we don’t fight for change, the violence will grow and more black boys and men will die, not just physically, but emotionally and mentally. The death of black men and boys is epidemic in this country.

I also understand that the election of a mixed race president did not usher us into a post-racial world. Instead it brought to light the very real inequality and injustice under which our society operates. Denial won’t change that fact.

The things that will change systemic racism are the following:

·      Video cameras on every police officer

·      Police departments that reflect the racial and ethnic makeup of the communities they serve

·      Viable citizen review boards

·      Better and more comprehensive diversity training for officers

·      Better and more comprehensive training for officers on how to provide a positive community presence that promotes a safe environment rather than an adversarial force that works against citizens

·      Equality in the criminal justice system including the charges brought against offenders, sentencing, and the length of prison terms

We also need to have that conversation about race in America.  

Let me be brutally honest: If you believe race does not affect your life, then you are one of the privileged in this country. If you don’t care about or support the growing use of unnecessary force against citizens of color, you are racist and one of the privileged. If you don’t care about black boys and men being killed at the hands of police officers and vigilantes hiding behind stand your ground laws, you are a racist and one of the privileged. If you believe that every black community is full of lazy and lawless people, you are a racist and one of the privileged.

This is a tragedy for all Americans, not just black Americans.

We need to dig down into the history of our country and the institutional and systemic factors that cause bias and oppression. We need to acknowledge how this country was taken from Native Americans and how it was built on the backs of slaves. We need to acknowledge that  we continue to create an underclass through sub-poverty wages, sub-standard schools, and the high cost of college tuition.

Then we need to educate the public about these truths and make the changes necessary through the enactment of laws that protect equality and through Federal government oversight. We already know that states fail to achieve equality and justice for their citizens. Ferguson has proven that yet again with the appointment of a biased prosecutor, an almost all-white police force in a city that is 70% black, a jury that was predominately white, and in the militarized response to protests.

If we don’t make those changes, black men and boys will continue to die in record numbers.

This is what Apartheid looks like in America.

Michael Brown will not be forgotten

Reaching for Reacher

I haven’t posted in a while. I am overwhelmed. Reality battered my sensibilities, I’m afraid, so I have been hiding inside a book or two or three. You’d think I would turn to romance or fantasy novels or literary fiction or poetry that titillates my love of words. But I don’t. I read detective, mystery, and police novels. After seeing Jack Reacher starring Tom Cruise, I started plowing my way through Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. I’m on number 12 and about ready to begin 13. I believe there are 17 total, and, hopefully, some more on the way.

It’s what I did as a child in a household in which my parents played out tragic lives. They faced poverty and alcoholism and anger and depression and cultural and ethnic differences that drove them apart in spite of the love I knew they had for one another. I suffered abandonment issues as a result, but that paled in comparison, I suppose, or at least was brushed aside in lieu of the adult problems, and, anyway, books had a way of finding me, sitting with me, comforting me, and loving me. 

I developed my taste for reading with the books I found in the bathroom hamper, Ma’s secret reading stash.  By the time I was twelve or thirteen I had read Gone with the Wind, The Carpetbaggers, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Knock on Any Door, The Valley of the Dolls, Grapes of Wrath, The Godfather, East of Eden, and a host of other adult novels. I like novels with grit and human suffering and realism and death and mayhem and mystery and resolution and justice. I still head for those books today: if not Lee Child and Jack Reacher, then Elmore Leonard and Raylan Givens, or Craig Johnson and Walt Longmire, or Walter Moseley and Easy Rawlins and Leonid McGill, or Jonathan Kellerman and Alex Delaware, or James Patterson and Alex Cross.

It’s not that I don’t read other books. I love Toni Morrison and Amy Tan and Alice Walker and William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill and so many others. I’ve read lots of memoir because there is something about the chance to live and walk in someone else’s shoes, if only for a few hundred pages, that speaks deeply to my empathy. I read lots of non-fiction, too, about history and politics and culture and race and gender. I worry my short time on earth, even if it is 90 or 100 years, will not be long enough to read all the books I hope to read.

But when life seems too much – when the news turns my stomach with stories of violence, heartbreak, hatred, and ignorance; when humankind displays its ugliest behaviors and emotions; and when family life transitions are difficult to experience, like the transitions my elderly in-laws are going through, because there is sorrow and loss and pain and unknowing – I run to the gritty, hardcore novels. The novels where the heroes struggle with their own brokenness and sorrow but who have strong ethical codes and who fight for justice.

I hadn’t read a Jack Reacher novel before seeing Tom Cruise as the star of the same-named movie. Movies are another escape for me, and I watch a lot of them. I liked Cruise as Reacher, although I had read in the reviews that he didn’t resemble the fictional character. That’s true. The Jack Reacher of Lee Child’s novels is a giant: 6’5”, 250 pounds, and muscular with arms as big as most people’s thighs. He is blonde and blue-eyed, ex-military police, nomadic, not a good looking guy, I’d call him “muggly,” and he travels with just a folding toothbrush and the clothes on his back, which he replaces as needed at cheap discount stores. I still picture him with Tom Cruise’s face when I read the books, but I told Ronald that I think Dwayne Johnson should play him in the next movie. He’s the right size, and he’s often played military and cop types.  Too handsome like Cruise, and certainly not blond and blue-eyed, but I think he’d be perfect.

In some ways, I married a hero taken straight out of a novel, someone who spent his working years fighting fires and caring for people in crisis, fighting for his own sense of justice, and taking care of his family: me and our twin daughters and his parents. Yet I want to be the person protecting, too, because that’s what life partners do.  They look out for one another and play the role of hero when the occasion calls for it.

I wish I could be one of the fictional heroes I read about in novel after novel. I dreamed of being a hero when I was a child, fixing every problem my parents faced and righting every wrong I stumbled upon. As an adult child of an alcoholic, I am still driven to fix problems and help people and make the world right. It isn’t easy though when life gets overwhelming, so I bury myself in a novel until I can find the resolve to get back up and keep on fixing. Ah, back to Jack Reacher novel #12, page 254.

Below: Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher and 

my choice for the nomadic, ex-military policeman, Dwayne Johnson.