We’re thinking about victims of police violence the wrong way

Every time US police kill another civilian – and in 2022, a record-breaking year, they slayed more than three people a day on average – it can seem there is a subtle tendency to emphasize the aspects of the victims’s lives that would make them seem especially unworthy of their fate.

See the portrayals, in articles and infographics and murals, of Tyre Nichols as a friendly, artistically inclined skateboarder, or George Floyd as a “gentle giant” and doting father of Gianna, or Breonna Taylor as a dedicated EMT, or Atatiana Jefferson as a family caregiver, or Philando Castile as a beloved school cafeteria worker compared to “Mr Rogers with dreadlocks”, or Eric Garner, who famously cried out, “I can’t breathe,” memorialised in a poem as a gardener making the air cleaner for all to breathe in peace.

Of course, families and communities are absolutely entitled to remember and honour their loved ones as they see fit. And there’s a long, ugly history of the media reinforcing prejudices about people of colour as inherently tied to criminality and tragedy. These stereotypes influence how individuals, including police, treat people in the real world, so sharing positive stories is not only understandable but also imperative.

What I submit, especially to those people who are lucky enough to process these events as pure observers, or who are just thinking about police violence for the first time, is to avoid the thinking that there is even such a thing as someone who is “worthy” of excessive force, or that there’s any link between someone’s personality and history and how police should treat them.

It doesn’t matter whether you are white or Black, liberal or conservative, innocent or guilty of a crime, even a serious one. By law, you have a right to walk away from a police encounter with your life unless you are an imminent, lethal threat to those around you.

That is the purpose of a right. We’ve decided as a society, at least on the books, that police don’t get to be judge, jury, and executioner. While they often act that way, we can’t give in to such thinking about police interactions as purely personal.

It’s a type of non-systemic thinking that breeds the conservative trope of “a few bad apples” on the police force, rather than a tree with some serious rot. It’s a narrow view that produces the shallow argument that because Tyre Nichols is Black, and the five main officers who beat him to death are Black, that police racism in Memphis is a moot concern.

Far from it. Even in a majority Black city with a Black police chief, Black people in Memphis still are singled out for disproportionate police violence.

We should apply a similar, big-picture lens to thinking about other areas of the criminal justice system.

As a civil rights reporter for The Independent, I have seen and written plenty of stories focusing on the most egregious instances of capital punishment gone wrong or police abuse, with the most innocent victims, the most outrageous prosecutors, the most racist juries, and the most tainted evidence. But this, too, obscures the larger point. Even guilty people deserve a fair shake in the justice system.

Impact litigators may look for the “perfect victim” to launch a test case, built on a compelling story, to challenge some fundamental unfairness, but as a society at large, we can’t indulge in a similar search.

If there’s any sense of justice that can be preserved in US policing, courts, or anywhere else where the government holds the power of life and death, that justice has to be blind.