Late final month, Chicago Police Officer Melvina Bogard was acquitted of felony battery prices within the taking pictures of an unarmed man at a Chicago practice station in 2020. Whereas a handful of native media retailers reported on the story on the time, the case obtained far much less consideration than most during which a cop shoots a civilian.
Maybe this has one thing to do with Bogard’s race — she is black and the taking pictures sufferer, Ariel Roman, is white. Each time a white cop shoots and injures a black sufferer within the US, the media explodes with outrage, as journalists search to prop up the narrative of systemic white supremacy and brutality throughout the police pressure. However there may be far much less urge for food for the reverse state of affairs, even when that white sufferer isn’t armed, doesn’t seem like a hazard to police and is shot at shut vary.
The main points across the Roman taking pictures are clear. On Feb. 8, 2020, officer Bogard and her associate, Bernard Butler, tried to arrest Roman for illegally transferring between practice automobiles on the Grand Avenue cease on the Chicago’s Pink Line practice system.
In video footage compiled by The Chicago Solar-Instances, Roman will be seen persistently resisting arrest. One of many officers screams “cease resisting” greater than 10 occasions. Finally the officers deploy their Tasers, but Roman manages to stay on his ft. Bogard then pulls her gun and yells, “Sir, put your f–king palms down!” Butler, in the meantime, yells, “Shoot him!”
In a matter of seconds, Bogard shoots Roman within the abdomen at point-blank vary. In some way Roman flees earlier than she fires at him a second time within the again. Finally, Roman, wounded and bloodied, is apprehended and arrested.
Blame for the taking pictures will be positioned on each side. Roman was clearly noncompliant — he defied all the officers’ instructions, forcing occasions to escalate. Then again, firing photographs at Roman when he was only a few ft away feels extreme. Though Bogard claimed she shot Roman in self-defense, even her personal police chief, David Brown, didn’t purchase that argument. He known as for her to be fired for violating police protocol, saying lethal pressure was not crucial on an individual who posed no severe menace to her or anybody close by.
However what’s most noticeable on this case is the media’s response to the taking pictures — or, quite, its lack thereof. After the 2014 dying of Eric Garner by the hands of NYPD cop Daniel Pantaleo, the media has scrutinized each occasion of police overreach — however solely when the cops are white and the victims are black.
The Bogard case, which refused to evolve to that ideology, barely registered.
Though some video footage from bystanders circulated via social media channels and quite a few principally native media retailers coated Bogard’s acquittal, the story did not seize the eye of nationwide retailers like The New York Instances, CNN and MSNBC. The case was nearly utterly ignored.
In the meantime, white-cop/black-victim shootings, like these of Jacob Blake and Ma’Khia Bryant have immediately gone viral — although, in each circumstances, the cops have been cleared of any wrongdoing. The notion that white cops are brutal murderers of black victims (which most positively was the case with Derek Chauvin’s homicide of George Floyd in Could 2020) typically fails to carry up in courtroom.
In 2020, coverage analyst Zach Goldberg researched racial bias within the media and confirmed that unarmed black victims of deadly police shootings generate 9 occasions as many information search objects as these about white victims. Mainstream media retailers have made coordinated “editorial selections” to “normalize amongst their readership the idea that ‘shade’ is the defining attribute of different human beings,” Goldberg writes.
Whereas it's true that a extremely disproportionate variety of black victims are shot by cops, unarmed white Individuals comprise some 40% of police taking pictures victims. White victims have additionally been killed by cops in circumstances that mirror their black counterparts: grabbing their driver’s license throughout a visitors cease (mistaken for a gun), not displaying their palms upon request, and being pushed to the bottom and suffocated to dying whereas officers crack jokes.
However these aren’t the tales that excite the media.
Because the Ariel Roman taking pictures reveals, the significance of human struggling hinges on the race of the sufferer — and its potential to be exploited for optimum ideological impression.
Rav Arora makes a speciality of matters of race, civil liberties, and spirituality. Comply with him on Twitter @Ravarora1 and on Substack at ravarora.substack.com
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