I knew exactly where the killing took place: midway between Minneapolis and St Paul, east of the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota. I’ve driven on Larpenteur many times. But Greg Laden knows the area much, much better.
A neighborhood where bad things don’t happen, filled with people who probably carry out their share of white collar crime (or who are academics, and thus have other problems) but otherwise pretty quiet. Nearby are the scary neighborhoods, the neighborhoods that are actually pretty typical urban zones, with varying degrees of charm, development, decay, all that. Nothing exceptional. But I have the sense that the people of Falcon Heights, Saint Anthony, Lauderdale, and this part of Roseville, a generally liberal and highly educated enclave, collectively identify, label, and talk about those other neighborhoods, which are blacker, crimier, scarier, bits of the “Inner City” (a term disdained by Twin City dwellers, just so you know) creeping out into the “better neighborhoods.”
The victim, of course, was a school employee and citizen of good standing who didn’t live in any of those nearby scary neighborhoods, and was not part of an inner city creeping, even if such a characterization was valid (which it only barely is). But he and the others in the car were black, and they were driving down a street where the city police probably feel a duty to keep the Inner City away, keep the blackness away. One good way to do that is to encourage black people to avoid driving down that particular street, a major local thoroughfare, and instead, stay south and in the city. Let Saint Paul take care of its own problems. Don’t be driving through our quiet neighborhood. How do you do that? Pull over black people with broken tail lights, obviously. Then shake them down. Make them regret driving down that particular street.
The cops in that neighborhood have a reputation.
About two years ago, Joe Olson was pulled over by a St. Anthony Police Department squad car for running a red light in Falcon Heights, the same Twin Cities suburb where Philando Castile was shot to death by a cop Wednesday evening. Olson put his hands on the steering wheel and waited for the officer to approach his driver’s side window when he heard a voice emanate from behind his head.
“I heard this voice with a tremor of fear in it. Actually, it scared me. Is this a scared cop?” Olson told ThinkProgress. “And he’s standing three feet behind my bumper interviewing me through the outside rear-view mirror, which is really weird, and he sounds terrified. I have a Jeep Grand Cherokee that has tinted windows, so he can’t see in the vehicle very well, he can’t see my hands at all, and he conducts the entire interview through my rear-view mirror.”
Olson said he “could’ve had somebody sitting in the back seat with a rifle” and the cop wouldn’t have been able to tell. He added that the officer’s unusual demeanor “made me afraid, and he was incompetent, and that made me more afraid.”
And this sounds familiar: these were not police trained to keep the peace. These were cops shaking down commuters for money.
Olson, who served in the Falcon Heights fire department, said he also has reason to believe that Falcon Heights officials place great value on the revenue generated by traffic citations. The city of 5,491 spent nearly $700,000 on policing last year. Across the three communities the St. Anthony PD serves, officers issued 2,410 citations, but only made 833 arrests, of which 661 were traffic-related. Small towns using traffic citations as a revenue stream is far from unprecedented in America.
“I was on the fire department in Falcon Heights when they got the [St. Anthony] police contract, and the chief promised the city council that he would double their ticket revenue,” Olson said, adding that this happened before Ohl’s tenure. “They essentially run a slot machine where the incident happened. They’re always out there looking for anything — write a ticket and collect a buck.”
Put it all together. You’ve got a well-off, largely white community who have contracted a lazily trained police force to do two things: to intimidate black people from “scary” neighborhoods, and to skim off a profit from said black people. It’s an old story: the playground bully who demands the milk money from the other kids, only this bully is racist as fuck.
Local news also claims to have police scanner audio that explains the rationale behind pulling him over. They looked like perpetrators of a robbery, because he had a “wide set nose”.
The governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, is compelled to acknowledge the obvious.
“Would this had happened if those passengers were white? I don’t think it would’ve,” Dayton said. “So I’m forced to confront, and I think all of us in Minnesota are forced to confront, [that] this kind of racism exists.”
Other politicians are speaking up.
The strength of #PhilandoCastile's loved ones in the face of a horrific tragedy is moving. I urge you to watch this: https://t.co/WnwFxNjm8v
— Al Franken (@alfranken) July 7, 2016
My thoughts are with all those grieving the death of Philando Castile. There must be a full & thorough investigation into his death.
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) July 7, 2016
One of FtB’s bloggers is from St Paul, and she has a few things to say.
White liberals, white progressives: stop talking about tolerance. Stop being color blind. Stop saying we are all equal, and it’s what’s inside us that matters. It’s not true. “Love see no Color” is bullshit. Love has to see color; love has to acknowledge racism and institutionalized oppression or “love” cannot do anything about it.
