All Lives Matter

I was working at one of my first jobs in the news business, assigning a camera crew for a freelance outfit to fires, murders, explosions and anything else worth taping for the local TV stations, or sometimes one of the networks.

This involved monitoring police, fire and EMS radios, knowing how to decipher what was going on, and mostly knowing the city’s geography.

Location. Location. Location.

A shooting on Mulberry Street or elsewhere in Little Italy was likely news, because it was likely a mob hit. A murder in a Park Avenue penthouse was a guaranteed story. But those were rare.

On the graveyard shift we had a policy of taping all body removals related to homicides, whether or not the television stations wanted them, because you just never knew when the archival footage would be useful to someone.

Most of the homicides didn’t get reported much.

The reports would come over a police teletype, reading something like HOMICIDE, 24 PCT. F/O 420 W109 ST. MB 30s GSW TO HEAD DOA. NFI.

In English this meant a black guy in his 20s was found dead from a well-placed gunshot at a Harlem address. There were three, four of these a night.

In those days if some maniac had traveled from neighborhood to neighborhood throughout town offing young black guys it would have taken awhile for the pattern to be discovered.

This is relevant today because of the publicity that has surrounded the deaths of Michael Williams in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York and black males dead as a result of police action in other places. The investigation is just about done in regard to the Sept. 23 death of 14-year-old Cameron Tillman in Houma, the result of a run-in with a Terrebonne sheriff’s deputy named Preston Norman that allegedly involved a teen with a realistic pellet gun answering the door of an abandoned house. HANDS UP DON’T SHOOT; I CAN’T BREATHE and BLACK LIVES MATTER are phrases that appear on the shirts of many people. The same phenomenon has not been seen in Terrebonne Parish to any great degree.

Deputy Preston is black. Early statements from at least one witness – despite some misinformation circulating the night of the incident – tends to support the theory that Preston did not break state law. But a final determination has not been made, and so should not be pre-supposed.

The legend BLACK LIVES MATTER should not be taken lightly, however.

The historical record does not support such an assumption of equality. An old friend of mine is related to a now-deceased law enforcement official in Washington Parish.

“You know them people will cut each other over a lemon,” my friend remembers his relative saying over the dinner table.

That black lives have traditionally in this country mattered less is no secret to anyone who is truly informed, which is a minority of people in our society.

Take a look at what stories of abducted or murdered children in faraway places make news for the networks. Although things are getting better, the victims featured in many of those tragedies are rarely children of color.

What whites view as rhetoric and alarmism is merely old news to many blacks. Not always, not everywhere, not all the time, but enough for the suspicion that a little less attention is sometimes paid when victims of crime are minorities.

I wasn’t in this place three decades ago so I can’t say. And the modern record shows a concern for what occurs in local black communities displayed by law enforcement locally as admirably even-handed.

But some things carry through generations. Call it the result, perhaps, of mutating survival genes. Throughout this country the record shows that in too many places the loss of black lives – whether police were involved in the taking or not – didn’t matter quite as much.

In one Mississippi community where I worked years ago every black family I visited had a story of some loved one whose violent death nary raised an official eyebrow; the lemon thing again.

So as we move closer to a final telling of Houma’s own tragedy in the history of black kids – rightly or wrongly – killed by cops, there is a need for understanding. And there is a need now, as always, for all of us to remember that every life untimely lost really does matter, and to work in our own individual ways to make that the case.