"Black Lives Matter" Banner Outside Northampton City Hall

Seeking to be very brief, for those unfamiliar with events in my city of residence, the city of Northampton, Massachusetts decided that this year, in honor of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it would install a small banner with the slogan "Black Lives Matter" above the entrance to Northampton City Hall.  For my part, I found nothing particularly controversial about its decision to do so.  While I have not actively taken part in any local Black Lives Matter mobilizations to protest police brutality against African-American populations, I sympathize with the aims of the movement.  In broader terms, government entities at the federal, state, and local levels need to engage in a thorough and evolving criticism of current organizational forms and operations in law enforcement and criminal justice/prisons in regard to the particular ways in which these processes both possess an implicit racial dynamic and contribute to our present understandings of race in the U.S.  That is to say, the current problems with police brutality against African-American communities are not going to be resolved by a handful of indictments and/or firings of blatantly racist officers, or the wholesale shuffling of particular police departments to mirror the racial distribution of host communities.  Rather, law enforcement and criminal justice need a more fundamental reconsideration concerning, in particular, the role of violence in policing practices.
           Having said this, it is indisputable that the Black Lives Matter movement is significantly invested in such a criticism of law enforcement and criminal justice in the U.S.  Placing a banner outside the Northampton City Hall absolutely advances a political statement with regard to the practices of law enforcement officers across the U.S., including the Northampton Police Department.  Again, this is not a question of which departments are guilty of explicit racial discrimination in police practices, but how all police operations and organizational (e.g. hiring) practices may be inscribed with particular racialist ideas that effectively contribute to the subordination of African-Americans.  In this manner, putting up a banner effectively suggests the need for a broader conversation about how law enforcement and criminal justice must evolve in order to support the full enfranchisement of African-Americans as coequal citizens and full-fledged human beings entitled to basic human rights.  The fact that such a movement has arisen in the U.S. is symbolic of the fact that the proposition that Black Lives Matter is, in fact, open for debate - a plethora of police incidents, punctuated by numerous deaths of unarmed African-American assailants in police custody, constitute practical arguments to the contrary in the course of such a debate.  As such, it is entirely true that, by installing a banner outside City Hall, the government of Northampton has palpably intervened in a debate of the value of African-American lives relative to the actions of law enforcement.
          On the other hand, to the extent that we recognize the installation to be a contested political statement, we further need to take a minute to ponder the alternative.  That is to say, supporters of the law enforcement community may be right to say that the placement of the banner in some way constitutes a criticism against police, but the only other alternative that I can contemplate is to explicitly argue that police violence against African-Americans, including lethal violence against unarmed individuals, is justifiable if only because Black Lives Don't Matter.  If no one really wants to make this argument, then the notion that law enforcement practices do not need to be thoroughly examined and reformed in ways that both recognize the practical reality of race and make explicit provisions to redress recurring grievances within African-American communities amounts to the suggestion that it is acceptable to question the humanity of African-Americans.  In this respect, I have no doubt that the Black Lives Matter banner is troubling to certain individuals in the Northampton community because of what it certainly implies with regard to law enforcement, but, in the absence of coming to some common recognition that Black Lives do indeed Matter and that we need to take proper actions in the reform of law enforcement and criminal justice to reflect such a reality, the actions of the city government certainly have merit as an incitement to engage in a discussion of what is to be done.