Day: July 22, 2017

2.23: A Curious Tale

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Stop me if you’ve heard this before: A person calls 911 and when cops arrive on scene an overzealous officer mistakes the caller for a perpetrator and kills the caller. The website copblock has dozens of these stories, with victims ranging from 7 to 70. This particular story doesn’t come from copblock.org. It comes from CNN and, apparently exclusively from CNN in terms of the major 3 American news outlets. However, this story is different than most and those differences might be why the story cannot gain traction.

The specifics of this Minnesota horror story remain a little murky, but here is what we know: Justine Ruszczyk, a 40 year old Australian-American woman, called 911 and reported a possible assault/rape in an alley. Cops arrived on scene quickly and quietly. They drove up to alley with the car lights, headlights, and sirens off. Officers heard a loud sound near the car window. Ruszczyk approached the window and officer Mohammed Noor, a Somali-American, shot her. She was in her pajamas. She was not armed. From what I can gather the officer was startled by her appearance at the window and reacted. He has refused to comment on the shooting.

If you want to break this down in racial terms, because ultimately people have begun to look at police shootings in this fashion, a black cop shot a white woman. Or in ‘Dateline and 20/20 terms’ a black cop from a predominantly muslim nation shot a pretty white woman engaged to be married. The adjectives (or circumstances) matter in many ways. I believe they are responsible for why the story isn’t gaining traction. I completely admit that I thought these conditions would be exactly why the story got a lot of attention. However, I understand completely why I was wrong. If you break this down in racial terms, it destroys the predominant ideological viewpoint of the story and makes the story about the one thing we aren’t actually willing to address.

The media is largely ignoring this story. A search of msnbc reveals no mention of the story, even using keywords. Fox doesn’t have any mention of the story either, and in fact their biggest Minnesota story is “Fish attack at Minnesota lake leaves girl, 11, with deep lacerations to her foot, leg” which makes all the sense in the world because their FoxTech page leads with the headline “BIRTH OF ‘DEMON GOAT’ TERRIFIES TOWN; POLICE ARE CALLED” Yeah, I’m adding the pic.

ID:3564421 DYN98, SAN LUIS 19/07/2017, UN CABRITO NACIÓ EN UN CAMPO EN LA ZONA NORTE DE SAN LUIS CON UNA MALFORMACIÓN QUE HACÍA VER SU ROSTRO SIMILAR AL DE UN HUMANO, LO QUE GENERÓ CONMOCIÓN EN LA PROVINCIA TRAS LA DIFUSIÓN DE SU FOTO POR LAS REDES SOCIALES.FOTO:DYN/GENTILEZA.
I’m not going to spend any more time bashing Fox here right now. Rather I want to point out that local Minnesota newspapers, The Australian, and Essence magazine are closely following the Minnesota shooting, leading me to believe that it is not fake news but instead inconvenient news. It is inconvenient because it furthers a narrative that cops are in fact human and as such are prone to the mistakes of humans and, sadly, are being asked to behave beyond human expectation. We expect them to be trained not to react out of fear and anger–essentially to remove emotion from the equation. This is not a standard they can live up to. If we make it about race then we can either sweep the story under the rug or, more simply, distract audiences by talking about race. However, the racial makeup in this case means that it is likely not about race and more about an unfortunate human reaction that is supposedly trained out of our police force but cannot be. 
I have every ounce of respect for law enforcement. Many members of my small family have been on one side of the blue line or the other. I have written letters to help get family out of jail and stood proudly as the flag was folded for family members at police funerals. Both sides say the same thing. The badge on your chest gives you a responsibility, but it doesn’t change the blood running through your veins.
Some Thoughts:
  1. Why are sex terms so violent? Smash? Really?
  2. Why am I constantly thinking about sex? You betray me, Lizard brain!
  3. Why is thinking about sex a bad thing?