A story broke Friday shocking enough to obliterate any feelings of goodwill you may have developed recently.
Sgt. Valerie Deant, a National Guardsman, was at a shooting range in Miami-Dade County last week. There, she found copies of old mugshots that evidently had been used for target practice. All of the mugshots were those of young black men, and all had been riddled with bullets holes. To make the situation worse, one of the ripped-apart faces was that of her own brother, Woody Deant.
What really makes this story upsetting, though, is that the mugshots weren’t being used for target practice by a white supremacist, vigilante group. They were being used by North Miami Beach Police for an exercise in sniper training.
Understandably, the world is in uproar over this incident. At best, it is an egregious lapse in judgment on the part of North Miami Beach Police. The worst possible interpretation points at evidence of racism at an institutional level.
Such an interpretation is easily susceptible to accusations of racial agitation — the mere mention of the word “black” in a headline unnecessarily makes the story “about race.” So it went with Michael Brown, Eric Garner and the multitude of other stories of this nature that would supposedly be open-and-shut — if it weren’t for the malevolent machinations of racial agitators and their attempts to defame our beloved institutions by any means at their disposal.
So let’s take race out of the equation.
North Miami Beach Police Chief J. Scott Dennis claims the mugshots used in the training program included people of all races.
Is that actually supposed to make us feel any better?
Are we supposed to lie back and accept the logic that, if you’re arrested, the police department that arrested you has the right to fire bullets into a photograph of your face?
It’s profoundly upsetting that people whose job it is to serve and protect residents of a city will end up with images of some of those same residents — not necessarily even convicts — in their sights. Using the likenesses of existing human beings for target practice is fundamentally sick.
Import race into this scenario, and it’s enough to make one scream. Yes, the police chief of North Miami Beach did say the department doesn’t use only mugshots of black men in its sniper training exercises, but the utter lack of evidence to this effect makes his claim dubious at best. Of the six mugshots found, six were of black men.
Even if the statement were true, it remains wildly irresponsible, disconcerting and repugnant.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 1/20/2015 under the headline “Mugshot target practice more than just a race issue"]
