‘This Is Without Question a Murder’

A police officer who shot an African-American motorist because he refused to get out of his vehicle must face murder charges in the state of Ohio.

Another unarmed black has been gunned down by a white police officer and another false police report has been filed concerning the tragic fatality. Once again, video images, this time recorded by a body cam, have revealed the truth. And also once more, white America must experience another near-daily violent act perpetrated on another black citizen by the police.

This time it happened in Cincinnati, where previous racial disturbances occurred in 2001 following the fatal shooting of another unarmed black man at the hands of the police. But this time, officials took immediate action after a video of the July 19 shooting was made public. For the first time in Hamilton County’s history, murder charges have been filed against a member of the police force. On Wednesday, prosecutor Joseph Deters said, “It was a senseless, asinine shooting,” after officer Ray Tensing, previously employed by the University of Cincinnati as a police officer, fatally shot Samuel Dubose. Tensing has since been fired from his position.

According to Deters, Tensing intentionally killed DuBose, remarking, “This office has probably reviewed 100 police shootings, and this is the first time we’ve thought this is without question a murder.” He added, “This doesn’t happen in the United States, OK? This might happen in Afghanistan. People don’t get shot for a traffic stop.” Unless you happen to be black, perhaps. Walter Scott died just a few months ago in North Carolina after he was stopped for a routine traffic matter and suddenly fled the scene. The gunshots, fired from considerable distance, struck him in the back.

Anyone who watches the video can easily understand the outrage prosecutor Deters is referring to at his press conference. Tensing stopped DuBose because his vehicle had no front license plate. He stopped him, however, in a location that was outside the area campus in which police have any authority. DuBose, at that point, produced the license plate which he was carrying in the glove compartment of his car, but admitted that he was not carrying his driver’s license.

Escalation Within Seconds

What appeared to be a routine traffic stop escalated within a few seconds, when Tensing tried to open the car door and DuBose turned the ignition key under the impression that there had been no reason to stop him. Contrary to what police officers are taught — never reach into a vehicle through an open window — Tensing did exactly that, with the obvious intention of removing the ignition key.

Tensing twice shouted “Stop!” then drew his weapon and shot DuBose in the head. A short time later, he reported on his radio that he had nearly been run over. In actuality, however, he had already shot DuBose. The vehicle only began to roll forward when the fatally wounded driver was no longer able to control the car.

After all the fatal shootings of blacks by predominantly white police officers in the past several months — from Ferguson to New York, from North Carolina to Baltimore and Cincinnati — it’s easy to become cynical and believe that such things will never change, and that a black life is worth less to many officers of the law than a white life.

However, that obscures the fact that the majority of blacks who die a violent death in the U.S. do so at the hands of other blacks. Besides, the often shocking videos showing blacks being mistreated by white police officers often cause a certain amount of soul searching on the part of white Americans.

Many had believed that Barack Obama’s election as the first black president signaled a solution to the racial question in the nation. Now they are confronted with just how much institutional racism remains in America. “A lot of white people are truly shocked by what these videos depict; I know very few African-Americans who are surprised,” Paul D. Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University, told The New York Times. “The videos are smoking-gun evidence,” he added, “both literally because they are very graphic, which generates outrage, and figuratively, because people believe their own eyes.”

It’s two different things when it comes to whether blacks from underprivileged neighborhoods just report their mistreatment in such encounters with police or whether they document such encounters and confront white Americans with visual proof of those painful realities. Until now, it had generally been assumed by the white community that police officers in those situations were justified in going for their guns. That confidence in law enforcement agencies has now been clearly shaken. Especially since it has been shown in many cases that police have grossly misrepresented the facts to justify their use of force just to cover themselves.

A Nation Where Whites Are the Majority

American society is currently going through a learning process. It has to come to the realization that the relationship between blacks and whites is still an open wound. And many whites are surprised to learn the actual realities of life blacks still experience nearly a half century after the civil rights movement. They read in newspaper reports of how even middle class black parents still lecture their maturing sons on how to interact with the police so that they will survive to live another day, because a thoughtless comment or one false move could have catastrophic consequences. And sometimes there are heartbreaking accounts of black parents trying to teach their offspring why America isn’t “their” land like it is a white child’s country; and why it’s still worth continuing the fight so that someday it might be.

The black intellectual and Atlantic magazine writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a long letter to his son in which he described the moment he heard the grand jury in Ferguson had decided against bringing charges against the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. “You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, ‘I’ve got to go,’ and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”

American society is taking a new look at race relations across the country. What they see is that there has been little progress evident in the past few months. The authorities in North Charleston and in Cincinnati reacted more quickly and openly than they did in Ferguson in an attempt to avoid giving the impression that some sort of omertà exists within law enforcement agencies that protects violent cops. Whether or not things will indeed “be OK” in the sense Ta-Nehisi meant remains to be seen. But it’s at least a start.