Acting White: Oakland Cop Killer

By now everyone has surely heard of the five shootings of Oakland Police officers over the weekend, resulting in four deaths, plus that of the parolee turned murderer. As a resident of Oakland, I was horrified when a BART Officer recently killed an unarmed man in custody. Today, I am equally horrified, times four, that these officers are gone by the actions of a vile being. But what I really want to talk about is what you will likely not see in the papers or news about this tragedy.

The first thing you will not see addressed, but perhaps pieced together in pictures, is that the four officers killed appeared to be white and their killer, particularly, was black, although this is what every honest reader wanted to know from the start. Why do we want to know, you ask? That’s easy. Ethnicity does not speak to guilt or innocence, but it is a very valid empirical story as to who, what and where notorious danger lurks.

The second thing you will not see written is why these police officers were so, umm, white. Oakland, with a sizable black population of 35% (white (23%), Latino (21%), and Asian (15%)) should have had at least one black person on the law’s side in this battle, but no. The reality is that both motorcycle or SWAT duty are coveted exam-positions where white males perform at a higher level and this is how this lone demographic found itself owning the wrong place at the wrong time slot.

The third thing you will not see written is that when police officers get injured or killed, the follow-on police work is often compromised to the detriment of the health and safety of the public and the officers themselves. While this is understandable, from an emotional standpoint, it is also an unacceptable profile for an officer, that they should take risks that increase the likelihood of injury to themselves or innocents. The SWAT officers clearly did not assume and prepare for the worst case scenario, causing me to wonder if emotions from their slain and gravely injured brother officers unduly influenced them.

The fourth, but hardly the last, thing you will not read about is the effect this tragedy will have on white officers and their relationship, good and bad, with black Oakland, and officers on the whole, engaging black suspects in the future. They can’t help but take a more aggressive and/or cautious posture toward them. Profiling will go up. Brutality will go up. Arrest will go up. Injuries will go up. Fatalities will go up. Lawsuits will certainly go up, and convictions will likely go down.

I don’t have a lot of answers, but I can tell you that until we stop hoping that we all just ‘get along’ and start speaking about things unspeakable, we are not going to make a lot of progress and people will continue to die senselessly, needlessly and tragically.

James C. Collier

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