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TPM CAFE: OPINION
Why The Chinese Community Shouldn't Rally Around Indicted Cop Peter Liang
By
ESTHER WANG PublishedFEBRUARY 26, 2015, 6:00 AM EST 52062 Views
Earlier this month, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office announced it
would indict NYPD Officer Peter Liang for the killing of Akai Gurley, with
the most serious charge leveled against him being second degree manslaughter.
This indictment comes after the non-indictments of Officers Dan Pantaleo in
the killing of Eric Garner and Darren Wilson in the death of Mike Brown in
Ferguson, and has touched off a firestorm of outrage, with many in the
Chinese American community saying that Officer Liang is being unfairly
scapegoated for being Asian. Let’s put this indictment in some perspective:
During the past 15 years, NYPD officers have killed at least 179 people,
and only three officers before Liang was indicted.
For those who aren’t familiar with the events leading up to the indictment,
here’s a brief synopsis: On the evening of November 20, 2014, Officer
Liang and his partner were doing their regular rounds at the Pink Houses, a
public housing development in East New York. They were performing what’s
known as a vertical patrol (a practice that has come under criticism for its
harassment of residents of public housing and their guests). As they
entered the darkened stairwell on the 8th floor, unlit due to malfunctioning
lights, Liang took out his gun, finger on the trigger. Startled by the
sound of Akai Gurley and his girlfriend entering the landing below, Liang
fired one shot, which ricocheted off the wall and into Gurley, killing him.
It hardly bears mentioning that Gurley was unarmed. He was simply there to
visit his girlfriend.
And yet this is how upset people are that Officer Liang was indicted: In the
span of only a week, almost 120,000 people—who I suspect are mostly
Chinese American—have signed a petition directed at the White House,
demanding that the Brooklyn District Attorney withdraw the indictment.
In the language of the petition, Liang was indicted only for “political
gain” and the killing of Akai Gurley was merely an unintentional,
unfortunate accident.
“Nonetheless,” the petition reads, “the circumstances surrounding Mr.
Gurley’s death lead to a manslaughter indictment this week, whereas police
officers in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner case were never charged.
Criminal charges appeared more likely in the later two cases, but these two
non-Asian Police Officers were never charged.”
The argument basically boils down to this: If these white officers got off,
so should Peter Liang.
I understand the sentiment. I look at Peter Liang, and I see someone who
looks like my brothers. I can imagine what it must be like for his parents—
a garment worker and restaurant worker—to face the terrifying prospect of
their only son going to prison. And I get why, when the vast majority of
mostly white officers aren’t indicted when they shoot to kill, one might be
upset that an Asian cop is the one who is.
But at its heart, this argument is deeply flawed. Rather than calling for
accountability for all police officers who kill, regardless of their race,
this sentiment is rooted in the belief that no officers should be held
accountable for their actions.
I’m going to call it what it is—hypocrisy (not to mention a reminder of
the limitations of identity politics and activism that’s based solely on a
shared racial or ethnic background).
The story of another Chinese American, Peter from New York, helps us better
understand why. Peter Yew was a 27-year-old engineer who, in 1975, was
brutally beaten by police officers in Manhattan’s Chinatown, when he
attempted to intervene after he saw them beating a 15-year-old kid whom they
’d stopped for a traffic violation.
This prompted one of the largest anti-police violence demonstrations in New
York City’s history, when as many as 20,000 New Yorkers, a majority of whom
were Asian, took to the streets in protest. According to accounts from the
time, virtually every store and factory in Chinatown closed on May 19 that
year, the day of the largest demonstration, with signs saying "Closed to
Protest Police Brutality" lining doors and windows in streets throughout the
neighborhood.
Here’s another, more recent example: the outcry when Kang Wong, an elderly
Chinese immigrant man, was roughed up by NYPD officers and arrested for
jaywalking early last year. People started online petitions, called for
protests, and rightly denounced the officers involved.
As a community, we can’t have it both ways. We can’t call for justice when
an Asian person is harassed, targeted or killed by the police and then act
to protect an Asian police officer when they’re the ones who’ve killed.
This myopic vision only serves to hurt us at the end of the day. If we care
when our own community members are targeted by the police and are moved to
call for an end to police violence, then we need to widen the breadth of our
outrage, compassion and empathy to include all those who are targeted,
harassed and murdered by the police. And in this country, this means we need
to speak out when black men, women and trans people are killed with
impunity by police officers in cities around the country.
To not do so—to distance ourselves from this fact—means that we will
inevitably fail to address the root causes of this violence, the
criminalization of black communities in our country.
This is what I hope will happen: that more of us ground ourselves in the
reality that a young man was killed by an officer in a police force that
routinely targets and harasses black and Latino New Yorkers, an officer who
kept his finger on the trigger, who admitted to being scared as he was on
patrol, and whose reckless act ended the life of another human being. I hope
we remember that a young girl named Akaila no longer has a father, that a
mother no longer has a son, and that this is a painful truth that is all too
common in our country for Black families. And I hope we can develop the
capacity to feel that pain as acutely as if Akai were our own brother. |
