Keller @ Large: What It's Like To Live In Fear
BOSTON (CBS) - Wednesday night was a bloody one in Boston, with multiple shootings and three fatalities, prompting officials to plead for more community cooperation in solving gun crimes, and preventing them.
"We need help, we need help out there doing our job," said a grim-faced Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. "We can't police ourselves out of this."
But to Boston NAACP President Michael Curry, who works regularly with police and city officials to prevent violence, that statement is a bit problematic.
"I'm always concerned about that, don't blame the victim, right?" said Curry in a WBZ-TV interview which will air in its entirety this Sunday morning at 8:30 a.m.
"What it really comes out of is fear. I don't want to tell you the guy down the street has a gun or the nephew in the house next to me has a gun because 1) I'm sending that person to prison and 2) It is me jeopardizing my own life."
And that rhetorical friction between two allies in the fight for peace and justice on the streets speaks to the sensitivity and difficulty of repairing frayed relations between communities of color and police, even in a city like Boston with a reputation for relatively progressive policing practices.
You can also see the complexity of that task in the very mixed reactions to the tactics of Black Lives Matter, the loosely-organized protest group that emerged a year ago in the wake of the Ferguson debacle.
Black Lives Matter protestors have taken to disrupting presidential campaign rallies involving – so far – Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush, infuriating some who say shouting down politicians does nothing to advance the cause of reform.
But in our interview, Curry came to their defense.
"They're figuring this out, they're in their teens and their 20's and they're trying to challenge institutions and the power structure to do what they think is the right thing, and they're not always gonna do it the way you and I would do it," he says "It's not always gonna be neat, it's not gonna always be directed at the right person."
Curry says if people are thinking and talking about our problems with crime and race relations, it's productive. That can be hard to remember when tempers flare, fingers are pointed and the talking turns to shouting.
But it's worth recalling what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said about the fight for a just society: "in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News weeknights at 11 p.m.
Email Jon at keller@wbztv.com or reach him on Twitter @kelleratlarge.
