Public Comment

The story of a killing

It happened in 2012. The facts were known at the time, but they got lost in the crowd of all the other killings, the hundreds that happened that year. Even so, it signified what was wrong. Now, ten years later, the film gives us focus. Lest we forget, lest we cease to understand the rules of the game, and what we have to change, it reaches across the sea of time, reminding us, “don’t buy the hype.”

What hype? “We’re just doing our job.” What job? Terrorizing an old man because he lives in a NY tenement, and says no? They imagine lurid crimes occurring behind all the cheap slum doors with their many locks and sheet-steel façade reinforcements. It took the cops 40 minutes to break in, to finally invade the apartment of a low income retired black former Marine whose only need for attention was a heart condition. And shoot him to death. 

The name of the film is “The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain” [Directed by David Midell, Produced by Morgan Freeman and Lori McCreary]. It is about an incident, correctly represented in the film’s title, which occurred in White Plains, NY, on November 19, 2011. You can watch it on YouTube. It has won many film festival awards. 

In the story, which was widely known back then, the monitoring device Chamberlain wore in case of a medical emergency mistakenly sent a signal in the middle of the night, though he himself was in no distress. The health care company’s dispatcher had no doctors to call at that moment, so the police were dispatched. They came to the door demanding entry. Mr. Chamberlain said he was all right, and that they could go away. He didn’t need them. So they broke down the door and shot him to death. Cause and effect. 

Though these few sentences encapsulate the story, the cops were there for an hour and half, demanding and arguing and beating on the door. They asked him why he thought he could refuse a direct order from a police officer? As if he was still in the military. He answered that he was in his home, his “4^th Amendment sanctuary,” which required that the cops have a warrant, or probable cause. All the cops could think about is his refusal. They imagined all the possible crimes he might be committing behind that refusal. They act on their imagination, their subjectivity, while he stands on the power given him by the law. For that, he is the criminal, and they are law enforcement. This is not chaos; it is not even a contradiction. It is flat out dystopia, causing a man to live in a situation that one is making unlivable. "Dystopia" means “there is no place for you.” 

The cops tell Chamberlain, “we are just doing our job.” They tell him “you are forcing us to do something we don’t want to do.” They imply Chamberlain is making choices that will determine a bad outcome, and he will be responsible for it. When they get violent, he is the cause -- as if they had nothing to do with the situation they placed him in. It is a strange example of “agent deletion.” In this case, it is the agent himself, the cop, who deletes himself. To a person who wishes to intervene when seeing a cop do something criminal (like killing George Floyd), the cop might say, “you are putting yourself in danger, sir; if you persist, you could get hurt.” 

Who wrote the script for this story? 

You know where the script for this film comes from? It comes from the medical emergency and monitoring company. They called up Chamberlain’s son, and told him that they had the entire event on tape because their equipment was in Chamberlain’s apartment, and turned on. It picked up Chamberlain’s responses, his feelings about what was happening and what was about to happen, the banging on the door, and the cops yelling in the hallway – all of it. 

When the police demanded entry, Chamberlain said no, he was okay, he was not sick, the alarm was a mistake, he didn’t need the police, the police had no warrant, no probable cause, they should just go away and leave him alone. In what kind of society does the truth get you a bullet? 

The police responded; we have to check you out, make sure you are okay, we must have visual contact, and make sure you are not torturing anyone in your apartment. They say that. One cop actually says to the others: “go into any of these apartments and you will find a crime being committed – drugs, or prostitution, or something stolen – in any one of them.” It is what they say to each other as they get ready to violate the US Constitution and kill a man in cold blood. 

What they don’t say, the ethic they operate under, is, “we have to have our every command obeyed, forget the ‘lawful’ part.” 

We must not forget any of this, because accountability is still to be won, in some yet undecided future. When they imagine crimes, without cause or evidence, it is merely an excuse to "militarize" people. A person is militarized when given no option to refuse a command, like in the army. 

Toward that purpose, they could not leave him alone. He is a black man, living in a NYC industrial suburb. When neighbors and relatives gather on the stairs, watching and objecting, the cops do not stop terrorizing. The audience merely amplifies and extends the effect. Chauvin didn’t listen to his audience either. 

In other words, it is part of police culture. A few cops may get charged and tried for killing. But that is not going to change their culture. It is bigger than that. 

None of the cops involved in killing Chamberlain were ever charged. 

What does “police culture” mean? 

Not even the cop who shot Jacob Blake was charged. 

