This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism

Lemon opens this chapter by examining the disparity in how police treat Whites and Blacks. He compares the police’s considerate treatment of Dylann Roof—a White supremacist who murdered nine people in a South Carolina church in 2015—with that of Eric Garner, a Black man selling loose cigarettes, whom a New York City officer suffocated to death using an illegal choke hold. While he criticizes the easily distorted solutions, such as defunding the police, he understands that the pace of reform is terribly slow.

Most police officers enter the force with good intentions but become jaded due to constant stress, a “one-Glock-fits-all” mentality to community service, and an insular culture (81). The roots of the police are not in ensuring public safety but enforcing social order, especially given that police departments originated in the slave patrols of the South and the anti-Black, anti-immigrant groups of the North. The reformer August Vollmer pioneered modern police ideals and science-based investigations, but they often only provide a veneer of professionalism to prejudiced operations.

In August 2020, a Kenosha, Wisconsin officer shot seven point-blank bullets into 29-year-old Jacob Black after he attempted to escape arrest and reach out to his three children in the car. The shots left Black paralyzed from the waist down, though officers still handcuffed his nonworking legs in a hospital bed.