Stop ignoring race from a misguided notion that talking about it with our kids will somehow poison their minds. The poisoning comes from our silence in the face of constant messaging they receive every day from television, the movies, video games, advertising, the news, LIFE, and the self segregation white people tend towards in our daily lives with our choices about where we live and where we send our children to school. The choice to ignore race is privilege. Our silence is privilege. And it’s killing our fellow humans.
The St Paul School District has issued a statement.
He graduated from Central High School in 2001 and had worked for Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS) since he was 19 years old, beginning in 2002, in the Nutrition Services Department.
Mr. Castile was promoted to a supervisory position two years ago and was currently working in one of our schools during the summer term.
Colleagues describe him as a team player who maintained great relationships with staff and students alike. He had a cheerful disposition and his colleagues enjoyed working with him. He was quick to greet former coworkers with a smile and hug.
One coworker said, “Kids loved him. He was smart, over-qualified. He was quiet, respectful, and kind. I knew him as warm and funny; he called me his ‘wing man.’ He wore a shirt and tie to his supervisor interview and said his goal was to one day ‘sit on the other side of this table.’”
It’s flat out murder. Won’t be treated as such.
If you can stomach it, the video taken by Philando’s girlfriend from within the car has good audio coverage of the cop that fired the shots. Listen to his tone; I found it very instructive and I wonder if people come to the same impression I had of him: a terrified rookie.
Note: graphic footage.
Dammit, I forgot it auto embeds. Could that be either deleted or turned into a text link?
Quoted for truth.
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CaitieCat, Harridan of Social Justice @ 1;
Depressingly accurate. How is it possible that in the 21st century we still live in a world where the single most powerful society on the planet is afflicted by what essentially amounts to state sponsored, racially motivated murder squads, and yet nobody in a position of power seems to care? It is enough to make you despair for humanity all over again.
Since when did ‘protect and serve’ morph into ‘oppress and kill in the name of the elite’? When did a badge become a get out of jail free card for cold blooded murder so long as the victim is of a certain hue of skin (or, increasingly, is otherwise of a certain perceived social class or level of wealth)?
Oh, that’s right – the authorities never actually stood for those things in the first place. It was just a lie we told ourselves so that we could sleep better at night, much like the assumption that the ‘American Dream’ actually represents opportunity for all who put the effort in, rather than a system rigged to advantage an undeserving minority of privileged parasites at the expense of everyone else, or the notion in my own country that the UK’s history is still somehow that of a civilizing project rather than a former imperial power who shed oceans of blood to steal its wealth from the less powerful and still hasn’t found the courage to accept and take responsibility for the fact. Or, for that matter, the lie of a god who is nought but a fig leaf for the maintenance of the unearned power of the same clerical subset of society (a path that segments of the atheist movement – in so far as there is such a unitary project – seems to be following with rather nauseating glee, what with its supposedly unassailable ‘thought leaders’).
As a species, we (especially melanin-deficient types like yours truly) seem to be very good at lying to ourselves, even (or perhaps especially) when those lies kill innocent people.
Done. I’ve tried to avoid including any footage of grisly, bloody deaths here.
One thing I noticed in the media accounts of this shooting (as well as the one in Baton Rouge) is that the reporters almost immediately dig up all the details of the victim’s criminal past. In this case, all they could find were a few misdemeanor citations. In non-police related murders, the victim is described as a loving parent, valued member of the community, etc… I guess it’s ok if the police purge the “good” neighborhoods of “bad” people.
@Holms, the impression I got was of someone who knew they had just really screwed up and was trying to externalize blame.
@xmp999, it’s not reporters “digging it up”, it’s police giving it to them.
Quoted for truth.
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CaitieCat, Harridan of Social Justice @ 1;
Depressingly accurate. How can it be, in the 21st century, that we still live in a world where the most powerful society on Earth – the self declared ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ – has what essentially amounts to state sponsored, racially motivated death squads, and nobody in any position of power seems to care?
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Holms @ 2;
Utterly horrifying. Just harrowing to watch. They murdered an innocent man for having a broken light, and then arrested the passenger for… what, exactly? She didn’t do anything at all. And they did it all before the eyes of a child. How can things have gone so wrong? When did ‘Protect and Serve’ morph into ‘Murder at Will (so long as the victim is Black)’? When did a badge become a get out of jail free card for cold blooded murder?
I suppose that is just my privilege talking – it has never been otherwise, has it? it is just more visible now. But with that visibility, with that greater awareness, surely comes an opportunity to stop this.
And lest I come across as a foreigner bashing the US just because, I would point out that, while it is less common in, for example, the UK, this is not just an American problem.
