Editor’s Note: Denise Lockwood has covered southeastern Wisconsin for over 20 years for CNI Newspapers, Patch, the Kenosha News and the Milwaukee Business Journal. She currently owns and operates the Racine County Eye, an independent local news website. The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on CNN.
In Kenosha, the shooting of Jacob Blake sparked massive protests – both violent and nonviolent. Shot seven times, Blake, according to officials, refused to comply with their orders while they tried to arrest him on a warrant. In the days following the shooting, the community watched as buildings burned and businesses were looted. They watched as people grieved and the nation’s anger grew.
In one of these protests, two people died after then-17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot and killed them. Earlier this month, he entered a plea of not guilty just hours before a news conference in which Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley announced his decision not to charge either Kenosha police officer Rusten T. Sheskey for shooting Blake, or Blake for resisting arrest while possessing a knife (as Graveley said Blake himself told authorities he did). Graveley also said there would be no charges against the other two officers involved, Vincent Arenas and Brittany Meronek.
Blake was left paralyzed from the waist down. In an interview with ABC’s Michael Strahan this month, Blake said he resisted on the night of August 23 because “I didn’t want to be the next George Floyd.”
Explaining to reporters his decision not to bring charges, Graveley said earlier this month, “I insist that this conversation be a complicated conversation, that it be a real conversation, not a simplistic one and that we talk accurately and thoroughly about the law and the facts.” He’s entirely correct.
In my years reporting on crime and law enforcement, I have heard an often-used catchphrase: “Perception is reality.” The actions taken by Sheskey and Blake reflect the existence of what I call a “second America” – neighborhoods with high crime and low resources where problems have been left to fester for decades. And when you live there, especially as a person of color, you get treated differently because your experience there is different. That’s not a perception. It’s a reality.
In the context of the Jacob Blake story, this enduring conflict between perception and reality has come to mean that many people sympathize either with Jacob Blake or Kyle Rittenhouse. And for them, that’s the end of the conversation – things stall at the questions about what happened and how it could have been prevented, how many different things went wrong to culminate in a horrific, nearly-fatal moment, why Blake resisted police arresting him, whether he knew he had a warrant for his arrest and whether implicit bias played a role in how Sheskey approached Blake in the first place.
Blake addressed some of those questions in his interview with Strahan. According to Blake, the incident began as he was leaving his son’s birthday party, when an argument with his girlfriend Laquisha Booker became heated, she called 911 and police responded.
Blake recalled, “I’m walking out and (I hadn’t) done anything, so I felt like they (the police) weren’t there for me,” he said, adding that he thought the warrant had “been done and over.”
Blake said he didn’t want to be on the ground, where George Floyd had been when a police officer put his knee to Floyd’s neck.
“That’s all I was thinking, honestly,” Blake said, adding. “I didn’t want to die.”
His ABC interview clarified what Blake’s perceptions were that night. But according to Graveley’s report, Sheskey and the other officers “knew the man who was the subject of the call, Jacob Blake, had a warrant for his arrest from a prior incident where he was charged with domestic violence offenses and a sexual assault. Every decision the officers made during this incident, in response to this call, must be interpreted in light of those facts.”
In a report from his interview with investigators three days after the incident (included in Graveley’s report), Sheskey said the squad area where the call was located “is known for a lot of drug and gang violence” and alluded to a home invasion with a shooting that had taken place nearby the previous month. Sheskey also told investigators he learned of the warrant for Blake while en route to the scene. Since “Blake would ultimately have to be arrested” and because of “the heavy gang activity in the area,” Sheskey thought Blake “would likely try to run from law enforcement.”
Context matters in this story, even in the absence of charges or some other form of closure. Kenosha faces problems common to other communities of color in America: poverty, unemployment, insufficient transportation options, lack of education resources and poor access to mental health services. Any police officer will tell you these conditions often set the stage for domestic disturbance calls and violence – an issue Graveley’s report discusses in detail.
These nuances – especially at the national level – need to be part of a larger conversation about the problem of trust between Black Americans and law enforcement. But that trust has to be rebuilt by acknowledging how unstable many communities and families have become, facing the fallout from a crumbling Covid economy on top of years of struggle and neglect.
Once, I reported on a gang shooting in an apartment building just blocks away from where Blake was shot in the neighborhood of Wilson Heights. A bullet went through a little girl’s leg and into her mother’s leg as they slept. The next day I went to the neighborhood to get comments, but residents chased me away out of what appeared to be fear that they might be labeled as snitches. Graveley, in his decision not to bring charges, surely knew how complicated it is both to live in and police neighborhoods facing these challenges.
Jacob Blake’s children will never forget seeing their father shot. Those children deserve better from all of us.
What happened in Wilson Heights isn’t unique in this country. It is not acceptable. White and privileged Americans have a role in allowing “second America” to persist on our watch. We do things like send our children to private schools instead of advocating to make public schools better. We vote for officials who will allocate more dollars to the police to “keep us safe,” but also spend little on resources or social support mechanisms for those who live in communities where they are at risk. Too many of us back the badge over Black Lives Matter when it should never be a choice in the first place. This is not an either/or decision. It’s an and.
But too many of those same people continue to dispute that systemic racism exists, even when confronted with data that tells us otherwise. Look at it. It’s there. You see it in disparate school disciplinary actions, graduation rates, wages, infant mortality statistics and even health care access. And I’m sure someone reading this will send me an email about how I’m wrong, that this is a lazy people problem, that racism is a hoax, and if “they only got a job and raised their kids right, things would be just fine.”
No. It’s not fine.
If we genuinely want to see a reduction in officer-involved shootings, we need to take a good hard look at how we patrol these communities. We need to ask ourselves why people are jailed, how bail and bond work, who is allowed to have work release and who is not, and we need to look at who is allowed into things like drug courts, which provide sentencing alternatives such as drug treatment for people living with addiction and mental health disorders.
I fear that Kenosha will remember only their version of the story. Buildings will be rebuilt. The boards on the buildings have come down. Businesses have reopened. There was no violence in the streets after Graveley announced his decision. But the racism, anger and the feelings of powerlessness will not leave this community or this country until we accept our role in creating two Americas.
