More than ever, it appears that the agencies and systems in place that should protect the weakest of us don’t. After they fail, there are no consequences nor are there any other avenues of recourse for average citizens to take. Two stories dropped today that, although they appear unrelated, are symptoms of the same problem.
Scot Peterson, was a former police deputy who was assigned to work as a resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSDHS) in Parkland, Florida. He was found not guilty of child neglect, perjury and culpable negligence. Peterson was on duty at school on the day an angry expelled student opened fire there, working his way through different floors, eventually killing seventeen and wounding seventeen more. The nation watched surveillance footage of Peterson, cowering near a door outside as the reports from the student’s rifle competed with the screams of terrified fleeing students and faculty.
The other story comes from the nation’s judicial branch. The Supreme Court’s right-wing provided surprisingly progressive rulings earlier in the week, and gave some hope that it would resume protecting the rights of the historically disadvantaged. As soon as the sun, rainbows, birds and butterflies came out to celebrate earlier decisions, the court reverted to form and its six Reactionaries of the Apocalypse handed down a ruling based in mythologic fantasy. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled in a 6-3 majority that race cannot be considered by college admissions offices when constructing their student body. For those scoring at home, this court upended 50 years of precedent for Roe v. Wade last year, this year nullified a state’s century-old law to restrict concealed firearms issued within it (I thought these people liked state’s rights), proclaimed that an amendment passed by Congress to enable the EPA to regulate wetlands near rivers was not enforceable and today reversed a legal precedent that has been upheld for 45 years.
On Valentines Day 2018, shots rang out at MSDHS. Students and teachers hid or ran for their lives. The unlucky were shot and wounded. The unluckiest were shot and killed. As shots rang out, then Deputy Peterson called in over his walkie that a shooting was in progress and proceeded to take cover behind a wall outside. While he shrank and took cover, students and staff were methodically gunned down by an unstable student wearing a gas mask and pumping rounds out of his AR-15. The carnage was over in under ten minutes, all of which Peterson spent hyperventilating, panic-stricken and immobilized outside. Former Deputy Peterson was hired as a police officer and then assigned to serve and protect the staff and students at MSDHS as a resource officer. What resource is he providing if not safety and protection? He’s not there to ladle out lunches or teach differential equations. The placement of armed police at a school is presumably to have an officer on scene who can engage an armed and dangerous assailant, and mitigate the threat.
I’m not against police. I’m against bad or ineffective police. To anyone who responds, “Let’s see you do better”, get out of here with that. I know I wouldn’t likely do better and never claimed I would. That is why I tap on this keyboard and didn’t choose to enroll in the academy, get sworn in, load and holster a sidearm instead. Those that do, however, are expected to live up to their oath and the credo on their uniforms and vehicles: serve and protect. Who did Peterson serve that day? Did he protect anyone, other than himself, while he hid outside with a working revolver and unarmed students and staff were picked off inside by an unbalanced lunatic? This failure happened again on a larger scale spanning an hour in Uvalde, TX. How do we ensure there isn’t another?
Sergeant Jeffrey Heinrich, another officer who was on the scene, was off-duty and watering the school ball fields nearby as a volunteer. The AP reporting said the following of him:
He said he heard loud bangs, but having worked as a school police officer, he just thought a student had set off firecrackers. And though he then heard the fire alarm go off, he only began to suspect gunshots when he saw panicked students running from the building. He dropped the hose and ran toward the buildings, even though he was unarmed and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt.
“My training is that you run toward the sound of gunshots,” he said. “It was just instinct.” He said officers are told to get to the shooter because every gunshot is potentially another death.
Sergeant Heinrich’s bravery and example were duplicated by officers responding to a school shooting in Nashville, TN earlier this year. Those officers heard shots, moved towards the source and neutralized the perpetrator within minutes of arrival on the scene. Casualties that day were six killed. That difference in number of victims seems to clearly illustrate that the speed, manner and direction of police response in such a case is key.
The jury found Peterson innocent of perjury, although he told police responding to the scene that he only heard a few gunshots and saw no children fleeing. Officer Heinrich heard lots of gunshots and saw many children fleeing. They found Peterson not guilty of child neglect and that he did not fail as a caregiver responsible for the welfare of students. Of the stipulations in child neglect, it includes a willful failure to make a reasonable effort to protect victim(s). Culpable negligence requires that the perpetrator could have reasonably known their actions (inactions in this case) would have led to bodily harm or death. What part of an on-duty officer not trying to stop a mass shooter doesn’t apply here? If someone is hired to stand armed watch to protect people from harm, and they don’t, they failed the assignment. Abandoning the youth, leaving those you are employed to protect to the muzzle of a mass shooter, while taking cover yourself, sounds like the very definition of child negligence. Not acting in the face of a gunman, knowing children and teachers are being sheared by bullets, sounds exactly like making a decision that you knew would result in children’s deaths.
