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The Lives Of The NYPD Officers Killed In Brooklyn Are No More Valuable Than That Of Eric Garner


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NYPD officers who were killed in Brooklyn

AFRICANGLOBE – Two New York police officers were killed on Saturday. This is an unfortunate happening.




A declaration of war against Black people in New York has also been issued:








Social media has responded with the hashtag “#NYPDLIVESMATTER”. This is a direct affront and effort to undermine the slogan “Black Lives Matter” and its affirmation of the value of Black peoples’ lives.

NYPDLIVESMATTER is a perverse and grotesque statement, one that assumes a lie and false assumption: of course the lives of police “matter”; there is an entire legal, social, and political apparatus to protect the police, and that empowers them to kill innocent Black people without consequences.

Moreover, that NYPDLIVESMATTER is positioned as a response to “Black Lives Matter” demonstrates how “law and order”, white racial resentment, and White supremacy are deeply intertwined and almost inseparable in the (White) American political imagination.

America’s police were and remain a deeply racist social institution. NYPDLIVESMATTER is a claim and assertion against the justice claims of Black Americans. For White America, Right-wing authoritarians, the unthinking mass of the American public, and cop fetishists this is a zero sum process: the possessive investment in Whiteness mandates that one cannot accept how the lives of police are no more valuable and worthy than the lives of African-Americans.

Revenge? Man Who Filmed NYPD Strangling Eric Garner Arrested For Gun Possession
Eric Garner being strangle to death on camera by the NYPD

White supremacy and white privilege also demand accountability from “Black leadership” and those others who have spoken out against police brutality, crafting broken logic where somehow the protests against police brutality are responsible for the killing of two police in Brooklyn.

Misplaced norms of group accountability for Black people as viewed through the White Gaze are a fixture of white privilege. There is no reciprocity: the supporters of “Black Lives Matter” stand in sympathy with the two police killed in Brooklyn; police and their spokespeople rarely if ever stand in unity with the victims of police violence, thuggery, abuse, and murder.

If the colorline was a sporting event, the spectators are rooting for their respective teams with police on one side and Black folks on the other. NYPDLIVESMATTER is cheerleading for a lack of accountability and preemptive violence by the police against African-Americans. Here, the rhetorical evasion in post racial, colorblind discourse will be the lazy out that “we support the police against “criminals” and “thugs” with “race having nothing to do about any of this!”

The obvious is also transparent as “criminals” and “thugs” are stand-ins for “Blacks” and “n*gger” in the post civil rights era racial discourse.

It is also important to note how NYPDLIVESMATTER exists within the same public discourse as language like “anti-police bigotry”:

See this explanation from the Johnson County Law Center for example:

Why would anyone single out people of a certain profession and try to discredit or vilify that entire group?Such wide-sweeping generalizations about Blacks, jews, gays, or other minority groups are typically not tolerated. Yet, when people make bigoted unfounded statements about the police nobody seems to mind.





These are common rhetorical moves by the Right-wing in the United States. From “reverse racism” to “equality of opportunity” and “colorblindness”, American conservatives have shamelessly, dishonestly–and to great effect–appropriated the language of progressives and liberals to work against the very goal of a more just society that the latter have struggled and died to advance.


As such, they are the enforcers of the Racial State whose purpose is to feed bodies into the gaping maw of the new Jim and Jane Crow’s prisons and jails. The notion that police are “victims” of “bigotry” is an absurd one. While their morality may in fact be stained, enforcers of power, by definition, are not victims of Power.



Human rights trump the “unique”, particular, and somehow imagined as “special” lives of the police. We are all human beings with universal rights. The public good will be much better served when the police as a social institution (many of whose members feel empowered to violate the rights of non-whites, the poor, the mentally ill, and those others who society has marginalized) internalize and act upon such a basic and foundational principle.


By: Chauncey DeVega



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