Pitts: As killings by police go unpunished, threat to all grows

They will face a restive crowd, every person in it thinking how easily Stephon could have been Tony, could have been Ted, could have been Tanya, could have been me, and they will plead for calm.

Maybe they’ll get it and the California capital will sleep in peace.

Or maybe they won’t, and the city will burn.

If that’s pessimistic, it is a pessimism well earned. In the movies, James Bond has a license to kill. In America, police have what amounts to the same thing.

Justice as a fairy tale

Yes, that’s a hard judgment likely to jolt and offend many observers, legions of good and conscientious cops among them. But can it really be argued? After Philando, after Tamir, after John, after Sean, after Eric, after Michael, after Darrius, after Sam, after Freddie, after Alton, after Terence, after Amadou, how can anyone really dispute the point?

It is understandable that jurors and police officials are loath to second-guess an officer who, in less than the time it takes to blink, makes a bad decision in good faith.

But once that willingness to accord the benefit of the doubt when sometimes warranted hardens into a reflexive refusal to hold accountable any officer in any circumstance ever, it becomes very hard to trust justice.

Consider that jurors in South Carolina saw video of Charleston police Officer Michael Slager pumping bullets into the back of Walter Scott, who was running away, yet still could not bring themselves to convict him. Slager ended up accepting a plea deal to avoid retrial.

If you’re African-American, what is that supposed to make you think?

You come to regard justice as a fairy tale for the very naive. You conclude that black lives actually don’t matter. Not to, or in, America.

But then, Caroline Small’s life didn’t matter much, either, and she was white.

The unarmed mother of two was executed by two officers in 2010 in a small town in Georgia. An investigation found that police tampered with the crime scene and manufactured misleading evidence, yet her killers never stood trial.

It calls to mind a truth Martin Luther King once spoke: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

So a nation that routinely excuses police killings of unarmed black people is a nation where all of us are ultimately at risk. Unfortunately, America has never quite comprehended that truth, nor really wanted to.

So the ritual of yet another black man’s useless death plays itself out in speeches, promises, recriminations. And many of us just watch and wait and pretend to believe. But it gets harder every time.

We’ve seen this movie too often. And we know every line by heart.