This Monday, North Little Rock High School hosted a day of service for the local community. Dubbed Mega King Fest 2018, it featured acts of service such as barbers from the Little Rock metropolitan area giving free hair cuts to those in need. The media reported it. The crowds and energy were effusive. Even Officer Norman was there! It was a day of black folk honoring the legacy of our most hallowed saint. If this nation was not yet living his dream, we would still continue his work of uplifting our fellow brothers and sisters.
Much of the media coverage of the event, however, treated the shooting death of Charles Smith Jr. as a footnote.
He was a senior. On the early morning of January 8th, he was the rear passenger of a car with a broken headlight that was allegedly speeding down Camp Robinson Road. Police pulled the car over. They began searching the car and the occupants; Smith had a bag of weed in his possession. He began to struggle against police. Eventually, he pulls the handgun; he cocks it and bucks off a random shot that nearly hits his friends. “I can’t go to jail!” he yells. The police are on top of him now. Smith managed to cock the gun and lets off another shot that nearly hits one of the cops. Seconds later, the police fired back and ended Smith’s life.
The police and the media have sketched the genesis of a criminal days after Smith’s death. According to the Arkansas Democratic-Gazette, he was a menace across eight counties, a black Jesse James robbing and rampaging fast food restaurants across December 2016. Smith was finally arrested in January 2017 and charged as an adult; Judge Marcia Hearnsberger deigned to try him as a juvenile offender and ordered a curfew before he was released from jail sometime in June. Smith was violating that curfew when he was pulled over on the evening of January 8th. All of this data is gleaned from both police reports and dashcam video, which North Little Rock Police Department Chief Mike Davis released to allow “our young people to feel comfortable as well and not be fearful.”
Crime teases the limits of human mercy. The local community has been quiet since the police released the dashcam video of Smith’s death. Local social media would make a post of condemnation toward the boy’s behavior before moving on. This silence disturbed me. How we treat the vagabond reflects on a nation’s ideas of punishment and mercy. Punishment and mercy—these two traits are not merely philosophical concepts. They raise questions of power and what a government does with said power. These concepts raise political questions. Black personhood has disproportionately received punishment as an answer to crime.
These are the things I believe shaped Charles Smith Jr., a scared 17-year old boy who made terrible mistakes;
First, all inquires concerning crime and mercy in American must go back to segregation. North Little Rock, as all metropolitan areas in the United States, is segregated by race; because minorities tend to be poorer due to structural reasons, this also results in segregation by wealth as well. He was pulled over in a deeply segregated part of town and went to a school that was both majority black and majority poor as measured by its free and reduced lunch numbers.
Segregation, secondly, creates a play pen for the state. Many of the practices police use against people of color—stop and frisk, creating informants, stops for broken headlights, curfews—are policing tools with no proven track record of reducing crime. Rather, they serve to funnel black youth into a criminal justice system with no exit. Chris Hayes argues in A Colony in a Nation that such practices could not be exported into white communities without major political consequence; the response to the opioid crisis shows his thesis being proven in real time. Smith was trapped in a world designed to primarily punish him for his mistakes and then to make sure he had no chance of redemption.
And redemption, always desired due to black personhood’s historical shaping by the church, is denied to us by consistent political machinations. Smith was going to trial as an adult, despite being 16 when he allegedly committed his crimes. Trying juveniles as adults does not work in rehabilitating youth. Black youth, furthermore, are typically tried as adults with much higher rates than whites who enter the criminal justice system. Being tried as an adult means entering an ecosystem with higher rates of sexual assault and recidivism. Even if Smith was tried as a juvenile, he would find a state that offers little in the way of rehabilitation;Arkansas’ juvenile detention is run by a syndicate of non-profits with little accountability and results.
All of these factors went into the shaping of Smith’s personhood. I am not trying to excuse what he did. His actions led to his death. His family and loved ones now must twist their lives around the loss of his. What will probably haunt his family the most, however, was what were among his last words: “I can’t go back to jail.” I cannot shake that Smith knew something that we did not know about his months being a child in an adult system.
When Chief Davis released his video so that all “can be comfortable as well,” I doubt he was referring to Smith’s last words. He wanted the world to know his police did what was necessary to defend themselves and the public. The local community, in acquiescence, gave him the silence he needed.
Silence is always a political act. In conserving the ammunition they need for more clear-cut political fights, the local black community moved on. But Smith remains dead. He came out of a segregated community, a segregated school, a segregated criminal justice system—and was terrified to return to the latter, to the point where he felt his last resort was to use a deadly weapon against the state. To understand how his personhood led him to such extreme actions would both indict the state and hold him accountable for such poor choices. Smith should have come out healed—or at the very least, into a system that promotes such healing. That he did not should not lead to silence or a seeking of comfort, but of consistent questioning as to where we failed a child on the cusp of manhood.
