#tom wise

🏫 Tom Wise Elected School Committee Chair

I want to reiterate a point from my last post regarding the killing of Alton Sterling by a Baton Rouge police officer, because it speaks to something that rarely gets discussed when these things happen. Seems like every time an officer kills someone (regardless of race, but especially when the person is a black male), folks want to know why the person killed had to “resist” the police? Why didn’t they just remain calm and still and do as asked? Putting aside the historical and ideological response (true though it is) about how hard it is for people who are constantly disrespected by police to suddenly be deferential to them, and putting aside the fact that cops kill folks who aren’t resisting plenty of times too (Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Akai Gurley, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Amadou Diallo, etc), ask yourself: Have you ever been tackled by someone who then proceeded to get on top of you and hold you down, the way Sterling was? Or choked the way Eric Garner was, by someone who was compressing your jugular, thereby disallowing blood re-circulation from your brain to the rest of your body? If not, consider how unlikely it is that the natural response you would have to either of these would be to “relax,” “stay calm” or comply with what was happening. Even if the person doing it to you was a cop, the fight-or-flight instinct that is part of all of us would kick in. Even people who EXPECT to be tackled (like running backs, for instance) have a tendency to struggle against the person doing it when it happens and they hit the ground, especially if the tackle was painful. And that’s people who know a tackle is coming and for whom being tackled is part of their job, not just some average person. Going limp in such a situation is a) not easily done, because of the fight-or-flight instinct to stiffen up and try and get loose; and b) is considered by police to often be ANOTHER FORM OF RESISTANCE ANYWAY, because it makes carrying you away more difficult. I learned this during political protests over two decades ago. We would try and go limp when being carted away by cops but it was hard to do in practice and often made the cops even angrier because now we were dead weight and they had to work harder, so they got even more brutal… In other words, we are asking average folks to become critical thinkers about their own physiological response to a very stressful and scary moment (i.e., being tackled or choked by a cop, or beaten as happened to Rodney King who “kept trying to get up”), even though moments like that are NOT known for being moments where critical thinking is likely, even as we are NOT asking police who are trained and agents of the state to think critically about how to de-escalate and hold fire. We are asking more of average citizens than the police. Police should not have to think before acting, but the person they are attacking should…it’s lunacy, truly.

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