It’s been a while since I’ve felt compelled to write a diary. There just so much going on. Some great and some heavy. And to be honest, I’ve had to pull back a bit from too much exposure to politics for my own sanity. I know you understand that.
But something has been bothering me. I have a personal connection to a police shooting case in my home state of Florida. It hasn’t gotten much attention and I think it’s because the person who was shot wasn’t the “right kind of black guy” to rally around.
I have spent some time thinking about this and it bothers me that he’s been ignored by the media and activists. What’s worse: I think the reasons for ignoring his case are broader, even, than the racism that has too many black men and women finding death at the hands of police officers.
Linus Phillip is a man who was shot and killed by police in Largo Florida at a WaWa gas station. You might have heard of him. Or maybe not. His case got a little attention when the police used his fingerprints (from the funeral home!) to unlock his cell phone. But that’s about all the attention his case got. I understand why. Phillip was no saint. He had 22 arrests in is past. TWENTY TWO! And so of course his execution wasn’t going to have activists streaming into the streets protesting execution of yet another unarmed black person, right? Of course not.
Initially, the police said they didn’t have video. But the WaWa station was equipped with 15 surveillance cameras. The police made assertions about his behavior that night. They claimed an existential fear of him (SURPRISE!) said the shooting was a necessary and justifiable use of force.
And for the most part, that was it. No more media coverage. No protest rallies. No hashtags or t-shirts.
During this time, the case of Stephon Clark was garnering a lot of attention. In much the same way, the police gave scant information followed by claims about the Clark’s behavior and the necessity for officers to kill him for their own self protection. Just like Phillip’s family, Clark’s family didn’t believe it. But his family was able to order an independent autopsy. And surprising exactly no one, police account and the bullet wound evidence were incompatible. Six shots to the back. A complete refutation of police accounts of his execution.
Of course, I wondered why Clark’s case got so much attention while Phillp’s case didn’t. And I realized: Clark was the “right kind of black victim”. He was “the saint” and therefore his case garnered a lot of attention.
But here’s where things got hairy for me. I found myself saying: “Well….maybe there was actually some sort of issue at the gas station….” I’m not proud to admit this. The truth is, it doesn’t matter if he was a “saint” or a “sinner” or whether he had a checkered past. Yes, I know this intellectually. We all do. I have vocalized this often. “Having some trouble in your past doesn’t mean you deserve to be executed by police officers! It doesn’t exclude you from due process!” I’ve said this and I believe this but still, here I was sort of … understanding why no one was rallying around Phillip. He doesn’t make an ideal poster child for police brutality.
Self-examination is a motherf*er.
I am uneasy about the dichotomy that exists in our media and in our activism between “saints” and “sinners” because it speaks to a calculation even Those Of Us Who Protest These Things are making about deservedness. This thinking is setting us back not only on issues of race, but across virtually every policy advancement we’d like to see happen as progressives.
For Phillip we’ve been largely silent. I suppose I could attribute that to the fact that so much is going on so often that we have to pick and choose where to devote our attention and energy. I get it. I’ve done that, as I said in the beginning of this diary. But the bottom line, still, is that the “saints” get national media coverage and their families get community support, but the “sinners” are forgotten, tossed aside even by Those of Us Who Protest These Things.
And I think this is a backward strategy. Nobody makes their case about the right to free speech, for example, by pointing to the most palatable examples of public speech. We point to people who challenge our natural inclination to deny the right. We celebrate the right, in fact, as an example of our values and the power of the constitution. “I don’t like what you have to say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it!”
But we aren’t doing that with the right to due process. We are holding off for Barack Obama’s levels of blemishlessness and I believe doing so could actually be making things worse.
I remember feeling like we were on the right track when we were making the argument that selling loose cigarettes wasn’t enough of a reason for police to choke somebody to death. When we were making the argument that “being mouthy” with an officer wasn’t enough to justify dying in alone in a cell somewhere. We were on the right track when we were making the argument that despite imperfection, there is an expectation that police not abuse the power of the state. That “feels” like the right argument to me. It forces the conversation about state power and the rights — even of problematic people — to due process under the constitution. It forces a discussion (and solution-finding) about racial bias and “feeling threatened” — even when police do not often even know their target’s history in the moment. If we keep suggesting that “maybe this person — who had a checkered past — deserved to be executed by police”, we will never fix this problem.