SCOTUS, oh boy the SCOTUS. I have grown to loathe this acronym over recent years. Today they gutted affirmative action for admissions like the British did William Wallace at the end of Braveheart, right down to the gleeful display of its entrails to their frothing right-wing audience. For those of us on the left, pensively watching the right-wing circling overhead as affirmative action ran out of sustenance in the desert, we knew the end was likely. It was still bitter. Roberts wrote the majority opinion with Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Coney-Barrett and Kavanaugh all writing in support. Roberts, apparently unaware the Constitution was originally written with Black people as thoughtless, rightless property said that race-based college admissions, “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.” Contrary to Justice Roberts belief, I argue that the majority of the Constitution’s history shows it not only tolerated that choice, but calcified it.
Affirmative action did not say a person’s identity was their skin color. It acknowledged that this nation did, and often still does, associate academic achievement potential with skin color. It further understood that people of color were, and often still are, not considered good choices for potential alumni by admissions offices of prestige schools and get denied opportunities. In response, it sought to open the considerations for education to those who were traditionally not considered. The fact that disparities in access persist between people of color and their White counterparts, even while affirmative action policies were in effect, was lost on the reactionaries.
Thomas, still ecstatic as ever to be a recipient of the benefits of affirmative action but deny it to others, also chimed in. He apparently was so proud of slamming the door of opportunity to his fellows that he read a significant portion of his own opinion aloud. To many court watchers, this is notable. Thomas was generally known as the “silent Justice”, often not speaking or asking any questions at all during oral arguments before the court. The NY Times quoted a portion of his opinion, targeted at the minority opinion of the court’s newest Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. In it he said, “As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of Black Americans still determining our lives today.” Two things struck me here:
That because he has made it to the Supreme Court, he believes fundamental and systemic racism does not exist. In other words, I’ve made it; the rest of you who haven’t must be lazy losers playing the victim.
Thomas identifies as Black. To read his opinions and interview quotes, one couldn’t be sure.
It could be that Justice Thomas has always held this view of other Black people, even while he gladly accepted the beneficial boosts he received from affirmative action, including higher education and employment, that helped propel him to the seat he now holds. It could also be that he truly is incapable of seeing that racism and its effects are intertwined in the country’s systems and that the legacy of those forces continues to beleaguer the Black community to this day. I can see how hard it would be to believe in racism’s existence when your White, billionaire “good friends” fly and yacht you for free all over the world, providing trips that would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to duplicate on your own. Maybe they would have done the same for Thomas if he led the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission his whole career, instead of ruling, coincidentally of course, in their favor in all the cases that came before the court during his tenure.
In her opinion’s rebuke, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” Justice Jackson’s observation is borne out. Did the law’s treatment of Philando Castile show colorblindness? Did the law show colorblindness when the Dakota Access Pipeline was determined too much of a risk to install near Bismarck and its water sources, but just the thing to install near the Standing Rock Sioux water supply? Do the construction sites of other industries, garbage landfills and other environmentally devastating and polluting construction, seen as too dangerous for fairer-complected neighborhoods, yet built without obstacle near Black, Latino and Indigenous neighborhoods show legal colorblindness?
When Justices Thomas and Alito, hop out of Uncle Harlan’s and Uncle Paul’s private jets respectively, maybe you can ask them. In the event that they don’t respond, or you need to wait for them to publish their response in the Wall Street Journal, you can have my opinion, which is that the law is still not applied with colorblindness. This is true in criminal justice, environmental protection, financial protection and in education. The law says now that one cannot discriminate but it did discriminate with compounding consequences for most of this nation’s history. The letter of the law says you cannot discriminate, but law in practice is not applied indiscriminately. Since this is the case, accommodations to correct for unequal application of laws, practices, rights and opportunities, including considering the historical effects of policies based on race, seems right. The majority of justices abandoned that view and with it an assurance that many people of color, who might otherwise be dismissed, got an opportunity normally not afforded them.
