Peter Frase

Every second Facebook post I see today is seemingly about Philando Castile, and rightly so. It hits me all the more that he was shot down in my homeland, the Twin Cities. Between this and Jamar Clark, a lot of white people are being rudely awakened to the nasty racist underbelly of Minnesota "nice". And not a moment too soon.

But sometimes it's good to get out of your social and political bubble. And as a Minnesota sports fan, I sometimes tune in to internet streams of the local sports radio. Today, Paul Allen of KFAN decided to dedicate a segment of his show to talking about the shooting. For this I can only commend him--he resisted the usual flamers who insisted he just "stick to first downs", because he recognized that this was the most important thing going on in the cities right now, and his show was as good a place as any to talk about it. As he said on Twitter, "I control an environment for people to react, and few are thinking about 'first downs ....' right now."

But the call-in segment I listened to was remarkable for how callous and out of touch it was, in discussing the murder of a man who, by all accounts, was killed for doing nothing more than putting his hand in his pocket to reach for his wallet.

An enormous amount of time was taken up debating various details of Castile's behavior, particularly related to the--legal--gun he was carrying, and which he attempted to inform his killer about. Did he reveal his armed status at the right time? Should he have had his hands outside his vehicle sooner? Various callers insisted that they would have done this, or that, or been more compliant, or done something to prevent the officer from shooting. On and on it went.

Towards the end of the segment, one guy calls in to object to this line of reasoning, and offers that he sees no more reason to trust a police officer than any other random person who might approach his vehicle.

At which point Allen reacts in immediate disagreement, saying that one of his best friends is a police officer in the Twin Cities suburbs, he knows many officers, greatly respects them, and so on.

This was where I was really pulled up short by the cognitive dissonance running through the whole discussion. Allen and his callers' obsessive focus on minute details of Castile's reactions seems to imply that police officers are, in fact, wildly undisciplined and violent animals, who go into every situation prepared to commit murder at the slightest provocation. And yet the same people who talk this way, will turn around and talk about these same police as brave professionals deserving of our infinite respect.

The question to be posed to people like this is, which way do you want it? Are the police responsible professionals who have earned our deference? Or are they lawless killers who will shoot at the first wrong move? To want it both ways suggests either deep denial or an intensely fascistic mindset.