Memphis: The Question That Keeps Not Getting Asked

I originally posted this early (PST) the morning of January 26, 2023.

Due to a series of mishaps, it disappeared.

I appealed to my daughter who makes a living making sure that the content of history is saved for posterity in digital form.

I figured if anybody could find a cache where my wayward post had gone, she could do it.

And she could; and she did.

So here it is again.

Since I posted this people started asking the question referred to, and Al Sharpton pretty much answered it at the funeral.

********************************************************

On 7 January of this year a 29 year old black man was stopped by police for a police-perceived traffic violation.

In Memphis, Tennessee.

Somehow the situation quickly got so dangerous to the peace and tranquility of Memphis that the police - there were five officers - found it necessary to "beat the crap out of him" (quoting his mother from a recent interview).

He died from injuries a few days later.

As horrible as that briefly told tale might be, like mass shootings, it tracks such a normal, every-day-nowadays storyline that one shrugs, moves on and mutters "when are they going to get the cops under control"?

Before moving on, however, some questions might arise.

One of them, question three, is pretty generic; it is always on the question list from these never-ending lethal encounters of the fatal kind.

But the other two seem to be Memphis specific.

Does Memphis really have roving bands of police - in this case there were five (well, maybe ten if you count the other five that allegedly watched the beating) deployed in the pursuit of that most heinous of crimes - traffic violations?

Does Memphis really have such a big police budget that it can provide that level of "public safety"?

How does a traffic stop warrant the use of lethal force?

But there is a question that screams to me, and I have not heard anyone ask it, or even imply that there might be such a question.

"All five of the murderous officers were black; the nature of this event is the classic Jim Crow slave patrol sort of brutality that is meted out to black men daily in America - by white police thugs; we thought that that phenomenon was a whites only activity - sort of a white privilege thing; so what gives?"

Unlike most questions I ask in politics and public affairs that question is not rhetorical.

I have no idea what the answer is.

But the distance between what I think I know and therefore believe about the nature of our slave patrol based police/military complex and the facts of five black police killing a black man after a trumped up traffic stop is so vast that I have to believe that it indicates an almost quantum-physics-like anomaly.

And an anomaly of that magnitude can be fatal.

If you don't understand it.

So we had better get an answer to the question.

FAST.

I have a suggestion.

I respect and trust Al Sharpton - a lot - I have always liked street fighters.

I suspect that Al knows the answer to the unasked question.

If not, I believe that he can quicky figure out how to answer it.

So let's appoint him the task of assembling a small group of similarly skilled and qualified associates and have them quickly work out their answer to the question and then tell America what's going on.