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2 of 3 Premium Clicks used this month SUBSCRIBE Print + Online Subscriber Activation | Register x Forgot Password | Need an Account? subscribe | newsletter | deals Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » NEWS NOW More lightning, high winds possible ... Scientist: We need to learn to live with wildfires ... Weather or Not: June in Redding — er, I mean Ashland ... More lightning, high winds possible ... Scientist: We need to learn to live with wildfires ... Weather or Not: June in Redding — er, I mean Ashland ... COMMENTARY Jeffrey Gillespie: Bad cops vs. smartphones Comment DailyTidings.com Writer Posted Apr. 24, 2015 at 12:01 AM Posted Apr. 24, 2015 at 12:01 AM » Social News On April 4, Walter Scott, a black man, was shot to death by Michael Slager, a white police officer, in South Carolina. Scott was shot in the back five times, apparently because Slager "felt threatened" (and despite the fact that Scott was approximately 20 feet away at the time, and running away from the officer). The entire event was caught on videophone by an eyewitness. There have been multiple similar captures of police violence in the past year or so, including the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, the killing of Eric Garner in New York, and just this week, the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who had his neck severed and died while in police custody in Baltimore. And there are more videos to be seen: a California Highway Patrol officer beating a homeless woman on a the side of a Los Angeles highway; an Ohio patrolman who shot a 12-year-old boy to death on a playground in Cleveland. All of the victims were black; all of the cops, white. In this writers opinion, the single greatest benefit resulting from the rise of the smartphone is the ability that ordinary people now have to take on problem behavior and brutality in a profession that has historically done far more to provoke and intimidate people of color than to protect and serve them. But is there a link between the racial bias seen behind the thin blue line, and the approach to gun ownership and constitutional entitlement in front of it? In a recent study by Harvard, Duke, and Columbia Universities, it was found that 9 percent of American gun owners have a history of impulsive and belligerent behavior. If we consider that there are around 300 million guns in private hands in America, we can approximate just how many of those weapons might be in the hands of troubled people. Needless to say, the more guns any one individual owns, the more likely they are to carry them around. In fact, people with six or more firearms were 400 percent more likely to carry a weapon at all times. Perhaps these findings, once they are processed and digested by law enforcement, become yet another statistic unfairly skewed towards the inner city? Interestingly, black people in the United States are exactly four times more likely to die in custody, or while in the process of being arrested, than are whites. So while police may be aware of the statistics, when it comes time for things to go badly during an altercation, an officer's trigger finger is reliably at its twitchiest when confronting a person of color. On top of that, blacks face an infant mortality rate that is higher than it was in 1950, have an average household net worth that is about 6 percent of the median for whites, and represent nearly half of all incarcerated persons in the United States. The most vicious of all possible vicious circles, then, and all indications are that things will only get worse. As more and more people in this country are forced to make do with less, it's clear that those who will continue to take the most weight on their backs are the very ones who are feared most by the men and women who enforce the law. While the odds continue to be stacked heavily against those citizens unlucky enough to be categorized as "urban" or "poor" or "high-risk" or whatever other euphemism might daily be plucked from the menu of prejudice to the benefit of its enforcers, there is a light that shines in the darkness. That light gives the once-silent witnesses to such perennial atrocities a potent weapon of their own — a supercomputer in the palm of their hand. Jeffrey Gillespie's writing has appeared in the Santa Fean and Art Collector magazines, the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week. He lives in Ashland. 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