News and views: Sports and race

News: this week, a couple of news items hit the virtual news stand at the intersection of sports and race:

• The Milwaukee police department is under fire this week, after the department released body camera footage of an incident from last January, in which a group of white officers tackled and tased Sterling Brown, a rookie on the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team.  Brown apparently had driven to a local Walgreen's late at night and parked his vehicle across two handicap parking spots.  This CBS News report provides some of the body cam footage (both video and sound) and also provides some additional background: this is not the department's first racially charged incident in recent years.  And, in a development that would surprise nobody from Chicago, it seems that the video contradicts the official police reports filed by the officers involved in the incident.
• The NFL has announced a new policy regarding the fraught issue of players kneeling during the national anthem before games.  As described in this Associated Press article, "the NFL announced Wednesday that players can stay in the locker room during "The Star-Spangled Banner" but must stand if they venture onto the field.  Not doing so will result in a fine against the team."  The article also reports that Donald Trump was happy to pour some gasoline on the fire: he "suggested Thursday in a Fox interview that 'maybe you shouldn't be in the country' if you don't stand for the anthem."

Views: I am not one who worships professional athletes.  Truth to tell, as a group I don't find them particularly appealing.  They are one percenters, not only in terms of their income but also in terms of the advantages and adulation that have been showered upon many of them, in some cases since they were in elementary school.  That a healthy elite athlete like Brown would manage to occupy, not just one but two(!) handicap spaces for a Walgreen's run, encapsulates the impression I have of entitlement and arrogance.  That's the kind of behavior that just might rile a cop on the beat who makes less than $50K/year.

Then there is the way the police handled the incident.  My understanding is that a single patrol officer approached (confronted?) Brown about the parking issue.  It seems the officer radioed for back-up, assuming they'd send a single patrol car; instead  the dispatcher caused the parking lot to be flooded with overwhelming force.  It's not clear to me whether that first officer, or any of them, knew who Brown was; and of course from an enforcing-the-law perspective it shouldn't matter whether or not the subject is an NBA athlete (on the other hand, from the point of view of generating unfavorable publicity and getting sued by a person who can afford a first-rate lawyer, it's an important item of information).  Police officers must deal with big, strong men, including some who practice intimidation, assault, extortion and other forms of mayhem, as part of their job.

But none of that excuses what happened.  I found the body cam video difficult to watch.  Here is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's description of what unfolded:

After Grams called for assistance, half a dozen squad cars showed up at the Walgreens. Grams tells several officers that there was a mistake, that he only wanted one backup. But eight officers appeared to stay at the scene anyway. 

At that point, the tension increased, with police standing in a circle around Brown, who was not aggressive. The police used profane language before yelling at him to take his hands out of his pockets immediately. 

Brown, who had taken his hands in and out of his pockets several times before that, replied: "Hold on. I've got stuff in my hands."  

Police swarmed him, shouting "Taser! Taser! Taser!" Brown yelled in pain as he was shocked.

Police officers in the field are called upon to make snap judgments, but we want their judgments to be better than "big black person - must tase".  And they should file accurate reports after the incident.

The release of that body cam footage couldn't have been timed worse for the NFL.  Recall that the initial point of kneeling during the anthem, which Colin Kaepernick, then of the San Francisco 49ers, began in 2016, was to protest the mistreatment of African Americans by police, of which the Sterling Brown incident is a pretty clear example.

It seems that the protests are unpopular with a large segment of the league's fan base, and the NFL's leadership has floundering for the last two years trying to devise a response to the protests.  And President Trump, who is not always the sharpest knife in the drawer but who does possess a certain rat-smart political instinct, has been stirring the pot for the last few months, keeping his base (who apparently also are big football fans) at a high boil over the alleged disrespect to flag and country.

The AP story to which I linked above indicates that players will now be searching for alternative ways of protesting.  Good for them.  Friends here from our dotCommonweal days may recall that I don't wholly embrace the kneeling protests.  I don't find a strong correlation between the issue at hand (police brutality) and the way the protest is expressed (which to me looks and feels like repudiating the United States and all it stands for, whether or not that is the protesters' intention).  But whatever my misgivings, I applaud Kaepernick, Aaron Rodgers and other high-profile players for calling attention to the issue and standing (kneeling) in solidarity with those who are victims of police abuse; notwithstanding the Sterling Brown incident, nearly all of those victims are pretty low-profile people who don't have a media platform for raising awareness.

One last thought: Colin Kaepernick really has paid a lot for his protest.  After the 2016 season, he opted out of his contract with the 49ers, which made him a free agent.  But no team has picked up Kaepernick since then, and he hasn't been earning an NFL salary. 

It's more than an eyebrow-raiser.  If you are an NFL fan at all, you know that the demand from NFL teams for competent quarterbacks always exceeds the supply.  There aren't many quarterbacks who can play effectively at an NFL level, and there are injuries every year to starting quarterbacks that make teams with playoff aspirations desperate for fill-ins.

While it's true that Kaepernick's final season with a declining 49ers team wasn't especially good, he's shown that he is an above-average quarterback.  He led his team to a Super Bowl appearance in 2012.  He has a strong throwing arm and is among the best running and scrambling quarterbacks in the league.  NFL sportswriters and other keener-than-average observers of the game find it very difficult to explain how it can be that no other team has taken a chance on him, especially when some teams seem to have reached a lot farther to give lesser quarterbacks a chance.  When the Miami Dolphins' starting quarterback went down last year, the team brought Jay Cutler out of retirement - and he was pretty awful.  And Kaepernick was available.

Each team also has a back-up quarterback; if anything, the paucity of NFL-worthy talent among back-ups is even more acute.  Isn't there a team somewhere that would give Kaepernick a backup position?  The Philadelphia Eagles, the current Super Bowl champs, illustrate perfectly the importance of having a backup quarterback who can play: their superb starting quarterback, Carson Wentz, sustained a season-ending injury before the playoffs last year.  For many teams, that would spell the end of their Super Bowl hopes.  But the Eagles' back-up quarterback, Nick Foles, turned out to be more than satisfactory as a replacement.  In the wake of Foles' Super Bowl victory, fans of two dozen or more other NFL teams looked at their own team's rosters and asked, "How come our team can't find a starter that good, much less a back-up?"  And meanwhile, Kaepernick is available.  Teams release back up quarterbacks in favor of better back up quarterbacks pretty frequently.  I would bet that Kaepernick would be in the top 20% among NFL back-ups.

The two available theories about Kaepernick's inability to find work are:

1. There is a conspiracy among the teams and NFL leadership to blackball Kaepernick for launching the protests.  Given the lack of opportunities for him, it's difficult to completely discount the conspiracy theory.  But to the best of my knowledge, no actual evidence for a conspiracy has yet emerged.

2. Each team, on its own, has concluded that Kaepernick brings more trouble and baggage than he's worth.  Throughout this era of the kneeling protests, coaches, team officials and some players have expressed concern that the protests have the potential to bring division and conflict into the locker room; it's not incredible that no coach or GM would wish to bring that potential for divisiveness onto the team.  But see my comments above about the scarcity of competent quarterbacks in the NFL.  Teams have certainly been known to take fliers on quarterbacks who are troublemakers with strong arms.

Kaepernick had made it known, last year, that he'll stand during the national anthem.  It's pretty clear that he wants to play.  Now, with this new NFL policy, it may be that players will devise protest methods that don't alienate their fan base while continuing to draw attention to problems of police brutality.  And maybe the NFL will let Colin Kaepernick work again.