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Column: On this death, bipartisan outrage

 
Published Dec. 5, 2014

It's a common condolence for politicians to urge angry communities to "have their voices heard" in response to signs of systemic injustice. President Barack Obama has used the phrase since Ferguson. So has outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, and even St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch, the night he announced that a grand jury would not indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown.

The idea, of course, is that a voice is a potent tool for creating change, particularly for people who possess little other power. But the more accurate reality is that change starts to feel imminent not when the likely voices grow louder, but when the unlikely ones start to speak up.

This is why it's a big deal — if an awkward commentary on whose words matter most — that conservatives seem appalled, too, by Wednesday's news that a New York Police Department officer won't be indicted in the death of Eric Garner.

The politics around Eric Garner's death have been different from those around Michael Brown's.

In the New York case, caught on tape, there are fewer details to dispute, leaving bare some painful points of consensus: An unarmed black man died after an NYPD officer apparently wrapped an arm around his neck, deploying a tactic banned by his department. The man's alleged crime was selling illegal cigarettes. He repeatedly cried that he couldn't breathe as he was dying.

That this story has drawn bipartisan condemnation is what makes it feel like a tipping point. The fact that Michael Steele has been more blunt than Barack Obama thus far makes it seem as if liberals and conservatives are finally watching the same event, staring down the same problem, not opposing versions of it.

This isn't to say that the voices of protesters aren't meaningful, too. But protest is largely the expression of people who knew that police bias and excessive force were problems before Michael Brown and Eric Garner died. When partisans who haven't said much about these issues before start to speak up, too, that's a sign that a larger swathe of America may be waking up to that reality, too.

Emily Badger is a reporter for Wonkblog covering urban policy. She was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic Cities.

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