You’ve just turned 17. You’re at your dad’s fiancée’s house, watching a basketball game. There’s a break, so you take a walk out to the local convenience store to buy some Skittles and a can of iced tea. On your way back, you notice a stranger in a car is watching you. You walk away from him, but he follows you. Then he gets out of the car and grabs you. He’s twice your size. You scream for help as you try to fight him off. Then he pulls out a gun and shoots you in the chest. Your life is over.
When the police come, he tells them he felt threatened by you and acted in self-defense. They believe him. Your body is the one taken away and tested for drugs and alcohol. Your blood is all over the man who shot you. He is excused and sent home.
This sounds like something you’d see in one of those bad teenage horror movies. But it happened in a gated community in a suburb of Orlando, Florida, only about three weeks ago. The 17-year-old was Trayvon Martin. He was not armed. His only crime was his skin color. He was black, walking around in an area where almost no African-Americans live.
The shooter, George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, said that Martin looked suspicious: the young man was wearing a jacket with a hood on it and walking in the rain, looking at the houses.
Zimmerman called the police, as he had done 46 times in the past year, to report this suspicious activity. “These assholes always get away,” Zimmerman complained.
“Are you following him?” asked the dispatcher.
“Yeah,” Zimmerman said.
“We don’t need you to do that,” the dispatcher told him.
That Zimmerman was carrying a loaded semiautomatic pistol is not at issue here; he has a license for it. His use of the pistol, though perhaps shocking, is also not at issue; it was clear from all the calls to the police that the guy was more than a little paranoid.
What is at issue is the realization that, 150 years after the end of slavery, 50 years after the end of segregation and three years after the election of a (half-)black president, America still appears to have separate systems of justice for blacks and whites.
Since the 1970s, black comedians have joked about police pulling them over for “driving while black” — in the expectation that they must have stolen the car, must be carrying drugs, or must be about to do some nefarious deed.
There’s a similar cliché about nervous white Southerners who sit on their porches and fire their shotguns at trespassers.
The local police department claims it can’t arrest Zimmerman. A law adopted in Florida, and later a number of other states, allows anyone on his or her own property to literally shoot first and ask questions later — even if the person feeling threatened has the option of running away, he doesn’t have to. This is called a “stand your ground law” or “castle law”, because when it comes to defense, “my home is my castle”.
Zimmerman wasn’t in his home, however, and because he pursued Martin, this wasn’t a matter of self-defense. The Sanford, Florida, police department clearly mishandled it.
For once, the national media is not letting go of the story. The FBI and the Justice Department have started investigations, and more than 700,000 people have signed an online petition demanding the arrest of George Zimmerman.
For now, though, he’s still on the loose.
