Cleveland Police Shoot an Unarmed 12-Year-Old Boy
BLACKWELL: People in Cleveland gathered for a meeting on gun violence and police relations after a police officer fatally shot a 12-year-old boy last weekend. Listen.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If a black person reaches for something, their kneejerk response now is to shoot.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Can we totally a world where the lives of black people mean nothing? It's that basic.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think the guys are going out to try to shoot somebody. I don't think anybody on the police department is doing that.</s>PAUL: Police earlier released a surveillance video of the shooting, and it shows an officer shot Tamir Rice two seconds after the patrol car pulled up near him. Police have also released recordings of the 911 call and the dispatchers tape as well.</s>BLACKWELL: Now, the police shooting of course that's garnering the most attention is in Ferguson. So much has been said about what's happening there, but we have with us this morning is a professor who says what we're witnessing is not black rage against police but white rage against progress.</s>PAUL: Carol Anderson is joining us now. She's an Associate Professor of African-American Studies and History at Emory University here in Atlanta. We're also joined by Bishop Raphael Green. He pastors a church in the St. Louis area. Thank you both for taking some time to be with us. Professor Anderson, I would love to start with you real quickly. I know that you wrote an op-ed for "The Washington Post" in August. And I want to read part of that for our viewers here. You said, quote, "When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, during the summer of 2014 it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African-American male, but that has it precisely backwards. What we've actually seen is the latest outbreak of the white rage. Sure, it's cloaked in niceties of the law and order, but it is rage nonetheless." Explain what you mean by "white rage."</s>CAROL ANDERSON, EMORY UNIVERSITY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR: White rage is the one that's invisible in terms of it really is cloaked in niceties of law and order. It is cloaked in the courts. It's cloaked in legislatures that devise systems that weaken black voting strength. It's cloaked in legislatures that figure how to define or to redraw districts and boundaries and defund programs or to shrink hiring or the number of public employee, given that most of the discrimination that we see is, for hiring for instance, is in private industry. So you have overwhelmingly African-Americans and the black middle class made up of those in public employment. So when you talk about fiscal responsibility it sounds genteel. It sounds responsible. It sounds doggone what a good government should do. But underneath it, the destruction to the black community is profound.</s>BLACKWELL: So explain how, if there is this white rage in the way you describe it, how do you change that, if it is so engrained in the institutions and as you say it is subtle from some angles?</s>ANDERSON: And I think in part the way we begin to do that, and we're seeing it, is that more and more whites are beginning to understand that there is something fundamentally, inherently wrong with the ways that when you are seeing, for instance, the Ferguson police who were fully riot geared up with armored vehicles and the like, wait a minute, this is not my America. When you strip away the veneer and you are asking, so, for jaywalking and shoplifting you get six bullets? I mean, when you begin to strip away the narratives of black as thug, black as criminal, and just begin to see that the violence level is so intense. Ferguson popped because that violence was so apparent. But the underlying violence is also what has led to the kindling that allowed this to explode. So the way you get at it is that African-American has have been talking about this for years. More and more whites are beginning to see it as well, and it is that coming together that is going to make the difference.</s>PAUL: We had a guest on earlier who had been a St. Louis County police officer, and he said -- we asked him about the disparity in the department. You know, if you have got the majority of the community who are African-Americans and only three out of 53 officers are African-Americans, how do you change that? And he said a lot of African-Americans don't want to be part of the police department. How do you get people involved if they don't want to be and they already see those barriers? How do we break through them?</s>ANDERSON: And I would push back on that "they don't want to be police officers, because you see, I mean, it's like saying there is an entire element or an entire profession where African-Americans just don't want to be. But what they see -- I mean, and we saw it too in August and in September when you have the police force -- members of the police force talking about we're here to shoot down these rabid dogs. And so if you have a norm within that force, that police force that sees the black community as rabid dogs, is that a place where you really want to work? And so it's not that African-Americans don't want to be police officers. They don't want to be police officers where there is that under underlying rage that takes the kind of violence that a police force can heap on a community and target it.</s>BLACKWELL: And, you know, one thing we learned is that the African- Americans especially in St. Louis County who want to be police officers are so high in demand, they can go to a larger department. They can get more money. So to stay in a small community, it's less attractive if you can go into St. Louis County or to a larger city. Professor Carol Anderson, thank you so much for joining us this morning. Our apologies to the bishop. We had some technical difficulties there. But we thank him for joining us this morning just the same.</s>PAUL: Absolutely. We have to get to a little bit of -- a couple other pieces of news here. Pilots, they have a lot going on when they are in the cockpit, right. Well, now they have to worry, may have to worry about remote controlled drones. We're talking about that a little bit We're talking act that a little bit later this year.</s>BLACKWELL: But also a man walked through the streets of downtown Austin, Texas, firing over and over more than 100 rounds. We're learning about the shooter's targets right after this.