What’s the Excuse Now?

Alton Sterling: July 5, 2016, Baton Rouge, Louisiana…dead.

Philando Castile: July 6, 2016 in Falcon Heights, Minnesota (near Minneapolis)…dead.

Police murders both.

It would be too easy to rattle off names of unjustly killed people, overwhelmingly black, all under highly questionable circumstances. In almost all cases, what would seem like justice is somehow circumvented, and this goes at least as far back as Rodney King.

In these two most recent cases, one victim was a peddler of CDs (see him dying here). The other was following an officer’s instructions at a traffic stop, told the officer he had a gun he was licensed to carry, proceeded to reach for his ID…and ended up dying for having a busted taillight.

I can’t wait to hear the rationalizations for these two crimes. There’s a contingent of “explainers” who always seem to justify anything police officers do. In fairness, when you see and hear the videos, you’ll notice that the responsible police officers are extremely distraught and unnerved by what they have just done.

I had to write this brief item because our community is too oblivious, or even on the wrong side of things, when these all-too-frequent tragedies occur. Each time I hear of these incidents, it seems as though a time machine has transported me to the days of the Bloody Sultan’s Hamidiyeh militias sweeping down on an Armenian village and doing whatever they wanted. Remember, those groups were official representatives of the state at the time, as are the police of today.

We, as Armenians, unfortunately well experienced in being at the receiving end of injustice, must be at the forefront of the efforts to prevent future killings of innocent people. These needless deaths are happening only because most non-blacks in the United States have been inculcated with a fear of black-skinned humans. This causes even well-trained police officers to overreact.

Get out there and use your credibility as a scion of genocide survivors to save lives.

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Garen Yegparian

Asbarez Columnist

Garen Yegparian is a fat, bald guy who has too much to say and do for his own good. So, you know he loves mouthing off weekly about anything he damn well pleases to write about that he can remotely tie in to things Armenian. He's got a checkered past: principal of an Armenian school, project manager on a housing development, ANC-WR Executive Director, AYF Field worker (again on the left coast), Operations Director for a telecom startup, and a City of LA employee most recently (in three different departments so far). Plus, he's got delusions of breaking into electoral politics, meanwhile participating in other aspects of it and making sure to stay in trouble. His is a weekly column that appears originally in Asbarez, but has been republished to the Armenian Weekly for many years.

Latest posts by Garen Yegparian (see all)

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