Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Crime in the Media Fall 2020

Jeffrey Poland

10/29/20

class and Police

The media blog podcast that I chose to research today was the podcast I Don’t Wanna Shoot You, Brother. This podcast was about an incident that happened in West Virginia in a town just outside of Pittsburgh. It happened in a small town where all police officers were praised and so were the veterans. A new officer named Mator was on the job one night when he got a call from dispatch there was a domestic going on in one of the neighborhoods. He pulled up and asked a man next to a car where 119 was and the man said right here. The officer hopped out of his car and asked the man to take his hands out of his pockets and the man refused. Officer Mator was deescalating the situation until two more officers came up to scene and within 5 seconds the backup officers shot and killed the black man who had an unloaded gun in his hand.

This story had a very twisted turn that the man that did not shoot the man with the unloaded gun was fired and the man who did shoot was praised for it. “When you do go to the honor and valor ceremony the award always goes to the guy who fired the gun.” (minute 37 of video). I found this quote very interesting because it is very true that the man that commits murder is the one who gets all the praise. Mator a month after the shooting was then fired from the job because the department found him unfit to be a police officer for not firing the gun. Mator was showing constraint to the man because later investigation showed the gun was not loaded and the man was trying to commit suicide by cop. The first officer mator pulled up on scene and was deescalating the situation very well and talking him down but as soon as the other officers showed up the man who was getting talked down was dead with a bullet in his head within 5 seconds of them showing up. Mator was then fired and hated by the other officers for being cowardly and not shooting the man and for showing constraint and compassion to a man who was “having the worst night of his life”. This goes back to the quote where the people who shoot and do not try to talk gets rewarded. We need to change this outlook and reward the ones who show restraint and are able to talk those who have mental problems or are just having a bad day off the ledge. This death was an unnecessary one and could have been avoided. It also does not help that he was also a black man with a gun. African Americans are 21 times more likely of getting violent treatment from an officer than a white man. This goes back to race and ethnicity and upholds those stereotypes.

“Their youth, their race, and their basic human dignity” (Davis 116). This is a quote from the book Policing the Black man. It was saying how the police are judging based off their race, dignity, ethnicity and other types of things. This should be shown that police need more training in just seeing people for who they are in the moment and not judge them on so many other things out of their control like race, ethnicity, and their age. In the video they did not give many solutions except for the fact that people just have to be more of a human being and realize some people just need to get talked to and not base how dangerous they are off their ethnicity or their race.

“He ran away from police because he was driving while black” (Edelman 83). Here is another instance of a black man judging a person by the way he looks and his skin color. This should not be allowed in any form of policing and should be cut at the knees for allowing someone to be treated this way.

In the film I heard many things I did and did not agree with. When the police officer was fired for not pulling the trigger and killing an innocent man for holding an unloaded gun, I find to disagree with the police department. He should be praised for holding out and trying to talk him down off the ledge or at least trying to before the other officers showed up and re escalated the situation to a state it did not need to go. I would most definitely recommend this podcast to someone else. I was very informative about what is happening not so far from where we live at IUP and let people see how some minorities are treated just by their culture and ethnicity and or skin color.

References

Edelman, P. B. (2017) Not a Crime to be poor. The criminalization of poverty in America. The New Press.

Davis, A. J. (2018) Policing the Black Man: arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.

Podcast Link: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/podcast/dispatch/i-dont-want-to-shoot-you-brother/