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Jack Tame: No reason to be optimistic for the US

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Sat, 6 Jun 2020, 9:27AM
Photo / Getty Images

Jack Tame: No reason to be optimistic for the US

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Sat, 6 Jun 2020, 9:27AM

I watched an incredibly disturbing video last night and I can’t stop thinking about it.

You may have seen it on the news last night. The video shows a line of Police in riot gear marching forward along a footpath. A tall man wearing a surgical mask strides up to them. He has short grey hair and according to news reports this morning, he’s 75 years old.

Anyway, he walks up to the advancing Police and waves his phone at them. He’s not touching them or physically threatening him. He actually has a bike helmet in his spare hand. But two Police shout and shove him back. He stumbles, falls, and there are two cracks. One as the bike helmet falls from his hands. The other as his head smacks into the concrete.

The person filming is only a few metres away. The man lies motionless and immediately you hear people calling out. ‘He’s bleeding from the ears! He’s bleeding from the ears!’

The man is bleeding from the ears. You can see the blood, pouring out. It’s not dripping. It’s a steady thin stream, like from a faucet on a low strength, and blood is quickly pooling on the footpath. His hand, holding his cellphone at his side, goes limp.

Do the officers immediately support him? Check his vitals? No. They walk past him. A couple of Police officers look like they want to kneel down and help, but they’re stopped by their colleagues. No one in a group of twenty or thirty gets down and offers immediate first aid to an unarmed elderly man who has clearly just suffered a serious injury.

Working in my industry you can become a bit numb to watching violent footage, but I’ve found a lot of the pictures out of America this week really upsetting. To the video of the man bleeding from the ears, you can add the video of the unarmed protestor with his hands in the air, in the middle of an interview, being crash-tackled by riot police with batons. You can add to that the video of the woman being beaten and whipped about her legs. Blow after blow. Baton on flesh. She’s not armed. She’s not fighting. She’s grossly outnumbered. She slowly lowers herself to the ground.

Police brutality in America is news but it isn’t new. Racism and the grossly different policing of African American people and white people... is news but it isn’t new.

I was living in the U.S and reported on the protests after Trayvon Martin was shot dead, and the Ferguson unrest after Mike Brown was killed.

The difference this time is that with Trump in charge, Police feel totally empowered in their violence. And for every Police officer that kneels with protestors or really genuinely wishes to de-escalate a situation or confront racism within a force, there is another who feels he has a right to beat and maim the people he purports to protect, or to push his knee into the throat of an unarmed, handcuffed, gasping man.

How will this end? Is there reason to be optimistic?

I do not feel hopeful for America. I think Trump will either continue to stoke tensions and encourage the Police to be more and more violent to the point that many people will die. Or, just as sadly, it’ll fizzle without achieving change that is so desperately required. There may be protests around the World, but if you consider the injustices of recent history under successive Presidents, very little at a systemic level has actually improved for Black Americans at the hands of Police. In the noise and struggle of modern life, Americans and those of us who care have not yet maintained the collective outrage and momentum this cause deserves.

And where will that leave us? Where will that leave the protestors bleeding from the ears? Where will that leave black Americans at the wrong end of the Police baton?

Waiting for another beating. Another alleged murder caught on camera.

It will make the news, sure. But it won’t be anything new.

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