Promote This Truth-Telling Killer Cop!

It is so commonplace these days that one does not even know where to begin. I am talking about the perennial and seemingly perpetual and/or interminable open season of the fatal shootings of African Americans on the highways, byways and alleyways of these United States of America. This barbaric canker is riotously rampant all over the Mega-Country, but it is especially and routinely so in the southern part of the erstwhile New World, which quickly became the veritable hellish graveyard of the Continental African Personality. There was, of course, no Continental African then, just captive African who crossed the Atlantic Ocean, for the most part, and got civically converted into a Nigger, a movable item of chattel. Historically, we also know that the institution of the American Highway Patrol, or the so-called State Police, was almost exclusively established with the overriding objective of keeping us Niggers in our place.

So, I was not the least bit surprised just this past February, when a young robust- and virile-looking, or perhaps even buffy, I should say, African American man jogging through a predominantly white, or all-white, residential neighborhood by the name of Mr. Ahmaud Arbery was given a hot chase by a retired white police officer by the name of Mr. Gregory McMichael and his son, Travis McMichael, in their vehicle and savagely gunned down without any apparent provocation whatsoever. Actually, there was a naturally unintended provocation of the first order here, which was simply “Jogging While Black.” In Ghana, it would be “Trotting While Black.” Nearly two decades, or perhaps even a little more than two decades ago, a friend and a colleague of mine at the globally renowned African American weekly by the name of The New York Amsterdam News, to wit, Mr. Gregory Meeks, wrote and published a fairly well-selling or well-sold book that was partly reportorial and a memoir titled “Driving While Black.” You see, that was precisely what the late Mr. Ahmaud Arbery was prejudicially found to have been guilty of by the retired Georgia killer-cop and his son.

Now, the February 23, 2020 brutal slaying of Mr. Arbery took place in a Georgia township called Brunswick. And for the better part of two months, the killers of Mr. Arbery freely strolled the streets of their neighborhood and the rest of the country, that is, the United States, with the criminally self-glorifying pretext that Mr. Arbery had actually attempted to physically assault the son of the killer-cop. Then, not altogether predictably but, nonetheless, not altogether unprecedently as well, on May 5, 2020, a 36-second videoclip of the barbaric slaying of Mr. Arbery surfaced in cyberspace. It had been filmed by another, 50-year-old, white man by the name of Mr. William “Roddie” Bryan, Jr. Initially, the filmmaker of this most ghastly and grisly incident was being euphorically hailed as a Good Samaritan in much the same manner that the white photographer who filmed the equally brutal and globally infamous mauling of what became known as the Rodney King Incident/Affair in the Los Angeles, California, of the early 1990s had been hailed.

Well, in the preceding incident, the white photographer-filmmaker was a genuine and authentic Good Samaritan. At any rate, as of this writing, Mr. William “Roddie” Bryan, Jr., had been arrested by law-enforcement officials and charged with being as guilty or equally culpable of the murder of Mr. Arbery as the McMichaels. But what really inspired this column was a WhatsApp videoclip sent to me by one of my relatives or my regular informants, I forget who, in which a white woman stopped on a highway in the township of Marietta, Georgia – the reason or reasons for her arrest is not clear to me from the videoclip, although it could be clearly inferred or readily presumed that the white-woman driver or motorist was driving drunk and/or erratically on the highway. Perhaps, the driver was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Now, we don’t see the driver of the stopped vehicle, but we know that she is a woman from the sound of her voice, as well as the sort of rarefied “tender courtesy” afforded her by the cop, who gently asks her to pick up a cellphone that appears to be on her lap, according to the cop, and call some relatives that she says she would like to call, after the officer says that he is placing the motorist under arrest as well as impounding her car.

The apparently palpably shaken white-woman motorist says that she is deathly afraid to reach down unto her laps for her phone, because she has seen too many videotapes on television in which motorists who had been confronted by cops who tried to reach down into their vehicles for their IDs or other personal effects were prompted executed by the cops who had stopped them and their vehicles. To which the anonymous arresting police officer is clearly heard to be telling the white-woman motorist: “All the videos you’ve seen, have you seen white people get killed? You have? But you’re not black. Remember, we only kill black people. Yeah, we only kill black people, right?” Well, I have seen a couple of videoclips in which white people have been killed. These are often young rowdy and or emotionally troubled white men. But, of course, the arresting Marietta police officer is absolutely right; such killings are very few and far between and invariably extremely accidental.

As of this writing, the unnamed white cop had been recommended for immediate termination by Chief Mike Register of the Cobb County Police Department. Officer Register seemed very anguished and almost in tears at what appeared to be a press conference at which he appeared to announce the immediate termination of the employment of the rogue Neo-Nazi-like police officer. “Now, I don’t know what was in his heart, by I know what he said….” Now, as a citizen who regularly donates to dozens of charitable organizations, including police associations and organizations all over the United States, I can only take a deep breath and wonder how many dollars and cents I have contributed towards the “legal” massacre of American citizens and residents who looked exactly like me. To say that I am heartbroken beggars the description of exactly how I feel. The irony here, though, is that Officer Anonymous was very likely telling us the truth about the professional mindset of the average American police officer and highway patrol officer. God have mercy on him and keep the rest of us safe from killer-cops.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

May 25, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]