I am a white guy, so I don’t pretend to understand what it’s like to be black and afraid of being unfairly treated by police. And I am not naive, either. I know blacks get profiled by police and are sometimes treated unfairly. I also know there is a significant amount of animosity between them at times. I read a story just the other day about three black girls and a white girl who were picked up by the cops at an underage drinking party. I don’t know all the details, but the end result was that the cops sent the white girl home to her parents shortly after bringing her in. The three black girls were searched and questioned for a while before they were sent home. Maybe there was a reason for that beyond race, but on the face of it, it doesn’t appear that there was. I know stuff like that happens. Nobody died, so it’s not tragic and it’s not widely reported, but it’s still unfair. And it’s events like this that create the aforementioned animosity. Having said all that, I think I have a solution to the problem of unarmed black guys – or unarmed people of any race or gender, for that matter – being shot by cops. When a cop asks – or tells, or commands – you to do something, just do it. Don’t give him a hard time. Don’t call him names or swear at him. Just politely comply. Rare is the case when someone who is politely complying with the police gets shot, beaten with a night stick or hit with a stun gun. Let’s apply my solution to the event last August in Ferguson, Mo., that has caused so much talk about relations between young black men and police. (The event also caused several minority-owned businesses to be burned to the ground.)We wouldn’t even be talking about this if, when the officer, Darren Wilson, asked Mike Brown to get off the street, he said “OK” and complied. Perhaps Brown would have been arrested anyway, because a few moments later it became apparent that he was involved in a strong-armed robbery at a nearby store. But he certainly wouldn’t have died that day. I can say with certainty that if you smoke a little weed, steal some cigars from a store, walk down the middle of a busy street causing traffic problems, get confronted by a cop, slam the cop’s car door on him a couple of times, jump on top of him in the car, repeatedly punch him in the face and try to take his gun and use it to shoot him, your day will not end well. That’s 100 percent of the time. And I’m confident that if Brown’s race had been anything other than black, the result would have been the same. Could Wilson have used a little more discretion and perhaps avoided killing Brown? I think so. I think he could have stopped him without taking his life. I think he could have shot to wound instead of shooting to kill. But then again, was the cop a good enough marksman to pull that off in the heat of the moment? Probably not. My sense is that Wilson was freaked out and scared out of his mind and just kept shooting until Brown hit the ground. I’m not sure if a crime was committed by Wilson that day. I’m not sure he was justified in using deadly force against an unarmed teen, no matter how big and intimidating the kid was. A grand jury found that he acted legally, and I’m not sure that was the right decision. But I am absolutely certain of one thing: All Mike Brown had to do that fateful day was comply and he’d still be alive.