One source I saw mentioned that the record was basically traffic stops. So, he’s been stopped thirty times or so over a decade for driving while black, and now they try to use that to prove he was a criminal?
How much you wanna bet he drove down that street every day, between work and home or something like that, running that gauntlet of predatory civic exploitation every day, before they finally just shot him for no reason?
qwints @6
When it comes to reporters, never attribute to malice that which can attributed to laziness.
When I worked at Dome Petroleum (perpetually on verge of bankruptcy) in the 1980s, I could read tomorrow’s Calgary Herald articles almost word for word on the bulletin board by the coffee machine where they posted press releases in the late afternoon. Churnalism has only become worse since then.
See also: (sometimes extremely dated) mugshots versus facebook (or other publicly available yet updated) photos.
Alleged police scanner audio via a local news station:
http://www.kare11.com/mb/news/police-scanner-audio-1/267042738
Philando Castile is a facebook acquaintance of mine. He isn’t a friend- he’s a friend of one of my other friends. His name would pop up on comment threads every once and awhile when my friend and him talked. He was just one of the people in the network of people that live around here. He liked music, and would talk about that to my friend every once and awhile. Just the chatter that you sort of glaze over in facebook because it doesn’t really concern you.
I work in St. Anthony. I’ve driven that road dozens of times to get to Source Comics. I go to community events with the St. Anthony cops. And this just makes me sick. Literally sick because this is the first time I’ve ever been smacked in my face with this much white privilege. I knew about white privilege- I’ve seen the smaller microagressions with my friends and coworkers of color. I knew that Jamar Clark was shot because he was black, and I knew and my cynical heart that nothing was going to come from it. I knew that the cops up here catch people for driving while black, and that there were more than the fair share of racist cops. Hell, I grew up in a law enforcement family- I know for a fact how racist those cops can be, (but “all in good fun” was there justification- just jokes). I signed the petition for cops to have to carry personal liability insurance, supported them getting body cameras, and donated to BLM and Blacksgiving. I knew about white privilege. But now it feels way more real and way more close, and it feels like there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
Just another aspect of the racism embedded in society – whenever an Islamist act of violence occurs, a deluge of demands come pouring in that the broader Muslim community should do more to repudiate the violence and condemn the extremism that motivates it, and yet when yet another Black person is murdered in cold blood by a killer hiding behind a badge, and who is able to get away with that crime due to the pervasive racism in society that is largely fueled by White privilege and unfounded racist stereotyping, there are no equivalent blanket demands that the White community should do more to repudiate racist violence in society or to hold the police force to account – it just isn’t used as a cudgel to beat White people in the same way, even though plenty of racist nitwits will try to claim that it is. Even the quote in the OP only exhorts White Liberals to simply live up to their stated values, but doesn’t try to place blame on all White people in the same way that all Muslim people are left in the cross hairs after an Islamist terrorist atrocity. I somehow doubt we will hear Trump arguing that it is time to stop White people entering the US based on this kind of horror.
It is an open double standard.
We walked to the protest at Larpenteur and Fry last night. I was extremely touched by the number of African-American folks who thanked us, in a very heart-felt way, for being there.
Rest in Peace, Mr. Castile. May we who are left behind have the drive and intelligence to prevent this ever from happening again.
I’ve always thought tinted windows were for macho guys who are easily marketed to. Now I have another reason to think tinted windows are stupid – they make cops nervous.
@justanotherguy I have dark tinted windows. They’re not stupid, they make any car look inherently better, they keep it cooler inside, and protect the materials from UV damage. For the few times I have been pulled over I will roll them down as a courtesy to the officer. It’s a shame we have come to this but I’m not getting shot for a speeding ticket because some nervous ass rookie can’t see into the car.
Yuppie Racism is a real thing. I didn’t even create the name for it; sociologists studying the phenomenon did decades ago:
http://jbs.sagepub.com/content/21/4/445.extract
I watched the video from start to finish. As I did my stomach tightened, pulse quickened, a dull ache formed in the back of my neck. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the huge gun barrel still pointing at the bloody, dying man through the window. All the while I kept thinking, “But he’s still strapped in his seat belt! There’s a child in the car! What did he do? WTF did he do?” And then I heard the woman’s voice. That incredibly calm, almost preternatural voice. It’s like a voice over. As the reality of her situation dawned on me — she’s sitting in the passenger seat, next to her dying boyfriend, holding the phone rock steady, explaining everything with a sang froid that I cannot begin to comprehend. When it was over I stared at the screen for a full minute, numb and speechless. Tears came to my eyes. I got up, went to the window, stared at a bluebird at my backyard feeder and cried.