Eric Garner – Memphis Flyer

Let’s say you read a story about a doctor who amputated a patient’s left leg by mistake. He was supposed to remove the right leg, but he was in a hurry and misread a chart, and he was tired from having worked 12 hours straight and, well, he screwed up. That doctor would be criticized in the media. He’d be sued for malpractice. He’d have to go before the medical board and might lose his medical license.

But his incompetence wouldn’t be seen as an indictment of the entire medical profession or an attack on all doctors. His fellow doctors wouldn’t demand an apology from the media or start demonizing patients. They know, as we do, that getting rid of incompetent doctors is a good thing for all of us, including hospitals and other doctors.

The same standards hold true for most professions. It’s just common sense. You want to toss out the bad apples.

So why isn’t that the case when it comes to cops? Why isn’t it possible to acknowledge the difficulty of the job they perform and still criticize those cops who are bad at doing it? In Cleveland, Ohio, the police basically assassinated a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice. The cop who did it has a history of mental issues and was deemed unsuitable for police work by another police department. There are protests in the streets and some of the city’s professional athletes are wearing T-shirts that condemn the killing, which was ruled a homicide.

But in Cleveland, as in other cities, the police are rallying around the officer in question. The union head is demanding an apology from the athletes and their teams. Battle lines are forming on social media; there are countless posts about the great work that cops do, and about how difficult their job is. Criticizing the behavior of some officers is portrayed as being anti-police or as being ignorant of how difficult their job is.

I get it. Being a cop is a thankless, life-threatening job. Most cops are good men and women. But police departments need to man up and acknowledge their bad apples. Closing ranks behind the blue “code of silence” is hurting them more than it’s helping them, as is the symbiotic relationship between district attorneys and cops that so often results in a sham grand jury “investigation.”

I’ve grown to respect Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong’s quiet approach to the current situation. His department’s non-confrontational response to local protesters has been spot on, and we should be grateful for it. It’s important that the police recognize that there’s a difference between a legal, organized protest and running through the streets and setting businesses on fire.

And it’s equally important for police leadership to recognize that the “thin blue line” is there to serve and protect us, and when someone in uniform fails in those duties, it’s in their own best interest that he or she be held accountable by their superiors — and their peers.

Poverty is a form of violence.

It holds millions in bondage, locked into neighborhoods stripped of public or private investment, trapped in low-wage jobs. Often, this violence is state-sponsored via policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, who are often brown and black. So it is a short walk from national protests against police brutality to calls for economic justice.

Rookie activist Tami Sawyer wants to help people in Memphis — the poorest large metro area in the nation — make that journey. In the past two weeks, the 32-year-old St. Mary’s alumna organized two die-ins — one outside the National Civil Rights Museum and another on Beale Street. These and dozens of similar protests nationwide were sparked by deaths of two unarmed black men — Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island. In both cases, a grand jury failed to indict the white officers who killed them.

But the fury on display at protests and on social media is not directed solely at a warped criminal justice system. It is the entire game that is rigged.

“We can scream, we can yell, we can cry on TV,” Sawyer said, “but it will fall on deaf ears. We don’t have economic power.”

For proof, look at last week’s report from the Pew Research Center. Although the economy is recovering, the black-white wealth gap is now at its highest since 1989. In 2013, the median household wealth of white families ($141,900) was 13 times greater than that of black families ($11,000).

African Americans make up 14 percent of the country’s population, but black-owned businesses bring in just 0.5 percent of the nation’s receipts.

It is difficult to amass wealth when just two generations ago, black people were shut out of some trades, red-lined out of more desirable neighborhoods by racist lending policies, and banned from state-run colleges funded by their tax dollars.

With little inter-generational wealth, black people are more likely to be unemployed and, regardless of household income, live in neighborhoods where property values are falling. These poor neighborhoods are more likely to be hyper-policed, which puts black people at greater risk of encounters that could be defused by smart policing or that could end in death.

That’s an oversimplified version of how the criminal justice system functions in a larger machine that devalues black lives. (For the complete account, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.) But in this context, it makes sense that the Ferguson grand jury decision, announced the Monday before Thanksgiving, spawned the #BlackOutBlackFriday shopping boycott. (Black Friday sales were down 11 percent, but pundits were loathe to credit hashtag activism.)

Sawyer supported the boycott but wondered about the long game. “You’re going to boycott on Friday, but when Cyber Monday comes up, you’re going to go spend money with Best Buy,” she griped.

Her Instagram page became a photo gallery to encourage people to shop with black-owned businesses on #buyblackfriday and beyond. “At the end of day, we don’t make it anywhere, if our own people don’t support it,” said Sawyer, who does employee development for government agencies.

Her vision of economic empowerment grew last week after a chance encounter with D’Army Bailey, a retired judge, attorney, and activist. At a black-owned coffee shop/office space in Uptown, Sawyer talked strategy with a man she’d met through the die-ins.

Bailey sat at a nearby table, eavesdropping. Then he interrupted. “He said, ‘Besides lying in the street, what else do you have planned?'” Sawyer recalled.

He was brusque, but she listened. “He said go to the county commission meeting and see what they’re debating today.”

She did. On the agenda was the economic impact plan for Graceland, which calls for $125 million in public investments to build a private hotel on the property and create 282 jobs.

“The jobs aren’t spelled out,” Sawyer said. “Are they going to be low-wage? Are they going to be middle-income?”

Those questions weren’t asked at the meeting. The lone vote against the plan came from Bailey’s brother, Walter.

“Being aware of how the money in this city is spent is important,” she said. “Our freedom as a culture ties into our economic freedom.”

Her next protest is planned for Christmas Eve, outside Graceland.