Police pulled Phillip over claiming the window tinting on his car (a rental!) was too dark. They said they found “significant amounts” of marijuana in his car. (The state’s attorney said there was .02 grams found). There’s missing and incomplete video surveillance footage. And yes, there’s the ever-present spectre of Linus Phillip’s troubled past (which never seems to matter with suspects who aren’t black. But that’s a different diary for a different day). Nobody, except his family, talks about how he loved his children and was a devoted family man. How he loved taking his kids to the park and spending time with his family. Or how when his daughter was born with a rare cancer, he refused to leave the hospital, even to get a haircut. I hate that I even have to type that. But it’s part of the deservedness calculation that compels us to present a saintly side in order to justify a demand for justice for an “undeserved”.
I’m sick about this.
Last week, Linus Phillip’s family demanded the release of the video. Police had stalled about it for weeks. Eventually, they released one grainy 60 second video from one of the cameras at WaWa, complete with a view that is nearly completely obstructed. The video, they claimed, shows why the officer had to shoot and kill Phillip. Except it doesn’t show anything of the sort. Nevertheless the officers have been exonerated. The shooting has been deemed justifiable. I believe the reason is simple: Linus Phillip wasn’t a saint. He deserved, somehow, to be executed.
That is leaving Phillips family with little choice. They have an attorney, pro bono, who has taken the case. They want all the video. They want to get an independent autopsy like Clark’s family did. They want to challenge the use of his fingerprints from the funeral home to open his phone (another constitutional violation). And I am hoping they can get it. All of it. Because we cannot hold a litmus test of perfection out as the standard for who deserves rights. We just can’t. It is not the right argument, the right direction to go.
This whole issue about saints and sinners and deservedness bothers me on an even deeper level. What’s bothering me about this idea of deservedness is that I believe it’s the root cause of so many policy problems in America. Because god forbid someone try to “get over” on the system; try to get something they don’t deserve. So let’s not have a system at all! It’s why we don’t have universal health care. Or decent minimum wage and labor laws. It’s why Republicans want to drug test welfare recipients and forbid those receiving SNAP benefits from buying seafood with their SNAP cards. It’s why we have inadequate laws protecting consumers and conservatives enact policies that say that a woman who gets pregnant shouldn’t be able to get an abortion if she wants one. It’s why ex-felons can get jobs and drug addicts are tracked through the criminal justice system instead of treated through the healthcare system. It all comes back to this idea of “deservedness”. Some people deserve good things, breaks, opportunities, grace. Others do not. This is in stark contrast to what I hear many of my friends and colleagues from other westernized nations say: “I’d rather make sure 10,000 hungry kids are fed, even if it means 10 families are cheating the system.” The idea of deservedness is a cancer-level sickness in America and an anathema to progress.
So here, in the case of Linus Phillip, we have a dead man who “sort of probably deserved it”. Not because of what he did that day at the scene — that question still remains unanswered because there are 14+ other video feeds that haven't been looked at and an independent autopsy that needs to be performed — but because he had some shady things happen in his past.
If we are going to move forward and create a more civilized, progressive America, Those Of Us Who Protest These Things have to stand up for the “deserving” and the “undeserving” in equal measure. Linus Phillip didn’t deserve to be executed. Arrested? Maybe. But certainly not executed. He also doesn’t deserve to be ignored.
You can learn more about the case here. And if so inclined, you can help his family get an independent autopsy performed, which they hope will provide them with answers they believe police may never provide.
In the meantime, I believe we must speak more loudly and raise the profile of other “undeserveds”. We have to, once again, make a strong case for the constitution and due process — especially when it challenges our natural inclinations. We have to, for the sake of the progressive America we envision, begin to publicly, loudly and repeatedly work to dismantle this idea of who is deserving and who is not.