Jacob Blake had just finished mediating an argument between two of his neighbors on the street where he lived. He knew them well. He was walking toward his car where his family was waiting when a cop shouted some commands at him (without trying to find out if anything needed law enforcement). Blake ignored him. The cop followed Blake to his car, grabbed his T-shirt from behind, and shot him 7 times in the back. He was not charged. Forget his lies about feeling threatened. The egotism of his culture could not stand being ignored. 

Indeed, when Rittenhouse carried his rifle into the street and shot three demonstrators, killing two, it was in a demonstration calling for justice for Blake. Rittenhouse then walked past the police line carrying his gun and went home. Those demonstrators had attempted to disarm him because the demonstration was peaceful. For that, they had to die. Dystopia. 

In 2012, according to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a black person was shot by the police in the US every 28 hours. That was a stunning revelation at the time. Three years later, in 2015, the total number of black people shot that year was 1100. That is, three a day. One cop gets charged with killing in Minneapolis, and it is front page news for weeks. But the hundreds killed objecting to their regimentation never makes the press. 

Even in Berkeley, last year, a black homeless man was shot as he stood in an open plaza near the university. The cop who shot him was aiming for his head, which means he was shooting to kill. The bullet only passed through the man’s jaw; he remains alive. The reason he was shot was because, as homeless and hungry, he took a sandwich and a soda from a Walgreens and made an irregular payment (a dollar bill and an object he had bought previously and was returning). Standing in that plaza with his sandwich and ignoring the cops made him a threat. 

Human Rights 

Does a person have the right to tell the police: “leave me alone; you have no warrant, nor probable cause, and no need to violate the sanctity of my home; so go away.” Yes, a person has the right to tell the police all that. What a person does not have is the power to make it happen, the power to implement the invocation of rights and respect for them. That power is something a person has -- today, in the US -- only if the police give it to them. Most white people get it, but not all. For most black people, it is withheld at the point of a gun. That is the autocracy of the police. 

The film is instructive in that sense. And it gives us a taste of the spectrum of police identities, and the differences between them. At times, they yell at each other, yet will not break ranks in their effort to defeat the appearance of autonomy in a black person. 

“Let’s just leave; he hasn’t done anything” is the form of identity that, for a brief moment, recognizes the humanity of the man behind the door, and understands his sense of self-respect. It appears briefly in the movie, and then is gone. A second approach is: “Let’s wait him out; he’ll have to come out eventually.” That is the liberal stance. They will still get what they want, but in a "civilized" manner. In the list of other forms of police identity, it gets increasingly horrifying. (A) “You’re just making it hard on yourself.” (B) “Open this door, dammit, and let us do our job.” (C) “If you don’t open this door, we’re going to break it down.” (D) And finally, you know, the expletives and derogatory terms, the banging endlessly on the steel façade of the door. It is like a taxonomy of white mentalities, confronting this black human being. 

What is constant among them is the assurance that “we won’t hurt you.” They all say it. “We’ll just come in for a minute, check you out, make sure everything is okay, and leave” – as if he were an inpatient or prison inmate. And after Chamberlain is lying dead with bullets in him, it is as good as if they had never said those empty words. The three cops who sat on Kayla Moore said similar words as she quietly died under their weight. Their lie expands until it fills the universe, leaving it empty and devoid of a real person who used to live there. 

It is the knowledge of that void that we are thrown into by this movie. It horrifies because we know what is going to happen (the same pall lies over all the action in “Fruitvale Station”). 

When we watch it, we want to be able to help, to calm Chamberlain, to stand in front of the door and say "stop," to neutralize the arbitrary nature of the assault, and to return to him the virtue and respect the cops and their racialization of him have stolen. We are too late. 

How is one to survive this dystopia? 

Who are we, that we live in a world of which the killing of Chamberlain, and all the other Chamberlains (Castiles and Taylors and Grants and Scotts and …) are a part? It is a question that surrounds us. It was the import of that image of a Vietnamese girl running away from houses burning from napalm, her clothes burned off her body. When we saw her, we found ourselves looking in an unwelcoming mirror. 

The US went into Vietnam the same way the cops went into Chamberlain’s home – slowly, step by step, knowing each step was more violent and criminal than the last, obsessively, hungry for control, and empowered by the knowledge that it would be entirely destructive (think of Libya). 

The question that is asked, again and again, is how does one survive an encounter with the police? Militarization is an institutionality in which one can no longer say no, and one is no longer held under Constitutional terms or Constitutional law. When militarized in one’s person, without consent, how does one protect oneself or one’s personhood? Or rather, how does one liberate oneself from that void of regimentation?