BLM Ma’Khia Bryant & Tre Von Dickson
'I'm sorry to cancel this interview today, as our school has scheduled a walk-out to protest for
all our students who have been killed in the past 72 hours.'
This is the message my partner got from a teacher this morning. They work in Columbus, Ohio. You may have already heard about the fatal shooting of the 13-year-old child Ma'Khia Bryant by a police officer just hours before Derrick Chavin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd. You probably won't have heard of the fatal shooting of 15-year-old child Tre Von Dickson, and the gunshot injury sustained by 15-year-old child Nasir Ndiaye (police say the pair exchanged gunfire after an altercation.) Dickson's death is reported as the 62nd homicide in the city this year.
There's a level of recurring trauma that this entirely avoidable and continuous loss of life imparts, on children in particular, which is deeply damaging. Imagine being a teacher who has to try to cope with their own and their student's grief, while trying to motivate them to learn. It's significant to note that gun violence is so ubiquitous in the US, that the death of a teenage boy only makes local news. It's also important to understand how shootings by police have displaced the deaths of children and teenagers as the headline news, and how that changes the conversation about gun violence. It's got to the point that unless it's a mass shooting or a police officer committing murder, individual deaths involving gun violence don't even get coverage or spark protests on a national scale. There literally isn't enough time to protest all the gun-related violence that occurs in the US, and that leaves the already vulnerable even more unprotected. The children who live in areas where gun violence is common are in danger simply by existing in that place.
In the cases of Ma'Khia and Tre Von, guns were used in situations where they did not have to be, by people who arguably should not have access to them. For some Americans, it's a controversial stance to say that even 15-year-olds should not have access to guns. Racism and stereotypes about gang violence and black male teens might cause some to say that they should not have guns, but it's ok for white kids to have them if they show 'responsible ownership'. It's definitely controversial to say that police should not have guns. Where we are, in the UK, it's horrifying to imagine that anyone is comfortable just wandering around with a gun. The only place they might be found are on farms or at stately homes, usually shotguns for shooting predatory animals or hunting birds and deer for food, and only for adults. Even then it's something most people feel uncomfortable about. Tasers being used by the police is controversial in the UK, whereas in the US it's often given as an example of a safe alternative to guns. This is not to say we don't have racism in the police in the UK, or that people don't die in custody under suspicious circumstances, because they do, and it's wrong. However the absence of guns for police and the population as whole means there is far less murder in the UK in general, including at the hands of police. Knife crime is still a problem here, and it is often fatal. But guns are more dangerous, more instant and more easily used to kill from afar.
Guns allow people to make split-second decisions to seriously harm another human being, without being close enough to intervene in a different way. If the officer who killed Ma'Khia, a child, had no gun, they would have had to get close enough to see what was happening, and have an opportunity to intervene without shooting. They may still have chosen to harm her, and as we saw in the case of George Floyd, a person can be killed using no weapons at all. And just to be clear, despite knife crime being the biggest issue, police officers in the UK don't carry knives in order to fight knife crime. Even typing that out sounds utterly ridiculous, and the reason it sounds so ridiculous is that police officers are supposed to uphold the law, and the law is you don't harm another human being. The fact this seems to need spelling out is also ridiculous, but that is where we are. Even self-defence is a specific and exceptional circumstance, whereby you are still expected to only use enough force to prevent the other person from harming you. Police are supposed to intervene when people are harming each other to, and this is important, prevent harm from occurring. The universal problem seems to be that the police, wherever they are in the world, feel that they get to choose who to protect and who to harm in the name of protecting themselves or others, rather than preventing harm to everyone involved.
Police don't tackle knife crime by bringing their own knives because knives are specifically designed to cause harm. Knives are inherently dangerous objects. It's pretty difficult to use a knife in a way that is purely defensive. Similarly, and again, I have to spell this shit out, guns are inherently designed to attack not defend. That's also the reason tasers are controversial in the UK; they are used to attack, not defend. Whereas other equipment, such as a baton or a shield, can be used to attack (and have been by police in unforgivable ways) they were designed to be used as a defence. Policing based on de-escalation and using force as last resort instead of a first option is important because it changes the nature of the interaction from the start. No one in their right mind would suggest a defence and harm reduction based de-escalation tactic designed to protect everyone involves a fucking gun.
However, increased police training on de-escalation and gun control isn't enough. So many of these situations occur because of deprivation and inequality. When only violence committed by the police or mass shootings involving multiple victims get attention, and still nothing meaningful is done, those who live on the edges of society are more and more at risk. When it's dangerous just being black, it's exponentially more dangerous being black and disabled, trans, female, poor, LGB, involved in sex work, an immigrant, native American..... all these disadvantages intersect to make the world an increasingly dangerous place. If you are the marginalised of the marginalised, where do you go to feel safe? When you are assumed to be a perpetrator, criminal or invalid because you exist as you are, how can you?
This only changes when our perspective on crime and justice changes. We need to see the root causes of crime as poverty, inequality and poor social and health care, and fix those problems, and then so much of the crimes that occur as a result of oppression will simply disappear on their own. We need to see a future where if we have a police force, they are only deployed in those rare situations where every intervention has failed, and a person is causing harm to others, so they need to have their freedoms restricted as a prevention, not as a punishment. And we need more law enforcement to focus on 'white-collar' crimes that harm society as a whole; crimes that enable rich people to cause poverty and increase inequality. Imagine a world where law enforcement means ensuring taxes get paid, the living wage is protected, adequate housing is maintained, healthy food is affordable, healthcare is free, drugs are provided to those who need them.... If this sounds idealistic, it is. But we need our ideals as a place to aim for, to ground us in hope when things get too hard and to remind us what we are trying to create to oppose those who just want to destroy.
Ma'Khia and Tre Von mattered. Everyone who has lost their life to gun violence matters. Those who live in the shadows and on the edges matter. Our human rights have to be protected, and those rights say that each and every person, with no exceptions, matters. Only when the most oppressed of us are free to live, exactly as they are, in safety and happiness, will our work be done.
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