The St. Louis Rams protest: “Hands up. Don’t shoot.”
As five of the St. Louis Rams ran onto the field for the start of the game last Sunday, they paused for a moment to raise their hands in the air. A now-familiar sign of protest from Ferguson, Mo. “Hands up. Don’t shoot.”
As we’ve all been trained to understand, there is nothing more important in the world on a Sunday than an NFL game. So it’s not surprising that complaints followed. I expect that from the intractable folks who see nothing wrong with the team from Washington embracing a blatantly racist nickname. Or the hardcore fans who seem disinterested in the NFL’s obvious complicity in enabling its players to beat up women. Nothing should interrupt the sanctity of the game, as young men prepare to deliver concussions to each other that will, in a few years’ time, leave many of them unable to remember where they’d parked their cars.
But I don’t welcome the protests about the protests that came from public officials. The authorities who represent the people.
We have a serious race issue in this country. And a lot of people think the best answer is to walk away from the story of a white cop shooting an unarmed 18-year-old black man and now isn’t going to stand trial for his actions. a lot of people think we should walk away from the cause of the riots that surrounded the event. Just like we walked away from the 26 dead women and children at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Because these problems take care of themselves, right?
Cops aren’t the problem. They have a tough job, we all know it. The problem is the institutions that police our citizens. Institutions that are increasingly equipped to wage war on citizens. We’ve been seeing it for years. Police using tear gas on citizens, police beating up citizens, police arresting citizens. Citizens who are doing nothing more than utilizing their American right to protest. The individual cops didn’t make the decision to fire tear gas into a crowd. They were told to do so.
No one was going to fire a round of tear gas at the five St. Louis Rams with their hands in the air. This was a deeply important game between two teams with losing records. But the next morning, the St. Louis Police Officers Association demanded that the five Rams be disciplined, and that the team and the NFL should issue a public apology.
According to the SLPOA, “now that the evidence is in and Officer Wilson’s account has been verified by physical and ballistic evidence as well as eye-witness testimony, which led the grand jury to conclude that no probable cause existed that Wilson engaged in any wrongdoing, it is unthinkable that hometown athletes would so publicly perpetuate a narrative that has been disproven over-and-over again.”
Well, a whole lot of citizens are not buying the narrative put forth by the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office that allowed the cop who did the killing to get away without a trial. And it’s not just the hoodlums setting fires, but lawyers and experts in the law who have expressed that opinion.
Hence, the protests.
The Rams and the NFL – for once, after a long string of public-relations failures – are doing the right thing by not disciplining the players. It’s called free speech, the first Amendment in the Constitution that our law enforcement agencies are hired to defend.
The authorities are never holier than thou. We’ve seen that too many times. The actions of the people who represent us, and defend our laws, should be under constant scrutiny. The attitude I’ve heard raised repeatedly by law enforcement after the Ferguson killing – and let’s not forget that we’ve witnessed a string of unarmed black men killed by police – is, “You’re either with us or against us.”
No questions asked. That’s a little too arrogant for today’s atmosphere of distrust. The police are not supposed to be a separate class of citizens with separate rights. They’re supposed to be one of us.
It seems they need a reminder. Perhaps this Sunday. I see that the Rams are playing that team from Washington with the blatantly racist nickname. FedExField would make a fine public forum for a discussion on race. We could start it with all of Rams running out onto the field and raising their hands. Then all of the players from Washington, that team with the blatantly racist nickname, could run out onto the field and raise their hands. Then everyone in the stadium could stand and raise their hands.
Now that would be the NFL Game of the Week.