How is an acquitted police officer, disgraced by cowardice, and a Supreme Court overturning protective precedent related? I’m glad you asked. In both cases, each party was put in place to protect others. Those that need protecting are the vulnerable, weaker or disadvantaged among us. In neither case did they fulfill their purpose. After failing to provide that protection, neither suffered any consequences. They took oaths but instead of keeping the weak and unarmed safe, they protected the empowered or themselves.
The old adage says that those who have the gold, make the rules. Those with amassed wealth, connections, influence and family legacy of attending premier educational institutions have great advantages. This is true even among people in the same social or ethnic caste. Carried out between favored and disfavored castes, repeated over time, those advantages are compounded. If the powerful and empowered protect themselves, and the government’s agencies and departments work as their guard dogs, who is protecting the rest of us?
We are told to put our trust in law enforcement to protect us and those with us. Many in law enforcement say that they fear further proliferation of guns among the public. They say it leads to more situations where they may have to engage with an armed assailant, which makes all interactions that more fraught and dangerous. Those who buy firearms point to personal protection in case of danger. Those of us supporting control of gun ownership, myself included, point to the ubiquitous presence of police as a reason gun ownership isn’t necessary. Yet, when an event like the one at Marjory Stoneham happens, and unarmed teachers, aides and students are under fire while the on-duty officer doesn’t engage, is that faith in police to protect you always well-placed? If those who are trained, armed and hired to put their life on the line decide to hide, while the rest of us are unarmed and taking fire, who is protecting us? I hate to even toy with this next thought because my gut, and loads of studies, show that the mass of guns is the reason for our high volume of random and unexpected gun deaths. Yet, should those of us resistant to gun-ownership change our tunes, start packing heat and hope that we more reliably protect ourselves than trained officers?
Our systems, agencies, and other established repositories of trust seem to be failing us. Who do we depend on if organizations, with expansive budgets, the most advanced tools, education, training and greatest influence are working for the richest and strongest of us, or just looking to protect themselves? President Obama had a saying as a candidate, “We are the ones we we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” We need heroes but no one seems to be answering our call. Are we the ones to do the job and make the change? Are we looking for someone else to step into the breach but we’ve had the power and the cape all along? If so, how do we do it and where do we start? I wish I knew but I don’t and it is a question we need to answer soon.
Wow! You continue to educate and inspire me with your keyboard tapping!
Thomas is confused, and more importantly compromised. He’s been welcomed into the fold by wealthy, powerful white Americans because of his position, not because of his race. Thomas would have us believe that somehow these folks have morphed from a caterpillar to a butterfly. In reality, if Thomas worked in the produce department at Kroger, it is unlikely a billionaire would offer to pay his nephew’s $72,000 yearly tuition or that he would have been accepted at that Hidden Lake Academy. Affirmative Action is designed to give everyone a seat at the table, an opportunity to be included in the discussion and for their voices to be heard. For one of the most powerful, influential black men in America to say that’s no longer important or needed is troubling.
Regarding law enforcement, we struggle in this country holding the police accountable. I lived through the killing of Breonna Taylor in my hometown of Louisville. The officers involved (for the most part) were found guilty of state and Federal charges and will spend a considerable amount of time in prison. It’s a black eye from which the city will never recover. Many times, officers involved in questionable line-of-duty shootings are cleared of wrongdoing. Regarding the events at MSDHS, inaction was just as costly. I wasn’t on the jury and didn’t hear the judge’s instruction so I won’t blame the jurors. It’s most likely Florida law that shielded the officer. Nevertheless, if you wear the badge, they are certain expectations from those you serve. Most law enforcement officers are dedicated to the people and communities they serve and will stop at nothing to protect both.
Well organized and thoughtful commentary despite being a rant in style.
If I was a university head, I would stop advertising on my website that admissions uses race as a partial determinate of acceptance but in fact continue to use it. In some ways the Supreme Court's decision makes saying the use of racial criteria are being used illegal, but it can in no way stop them from actually being used.
Similarly their decision against the legality of abortion, means it cannot be done in open commerce, but it will now be done through illicit commerce.
We measure our society as a whole in part by what we consider legal and what do not. Clearly we are taking many steps back from our ideals and lessons of the civil rights movement in particular. But people flout the law all the time in many circumstances especially when it seems unfair or they can simply get away with it. Very few people drive at or under the speed limit at most times. I think admissions departments if they are smart will change their procedures in writing but no so much in actual results if in fact they want to keep their current student body diversity.