JUSTICE SHOULDN'T BE BLACK OR WHITE

Just a month after the city of Cincinnati finalized a $4.5 million
settlement to families of black males wrongfully killed by white police
officers -- as well as others claiming racial profiling in traffic stops --
the city is again immersed in issues of race and a questionable
police-related death. By now most Americans have seen the videotape of
Nathaniel Jones being beaten repeatedly with clubs by a half dozen police
officers. Jones, who weighed 342 pounds, had an enlarged heart and was
intoxicated on cocaine and PCP, died from the stressful effects of the
beating, according to the coroner's report.

And once again Cincinnati, plagued in recent years by charges of police
brutality and protests leading to riots, is split along racial lines.

The city's black community sees yet another incident of white police
brutality, though one of the officers involved in Jones' beating was
African- American. Jones is the 18th black male killed by police since 1995.

Whites once again see, what? Scary black people on drugs? Police just doing
their jobs?

Watching this saga unfold, it's disheartening to see opinion divide along
racial lines. If a black man is threatening, should police slacken their
response in order to avoid racist charges? If a white cop reacts incorrectly
to a confrontation involving a black, does that always make him a racist?
Or, if he is in fact a racist guilty of excessive force, must whites defend
him because he's a cop just doing his difficult, thankless job?

Fairness and justice are supposed to be colorblind and yet we seem
inevitably to side with "our own kind." If blacks suggest white cops are
heavy-handed, they're considered stuck in a civil rights rut; if whites
suggest cops are heavy-handed, they're ACLU-lovin' liberals.

Just when did it become liberal to be skeptical about arming the government
against its citizenry? The police have guns and the legal prerogative to
shoot me anytime they deem appropriate, and I'm not supposed to question
their judgment?

I ran into this mind-set recently when I criticized the Goose Creek, S.C.,
police for a drug raid on a high school. As armed police and drug-sniffing
dogs swarmed into the school, kids walking to class were forced onto hallway
floors and, in some cases, handcuffed. No drugs were found. As I watched
those tapes, all I could think was, what if one of those kids had reached
for his pocket? He might have been shot, just like 19- year-old Timothy
Thomas, whom Cincinnati police fatally shot two years ago, provoking four
days of riots. No Goose Creek students died that day, but the potential for
tragedy was immense and the risk unjustified. Yet some readers accused me of
being, oh, a commie-loving, left-wing radical, whereupon left-wing radicals
everywhere cried in protest.

I don't doubt that Jones was pretty scary. An extra-large man stoned on
cocaine and PCP would seem threatening even without a weapon. And Jones did
lunge at and bring down one officer, as captured by a security camera,
though not on the police tapes replayed on most television news programs.

Even so, a whack or two should be sufficient to bring down a rhino, much
less a man, who, let's face it, probably wasn't going to give much of a
chase. Officers involved said Jones wouldn't cooperate, that he continued to
struggle. How exactly does one relax and cooperate when being beaten?

I'm no softy on crime and no enemy of cops. I'm a fan of reasonable
consequences and punishments, and I admire those who risk their lives to
protect our communities.

But Americans have a right to demand that those we arm to protect us use
force judiciously. We also have a duty to take the "right" side, not the
black or white side, when something goes wrong. People who have committed no
crime shouldn't end up dead when the police show up.

It is a fact of American life that not many unarmed, middle-aged white women
are on the receiving end of excessive police force. But I would like to
think that if I were the 18th white woman to be killed by a black cop in
fewer than 10 years that blacks -- not just whites -- would raise hell on my
behalf.