In 1920, in conjunction with the anti-lynching campaign, the NAACP began flying a flag from the windows of its headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York City when a lynching occurred. The words on the flag said simply, “A man was lynched yesterday.” Last week after Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were shot and killed by policemen, an artist hung a similar flag outside an art gallery in New York City. This flag says simply, “A man was lynched by police yesterday.”
Although the actions of the police against African Americans seem to have grown worse in the past few years, it is not a new phenomenon. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King highlighted the problem in his famous speech at the March on Washington in 1963: “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”
What can we do about this police brutality? According to much of the discussions on the media this is a difficult issue with no known solution other than to bring blacks and whites together in dialogues of understanding. While such discussions might be helpful they are not the solution. This is more a problem of concrete actions than a problem of attitudes. To shine light on solutions I will invoke other words of Dr. King, who argued for the regulation of behavior.
“Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. You can’t legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion. Well, there’s half-truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also. So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government.” [emphasis added] (Taken from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s address at Western Michigan University, December 18, 1963)
While Dr. King was pushing for action on civil rights to prevent the legally discriminatory treatment of African Americans, the same orientation should be applied here. We need to push for the regulation of the behavior of the criminal justice system. This includes prosecutors and the courts as well as policemen. On the one hand are the deadly actions of policemen; however, on the other hand is the failure of the criminal justice system to punish these actions. These are actions—or non-actions—that should be addressed.