At one point, Christopher Pate, handcuffed behind his back, blood dripping from his face, the electrocution wires spiraling loosely from his body, leans his head against the cage in the back of the police car and says he’s sorry and that he hates his life.
He sounds like he’s crying.
He got that way by jaywalking, and by looking like somebody else, and by stiffening and pulling away when officers tried to detain him.
Ultimately, the charges would be dropped, an activist would hold a press conference, a police officer would be convicted, and some body-cam footage would be released.
And a mayor would stand up, seemingly on the verge of tears, talking about the segregated south where her grandparents were raised.
And it all would play out against the backdrop of taunting police officers, mocking Christopher Pate with his shattered face, chiding him, and talking about the paperwork they would have to do.
It’s an ugly place to be, but it’s where we are.
The assumption is that it’s racism, that this is how it goes with black men and white cops. That is the conclusion some will draw, though it is not one proven by this circumstance. You can’t from this one incident conclude that this is how black men are treated.
But you can know that Christopher Pate was mistreated.
As he stands there handcuffed, as he sits in the back of the police car, as they watch him at the hospital. He is mistreated. By that point, not physically, but certainly emotionally and psychologically. He is a beaten and compliant man, in physical and emotional pain, unable and unwilling to resist, and they mock him.
Like Jesus upon the cross.
The centurions of a modern day.
But Christopher Pate is not innocent and these cops are not evil, but all of them together are damaged by the realities of their worlds. Christopher Pate should have been cooperative and kind; the cops should have been measured and compassionate. But each dehumanized the other, responding not to individuals in reality, but boogie men in the mind. Christopher Pate judged them by their uniforms and they judged him, if not by his skin color, then by his circumstance.
His life made him his way, and their lives made them their way. Stereotypes collided and men got caught in the middle, and lives were damaged.
And somehow men sworn to service and duty, raised in homes of love and nurture and dignity, were cold and hard, mean and hurtful in the face of another man’s humiliation and suffering.
Without regard to who he was or one day will be, in that moment Christopher Pate was broken, and the response of the officers around him shows that they were, too. For only a broken person could be so insensitive to the circumstance of another. Only a broken person would be, in that moment, so bereft of the milk of human kindness.
And it makes you wonder how, in that moment, they got to be that way.
It is natural and easy to see how the history of black men and the law shaped Christopher Pate’s actions in this matter. But it is also likely that the accumulated duties of these officers, the months and years of emotional traumas, shaped their actions. It’s like the soldier on a foreign battlefield posing beside a fallen enemy. It is a heartless act which is normalized by the abnormality and trauma of the duties imposed on those who serve.
Years of conflict, the tears witnessed and wiped away, the regular danger and loss of life, the daily exposure to the worst circumstances in people’s lives and the greatest losses of people’s hearts. You send officers into that day after day and you’ve got to know it’s going to affect them. At a certain level, it’s going to break them.
It’s like PTSD only it’s not post anything, because the traumatic stress never goes completely away.
Life has made that true for all the men in this incident. It worked upon the mind and behavior of Christopher Pate, and it worked upon the mind and behavior of the officers that day.
This isn’t to make excuses, but to offer an explanation.
For how a man could walk away from cops who just wanted to look at his ID, and for how men could mock and scorn as another was broken and weeping.