A sixteen-year-old boy died at the hands of three men after they restrained him on December 14, 2012. The men were customers at a convenience store in West Allis, Wisconsin. The men claim that the boy was trying to steal "alcohol items" from the store. Apparently the boy put the disputed items on the store's counter before trying to leave. The men restrained the boy outside the store as he tried to leave. When police responded the men were restraining the boy outside the store and the boy was no longer breathing. The boy was revived but later died, having suffered "major brain damage." The boy was an African American student at Nathan Hale High School. The men who restrained him are white. http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/student-died-after-being-restrained-in-alleged-shoplifting-bn8830n-185606331.html
Where to begin?
I was sixteen once and I possessed the recklessness characteristic of boys that age. I lacked foresight to the same degree that most of my companions did. I broke the law as did my friends and acquaintances. I do not recall if I shoplifted when I was sixteen, though I do not believe I did. This was an offense I committed, though infrequently and at an earlier age. I did purchase and consume alcohol when I was sixteen, as did many of my friends and acquaintances. I also did some stupid things after dark, such as toilet papering my high school, that no doubt technically violated more than one law when I was sixteen. The thought that I might end up dead because of any of this minor-league delinquent behavior never entered my head. I cannot believe the thought entered the mind of Corey Stingley when he walked into a convenience store on December 14, 2012 either.
Why would I never have thought that I might end up dead when doing petty, stupid things? Principally because the things I was doing were petty and stupid. Any common notion of justice requires that justice be proportional to be just. Shoplifting some booze from a store, if that in fact is what Corey Stingley was doing, is a petty offense. For any response to be just, it would have to be commensurate with the offense. Most sixteen-year-old kids caught trying to shoplift booze would probably not even face criminal charges and if they did, most judges would recognize the fact that the decision was an instance of poor judgment and would offer a deferred prosecution agreement or some other such alternative that would convey the message that what the kid did was wrong but was not a capital offense. At some level, who would have cared if the kid got away? The store had a camera, the kid attended school nearby, and at least four persons would have been available to identify him for the police. This case would not have presented a challenge for the police to investigate. I have a difficult time conceiving that three adult males would not grasp that their response in restraining Corey Stingley was grossly disproportional to the offense he allegedly committed unless they acted with evil intent. Nevertheless, the men chose to restrain Corey Stingler.
Perhaps something else is at play here, though. As a culture, we have become inundated with messages that question the benevolence and legitimacy of the government and advocate a sort of state-sanctioned vigilantism in its place. This anti-government rhetoric has led to radical changes in self-defense laws along with expanded rights to own and carry firearms. The change in self-defense laws that are variously called "stand your ground" or "the castle doctrine" explicitly give individuals the power to use deadly force in instances that previously were reserved for the state through the police or other law enforcement agencies. In this regard, such laws act as state sanctioned vigilantism because they give the individual the power to use deadly force whether its use is in fact proportional to the threat that the individual faces.
More perniciously, the expansion of self-defense rights to allow disproportional use of force when responding to a threat along with the push to allow every person to carry a concealed weapon creates an atmosphere or belief that carrying a concealed weapon and using disproportional force when responding to a threat are necessary. If we disentangle the potential racist elements from the Corey Stingley tragedy (which I will discuss below), one wonders if the rhetoric that has led to state-sanctioned vigilantism and the belief that vigilantism is necessary played a role in Corey Stingley's death. I am at a loss to otherwise explain how three men could consider physically restraining a boy who may have attempted to shoplift to the point where he stopped breathing could fall anywhere within the realm of reasonableness or propriety.
If my explanation is correct, it represents social regression, a step toward barbarism and away from being a civil society. The reason we allow the state to administer justice is that the state is expected to do so impartially and by providing due process to the accused. In addition, the state is required, at a minimum, to administer sentences that are proportional enough to the offense for with a person is convicted so they do not run afoul of the Eighth Amendment proscription against cruel and unusual punishment. Whether the state administers justice fairly may be debated, but the state is certainly always preferable to three men at a convenience store as the administrator and arbiter of justice.
As a society, we ought to ask ourselves why we consider the message that we need more guns and less restraint on the civilian use of deadly force to be a good thing? The more civilized a society becomes ought to be inversely proportional to the need for expanded private rights to use self-defense. The message one would think a civilized society should send is that we have courts and other mechanisms for resolving disputes, that we have police forces for investigating and responding to crime, that we do not need vigilantes to administer our laws effectively. Corey Stingley would have benefited from a society whose members believed these simple precepts and would probably be alive today if those three men at the convenience store did.
I have not addressed the possible impact racism played in the Stingley tragedy. Nothing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article I read mentions race as a motive, but in this particular place in this particular time it is hard to believe race did not play some role in the behavior of the three men who restrained Corey Stingley. Assuming for the moment that the men were not overtly racist and actually attempted to injury Corey Stingley because of his race, racism nonetheless could have played an enormous role in what happened. The biggest effect of racism that I observe is depersonalization of the other. What I mean by this is the multifaceted response to difference that leads to assumptions based on fear and prejudice rather than on actual experience. In colloquial terms, it is the response that leads a white person to think four black kids walking down the street are a gang while four white kids walking down the street are just four kids walking down the street. The assumption one way or the other has no bearing in fact or experience.
I am quite certain that just as many white kids commit petty crimes to obtain beer and liquor as black kids, but most white people have built in prejudices about the rate at which black males commit crimes and the propensity of black males toward violence so that when they encounter a black kid doing what a white kid would be equally likely to do they overreact. Witness Trayvon Martin and the nefarious act of wearing a hooded sweatshirt. The hyper-segregation of the Milwaukee metropolitan area only serves to heighten prejudice. Most white persons in the Milwaukee area can avoid having any meaningful social contact with black persons almost without thought.
Without meaningful social contact, most white persons in the Milwaukee area will never question their prejudices and assumptions about African Americans. When persons do not question prejudices and assumptions about a category of persons, the individual persons falling within that category i.e. individual African Americans, lose their humanity and are judged as a category rather than as an individual. As such, it is easy for a white person to treat an individual African American like Corey Stingley as representative of a population that steals, cheats, uses drugs, milks the system, etc. (an assumption that is neither valid for the category nor the individual, but is nonetheless an assumption many white persons have). When Corey Stingley functions as a representative of this category rather than as Corey Stingley the sixteen year old junior at Nathan Hale High School who plays football and runs track and has a family and likes music and girls and all the other normal things every sixteen year old likes, it is concomitantly easier for the men who restrained him to act more like they were restraining an animal than a boy (even if the prejudice operates a subconscious level).
Do I know for a fact that this occurred? Of course not. It may be that the men involved were just idiots. It may also be that they were outright racists and actually wanted to hurt Corey Stingley. I do, however, believe it is tragic that we live in a city in which so many persons of different ethnicity, race, religion, socio-economic status, etc. isolate themselves from one another. While there is comfort in familiarity, there is adventure, growth, and opportunity in the new. There is also the potential for understanding. We have an ethical obligation to treat each person as a person, not as a category or as a representative of a category. Perhaps if we can all make an effort to know and understand at least one person who does not look like us or talk like us, we can begin to connect our community and break down the prejudices that pit us against each other. Perhaps if the three men at the convenience store had done so, they would have looked at Corey Stingler as just another teenage boy who made a dumb decision and he would be with us today.
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