"If You Ain't Want Him Killed, Why'd You Leave Him With Me?"

Walter Mosley writes crime fiction, and his recurring character/detective is Easy Rawlins.  In Devil In a Blue Dress, of which I have the movie, Rawlins has moved from Texas to Los Angeles, has lost his job (Mosley is black -- well, half; his mother is Caucasian and Jewish --, Rawlins is black, and that provides overpowering parts of the dynamics in Mosley's stories), and he needs a way to make money.  He gets mixed up in something that was not as straightforward as he hoped it would be, and he's in increasing trouble.  Rawlins, played by Denzel Washington, calls his old friend and inveterate bad boy, Mouse, played by Don Cheadle, and Mouse comes to California to help his friend.

At some point, Rawlins and Mouse are going to try to save the dazzling Caucasian woman who might know where important evidence is, and they have taken with them Joppy, who sort of got Rawlins into this trouble, even though he's Rawlins' friend.  Once they get to the secluded cabin where Joppy believes the bad guys have the girl, Rawlins tells Mouse to tie up Joppy.  Mouse offers to shoot Joppy, but Rawlins doesn't want that.  Rawlins sneaks up to the cabin, finds the bad guys about to torture the girl, starts shooting, at which point Mouse comes along, and shoots, too, and they kill all the bad guys, and save the girl.

When they get back to the car, Rawlins wants to know where Joppy is.  Well...he's dead.  And Mouse is sheepish.  Rawlins complains, and says he didn't want Joppy dead.  Mouse defends himself, and says Rawlins only said he didn't want Joppy shot.  So Mouse choked him.  He explains that if he was to help his friend Rawlins, he couldn't be wasting time tying up Joppy.  It was then he spoke the line that is the title of this post.  Rawlins had to understand that this is how Mouse rolls.  Of course it is.  It's what got Mouse his reputation in Texas.  Mouse is slightly indirectly suggesting it's why Rawlins left Joppy in Mouse's "care."

A New York Times article about the assassination of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta on Saturday contains the following recapitulation:  "The police were called to the scene initially because Mr Brooks had fallen asleep on the drive-through line of the restaurant.  The video shows Officer Brosnan waking Mr Brooks in the driver's seat of a car and asking him to move the car to a parking space.  Officer Brosnan appears to be unsure whether to let Mr Brooks sleep there, or to take further action.

"He calls for another police officer, and Officer Rolfe arrives 12 minutes later.  Officer Rolfe searches Mr Brooks, and then puts him through a sobriety test, which he fails.  Mr Brooks asks the officers if he can lock his car up under their supervision, and walk to his sister's house, which is a short distance away.  'I can just go home,' he says.

"Officer Rolfe asks Mr Brooks to take a breath test for alcohol.  Mr Brooks admits he has been drinking and says 'I don't want to refuse anything.'  When the test is complete, Officer Rolfe tells Mr Brooks he 'has had too much drink to be driving,' and begins to handcuff him.  Only then is Mr Brooks seen offering any resistance."

Other parts of the article, and other descriptions, make clear the "resistance" involved a scuffle, in which officers applied a Taser to Brooks, who had been totally cooperative, until police escalated a calm situation, and Brooks somehow came away with the Taser.  Then, he ran...away.  Representative James Clyburn of SC said "They'd already patted him down, he had no weapon on him -- where did they think he was going to go?...So he's running away -- my goodness, you've got his car; you can easily find him.  But no, you fire bullets into his back."

Stacey Abrams of Georgia called for "reformation of how police officers do their jobs, how law enforcement does its job, because what happened yesterday to Rayshard Brooks was a function of excessive force...The fact that they were either embarrassed, or, you know, panicked, led them to murder a man who they knew only had a Taser in his hand."  Ms Abrams is clearly omitting, at least in this quote, to reference the underlying and overriding dynamic.

Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is more direct.  "You can't really reform a department that is rotten to the root -- what you can do is rebuild... What we are saying is the current infrastructure that exists as policing in our city should not exist any more... And we can't go about creating a different process with the same infrastructure in place."

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates (GWB and Obama) referenced the military, and he mentioned a "legacy of racism that should be confronted in society, including within a military that is increasingly diverse."

And then, there's the other police-related issue that gets increasing discussion.  Various people, especially the police, and especially when they're being criticized for behavior like this, complain that too much of solving non-police problems is unloaded on police.  It seems fair enough to agree that police are somehow expected to be front line mental health professionals.  Which they're not qualified to do, but it falls to them anyway.  But they're also asked to be referees in non-criminal spats.  This is part of what people like Rep Omar are getting at, apart from the rotten culture of prejudices.  And she mistakenly thinks the prejudiced and dangerous people are the police.  It's true that deputized and armed prejudiced people are more problematic than anyone else, but they're most certainly not the only culprits.

The point is that racism, and various other prejudices, are rampant.  And they're insidious.  You can't legislate them away, and you can't make every rule and every law that will adequately protect blacks, and women, and Jews, and Muslims, and Native Americans, and homosexuals.  It's actually a terrible dilemma to know that there's a massive problem that seems impossible to solve.

Some countries manage parts of this better than we do, and some manage parts of it worse.  We treat blacks worse than almost anyone else does, and we treat women and homosexuals better than they do in the middle east.  OK, sometimes, it doesn't look dramatically better, but it's at least somewhat better.

The real question, considering the title of this post, and the story about Mouse and Devil in a Blue Dress, is why Brosnan called Rolfe.  Everything was fine until then.  Was it because, as Mouse implied, Brosnan unconsciously wanted something done that he knew he himself wouldn't do?  So he called for..."back-up?"  He had a very tidy solution to what was essentially a non-problem.  And he did it all by himself.  For what did he need "back-up?"  Rolfe, and everyone, might properly ask the same question Mouse asked: "If you ain't want him killed, why'd you [call] me?"  In fact, it would be similarly fair to ask why anyone called the police at all.  Rayshard Brooks was sleeping in his car, and others at the Wendy's were simply driving around him.  Brooks wasn't harming anyone.  And police were called why?  Does Mouse know the answer?