To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
December 31, 2020
Re: One of a continuing stream of racist murders
by Mark Williams, Detroit Workers' Voice
Around 8:25 pm Saturday night October 3, in Wolfe City, Texas, 70 miles north of Dallas, Jonathan Price was shot to death by Wolfe City police officer Shaun Lucas. The incident took place at the Exxon Gas/Kwik Chek convenience store facility. Price was a 31-year- old black man, a city employee, and fitness trainer, widely respected in the town, while the police officer was a 22-year old white man with a bad reputation among black people, gained in his mere six months of duty.
Price was shot by Lucas because Lucas behaved as a racist, not because of anything Price did. Price had merely succeeded in stopping an argument that had been taking place between a man and a woman at the site. When Lucas arrived at the convenience store area after receiving a phone call about a disturbance taking place there, he immediately took for granted that Price must be the guilty party. He ignored any contrary evidence. Price naively believed Lucas had arrived to help sort things out and greeted him, offering a handshake and asking "You doing good?" (1) Lucas then pretended that Price was intoxicated, a tactic Lucas often used to detain black people. (2) When Price resisted, Lucas started tasing him. When Price began to resist the taser, he was shot four times. All this is on Lucas’ body-camera, which was made use of as part of the investigation by the Texas Rangers.
Confronted with this overwhelming evidence from the camera worn by officer Lucas, the Texas Rangers -- in a rare gesture -- recommended charges for an officer who had killed someone while on duty. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which includes the Texas Rangers, concluded Lucas’s actions were "not justifiable force" and that Price had merely "resisted in a nonthreatening posture" before the officer opened up with his taser and gun. In early October 2020, Lucas was being held at the Collin County Jail on a $1 million murder charge.
No doubt the right-wing groups and media usually use many means to justify what the police did in such a case. They often paint the victim of police murder as a bad person, a criminal, and thus, whatever the police do, legal or not, they supposedly deserve credit for getting rid of evildoers. Indeed, police think of themselves as ridding the world of evil. (3) But Jonathan Price was not anti-police by any means. In a June Facebook post where Price weighed in on the anti-racist movement nationally, he apologized for police behavior while not denying the existence of racism. He said he had good experiences when he was justifiably pulled over by cops and with white friends generally. "Not saying black lives don't matter, but don't forget about your own, or your experiences," he wrote. However, it must be said that whatever value there is in undermining the idea that the victim was anti-police, there is the far greater tragedy of Price’s belief in the forces that would do him in.
It must also have been irritating to die-hard Trumpists who support racist police that Price was openly committed to an integrated society with whites and other peoples. In his June Facebook post he called Jason Malone’s family, a white family, his "2nd family". Jason Malone was with Price the night he was killed.
Moreover, the right-wingers can't deal with the fact that Price was not some down-and-out guy, involved with drugs in some way, or anything like that. No, he was a pillar of the community type, loved by one and all, black, white, and Hispanic. He attended college at Sam Houston State, and then was a college football player at Hardin-Simmons. Price became an athletic trainer and a motivational speaker in addition to his employment by the city. His family lived there for generations. He was not perfect. Evidently he had more than one auto ticket, and too much to drink after hitting a bar on occasion, for which the police let him go. For Wolfe City he was "a hometown hero", loved by most everyone. Wolfe City is 77% white, 16% black, 5.3% Hispanic, but it seemed like the whole town turned out for the vigil following Price’s death.
How have the authorities behaved? Police chiefs, past and present, seem unable to explain why they hire someone like Lucas. At a public meeting after Price’s death, residents demanded more experienced police, not a 22-year-old racist who didn’t know what he was doing. But experienced cops too have committed racist murders, and they knew what they were doing. The experienced police chief didn’t care if Lucas was harassing black citizens. The records were right there before him. He would have seen Lucas was racist and mean if he cared about that. Was there really much surprise about where, one day, that might lead?
The murder of Jonathan Price is but a small part of the disgraceful treatment of black people by the police state. Biden will soon replace Trump as President, and the new administration will take over, allegedly with a more anti-racist orientation. But no one should be fooled. The fight against the system of of racial injustice and police brutality must be continued. It must be stepped up! The Democratic President will preside, but Trumpism will continue as a trend thirsty for power. That’s how capitalism survives for now.
(1) "Texas police officer antagonized people in small town prior to shooting, residents say," Arelis R. Hernández, Mark Berman, Mary Beth Gahan, October 10, 2020.
(2) Ibid. "Residents say the 22–year-old officer had been overly aggressive with his traffic enforcement and berated longtime Black locals. At least one former resident who had moved out of town resisted visiting her parents within city limits, just to avoid Lucas. Black men told The Post about antagonistic interactions with the officer after being mistakenly arrested for public intoxication. Residents, both White and Black, shared a Facebook post in August warning of 'another mean police officer' stopping 'everything that moves at night.'"
"James Alton Brown said he was puzzled one August day when Lucas trailed behind him in a Chevy Suburban for a quarter mile as the 65-year-old walked home. Brown’s gait was slow and labored because of a severe limp. Lucas arrested him for public intoxication, records show. ...
"The public intoxication charge was later dropped, according to bail bond records, but he still faces resisting charges and hundreds of dollars in court fees."
(3) Radley Balko writes about how "Reagan's drug warriors . . . cast the drug fight as a biblical struggle between good and evil, and in the process turn[ed] the country’s drug cops into holy soldiers.” ("Rise of the Warrior Cop", 2013, p. 139)
Who is Balko? He is by no means an enemy of the police but merely
seeks some reforms. When he wrote his book, he was a writer and
investigative reporter with the Washington Post. He happens to be an
atheist with libertarian political leanings, judging by the fact that
he has worked as a political analyst for the conservative/libertarian
Cato Institute and was a senior writer for the backward/libertarian
Reason magazine. But he expresses his own views, and in 2011 the Los
Angeles Press Club named him Journalist of the Year. <>
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