Why Jacob Blake’s criminal record doesn’t matter

artwork credit: Jacob Hernandez

tw: sexual assault

There has been--as there always is when another Black person is murdered by the police--a lot circulating about the personal life of Jacob Blake. The media will go on a smear campaign against any Black victim of police brutality, so when I saw a claim that he had raped a 13 year old, I went and did my fact checking in hopes of being able to drop a link to a disproving article for the Twitter trolls. What I found instead, was that Blake had not raped a 13 year old, but that he had allegedly sexually assaulted his former girlfriend, and was under charges for sexual assault, domestic violence, and theft of $1000 from her.

I was taken aback. Sexual assault? Especially when I read the disturbing details of the assault, I had to think things over for a moment. As a college age woman, being sexually assaulted is my greatest practical fear, and when I read the woman’s testimony about the “pain and humiliation” she had felt from the assault, I immediately empathized with her. Would advocating for an alleged sexual assaulter tarnish my empathy for his victim? How could I reconcile these feelings? And then I realized--what did I have to reconcile? Why did I feel the need to prove anything about Blake's character? Doing bad things--even allegedly assaulting women--does not mean police can shoot you seven times when you’re peacefully walking to your car.

The momentary conflict I felt regarding Jacob Blake, was me succumbing to our hyper focus on individual stories. Our focus on individual stories allows for people to empathize with the issue, but I also fear it has dangerous connotations. It is saddening that we have to rely on Change.org (which is a corporation by the way) petitions going viral to achieve justice (and in the case of Breonna Taylor, 11 million signatures has still not been enough for her justice), and I worry that signing these petitions allows for people to feel involved in “something good” without understanding the need for, or demanding structural change. You have people talk about how they cried for George Floyd but they clutch their pearls at defunding the police. I understand that’s how change works--painfully slowly. Of course I still sign petitions everyday, but I want the conversation to graduate to a systemic, policy level: defunding the police by at least half, funding social workers, defunding prisons and funding schools to combat the school to prison pipeline, etc. I believe this trend is also to fault for copaganda, where we see this nice cop or that nice cop. People show a polite cop as if that has any relevance whatsoever, when we are critiquing the system (which is also why I think "ACAB" and “all men are trash” are easily misunderstood and therefore unproductive because it seems to be talking about the character of each individual cop or man rather than the structures they inhabit, although I do empathize with the frustration behind such slogans).

The focus on individuals not only keeps us from having these conversations, but we also get sidetracked into the personal records of these individuals, as I did with Jacob Blake. It becomes a conversation of whether the individual is good or not, rather than whether they were treated unjustly or not. There is no standard a person has to meet to be treated justly. I understand you have to play the media circus of getting sympathy for the victim, but I do find it kind of racist, that there seems to be some need to portray him as the perfect victim for him to be deserving of not being shot for no reason. One viral petition (which I have still signed despite these shortcomings, and you should too), writes that "Officers were on the scene due to a fight, which Jacob Blake was trying to break up," and that "his kids were right there and saw everything." It is not relevant that his kids saw everything--if he was alone it would be just as unjust, and the “Blake as a gentle peacemaker” narrative that I have seen everywhere among leftist circles is also odd. The police were initially called by the woman he sexually assaulted in May, who called to report Blake's trespassing onto her property. The police, it seems, were called to deal with the threat of Blake's presence, but what does it matter whether he was there as a peacekeeper or as a threat to his partner--he did not have to get shot for trying to go back to his car. Why must we beg for sympathy and paint an appealing narrative for people to understand that someone shouldn’t be shot seven for peacefully walking away?

All you need to know about Jacob Blake is what is shown in this video, that he was peacefully walking towards his car when he was grabbed by his shirt from behind, and shot in the back seven times. It doesn't matter what he has done, or that the police knew about his record--you can clearly see that he wasn't being a threat to anyone in that moment, and then was shot from behind. This was attempted extrajudicial murder. That is the only important detail pertaining to this case: that this was an attempted extrajudicial murder.

This is a larger frustration I have with people's irrationality and selective empathy as well. Can't you not relate to someone, not be like someone, even dislike someone, and still understand that they must be treated with justice in order for society as a whole to be just? Justice is not something upheld by any one individual outcome (or the treatment of one race, gender, sexuality, species), but by how society functions as a whole. It bears repeating, that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, that those four bullets that pierced through Blake's skin and flesh were simultaneously ripping through our Bill of Rights. When one person is violated unjustly, all of our rights are violated, not only because of the slippery slope of power that the government loves to slide on (today it is them, but tomorrow it will be you), but also because that's what being a just society is--it means you treat everyone with fairness and due process. I don't know how to explain that one person's rights violated is one person too many.

The whole point of a justice system instead of vigilantes running around is because we have committed ourselves to organizing as a society of fairness, due process, and will of the people. The problem with vigilantes and their glorification (of which Hollywood is a chief architect of), is that it misses the point of why we have left, as Hobbes said, the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" state of nature. It goes to the heart of why we have societies. We have rules and protocols for how to deal with people making mistakes. Even if you believe killing someone is a fair punishment for certain actions, that comes after a fair trial (which also, btw, is far from the truth for poor and/or Black and brown people in this country). You don't just go on your own, running around murdering people extrajudicially like the police are right now.

It also turns out that vigilantism is actually something of a purposeful--and even proud--point among police officers: apparently they plaster the Punisher's skull (a ruthless fictional vigilante) all over, even on squad cars and gear, I suppose imagining themselves to be vigilante heroes. It is no surprise then, that the police are handing out water and buddying up to real vigilantes, white supremacist vigilantes, one of whom recently went onto murder two people at a protest that was, ironically, held for the same Jacob Blake. The police state right now is simply a large, well-armed, state sanctioned gang that gets away with murder in broad daylight.

I really believe it is only in the defense of these flawed victims that we get to the heart of Black Lives Matter. This shouldn't be about how nice Black people matter. The lives of all Black people matter. The rights of all Black people matter. Black people matter, period. If you only cared about kind, volunteering, vegetarian Elijah McClain but now you don't care about what happened to Jacob Blake, even if he committed sexual assault, you're missing the point. It is not a question of do I like Jacob Blake or not, it is a question of whether Jacob Blake was treated unjustly or not. If you're only upset about the perfect victims, you are simply sympathizing with individual stories, and not seeing the greater injustice. And there are hardly any "acceptable" victims anyways, as the right will be sure to vilify every Black victim--remember when people brought up how George Floyd may have allegedly written a bad check...as if that justifies murdering him?

Distilling this fight down to a matter of individuals does a disservice to BLM, a movement for ending the racial apartheid we live in right now, where there is a separate policing system, carceral system, school system, healthcare system, food system for the Black people in this country. It is an issue that pervades every part of society--it is so far from an individual case or issue.

George Floyd, Elijah McClain, Jacob Blake, and so many countless others--they are all individually different and you can feel differently about each individual, but each extrajudicial, racist police murder is as unjust as the next one. They are each pieces in a broader, tragic mosaic of the white supremacy of America and people's apathy to do anything about it. And although these victims have become symbols, there should be no expectation that they all be angelic martyrs. Black people are under no obligation to live up to any standards to be worthy of the right to a fair trial, and to not receive cruel or unusual punishment. This is about injustice, and being a fellow human should be enough to mobilize all of us against injustice.