When my sister died twenty five years ago at the age of twenty, I was very angry at the relatives that came around to give condolences to my parents. I hadn’t seen many of them in about a decade. They hadn’t been in contact with me or my sister. Anything they knew about us was from letters sent by my parents. None of them knew about the white boyfriend my sister had, or the one before that. None of them knew about the late night drunk call I got from my sister at a party, and how I picked her up and took her home. I didn’t even know, until years later when a teacher gave me her time capsule project, where she thanked me for not saying anything to my parents and how she thought it was great how I was just a big brother who didn’t judge her and helped her out in a time of need. They didn’t know my sister had a mean streak, sometimes smashing doors when she got angry. They definitely didn’t know, since it came up years later in the Glamour magazine article, that she died because she took birth control pills for the first time because she wanted to have sex with her new boyfriend.

The hard lesson I learned from my sister’s memory as given by my relatives is that in death, people will remember the good and brush off the bad. You could call it respect for the dead, maybe people don’t want to upset the living family members but people who are close to the family of the dead will go out of their way to keep the clean, wholesome image of the departed, especially if they died young.

What I always find frustrating about police killing events like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sean Bell, Eric Garner and countless others is that family and friends paint the person in the best possible light. I understand that grief is the reason, but the problem is at some point, the police and reporters will release of get hold of information that will show what could best be described as a complicated picture of the person. With the advent of social media, an innocent picture posted of youthful bravado is interpreted as a ‘gangsta’ stance.

About a year and a half ago, the local news had a story of a toddler found wandering in the street. A few hours later the mother came for the child. It was reported that the mother was a guest of a friend a block or two from where the toddler was found, but no one from the home responded when the police went on a door to door search for the parent. While it would seem the happy reunion would be an end to the story, something struck me as odd. The news station used a Facebook photo of the mother. It was the typical being fake sexy selfie photo in a mirror. The news had conflicting reports about the father. One station said he was in town the other said he lived in Florida or some other state. The news reports also kept mentioning ‘friend’ when talking about the person she was visiting. I don’t know I just thought something was off with the story being told and the Facebook photo they presented.

It took fifteen minutes on Facebook to get the whole story that I’m sure the news channels had, maybe the police also. The distant boyfriend was out of the picture because she got a new man. That is who she was staying with at the house. Just like one of my favorite Dragnet episodes, they were heavy potheads and partied a lot. Later, when the police arrested her on child neglect charges, on the night in question she and her new boyfriend got so high and drunk they passed out, the kid got out of the house and when the police tried contacting them on the initial door to door search, they didn’t answer because of a combination of being to wasted and too paranoid the cops were going to bust them on the drugs. It was two hours after that contact, when they had sobered up more, she noticed her daughter had wandered off.

The press never mentioned the Facebook postings showing a young woman who loved her daughter but who was in a contentious fight with the father of her child over her antics. They never talked about the heated exchange between the two of them through Facebook. I’m not claiming the news groups had to do the investigative work the police did, but the first information the press gave out about the woman was one of a loving mother who somehow had an unusual incident happen to her. The Facebook post would at least suggest some complications to that presentation.

There was a recent article in the New York Times which painted a complicated picture of Michael Brown. He was a teenager. Not a saint nor a devil. In fact, just as his step-mother talked about he was grappling with his new interest in religion, he was, if the accounts are true, was working towards being a more responsible young man. See, in the beginning we weren’t given the complicated man. We were presented with the saint. The gentle giant with a heart of gold. He was that person. If anyone watched the hours of interviews done through networks with family members and friends, you would have seen they had slips every once in a while where they said Michael had troubles. You have to understand that troubles doesn’t automatically make him a thug. It doesn’t make him a hardcore gang banger. That portrayal is from folks on the opposite side who want to justify the shooting by the officer. The police release a video apparently showing Michael stealing some cigars and pushing a clerk. They claim that video has nothing to do with the shooting but like many cases like this, the video was put out to give the impression Michael was up to no good. Just like Trayvon Martin, information is released to say the suspect wasn’t a saint and by implication, if he had been allowed to live his crimes would escalate and he would eventually have to be sent to jail.

You think that’s a far-fetched notion? Go on the news sites and look at the comment pages about any of the recent black men killed by cops’ incidents. If you really want to get sick to your stomach turn to the Fox News comment pages. You will see posts from many supporting the shooting of black men because of the potential of violence ‘they’ pose. The negative reaction on the Fox News site isn’t contained just to racial shootings. The other morning I followed a link to Fox News about the VMA awards, specifically about Beyoncé’s performance. The article talked about if her projection of Feminism on stage matched the hyper-sexual energy of her dance. So, the main subject of the story was Beyoncé’s message of women empowerment obscured by a representation of ultra-sexuality? Here are the first six comments I saw in the comment section of the article:

There were hundreds of posts like those on the site. Yes you might have a few trying to rebuke racist remarks but overwhelmingly the posts attributed everything bad to black people. Of course you can’t help people twisting something into a racial stereotype or projecting their prejudices on others. I know when a tragedy happens to a young person close family and friends are going to overlook problems. I know people on the other side are going to exaggerate any flaws in character. The point missed in all the finger pointing is someone is dead at the hands of a police officer. In most cases they haven’t killed anyone, which might and I mean might cause some justification in the heat of the moment shooting. What can’t be ignored is too many black men are being killed by police because of preconceived notions that logically don’t make sense. Because tensions are high in these situations, with the family more apt to show the good in the dead and the police trying to justify the shooting by alluding to criminal behavior, we get an impression of every black man as a suspect.