Assignment #5
What do you think needs to happen for relations between police officers and black Americans to improve? Why? Use evidence from the articles to support your answer.
Due Date: Tuesday, October 11. Minimum 2 pages, typed in MLA Format.
by Jack Healy and Nikole Hannah-Jones
Upfront Magazine
Sept. 19, 2016
Shanel Berry has raised her two sons, Dallas, 15, and Amari, 11, to be confident and upstanding. She tells them to square their shoulders, look people in the eye, and defend what’s right. But her advice comes with an exception: Do none of those things if stopped by the police.
In that case, she wants her sons to be cautious and just obey any orders the police may give them—even if they feel they were stopped for no reason.
“That is the part Dallas doesn’t quite get,” says Berry, a teacher in Waterloo, Iowa. “[He asks,] ‘Why are you telling me to comply if I am not doing anything wrong?’ I am trying to teach them to be men and stand up for themselves, but at the same time I am telling them to back down and not be who they are.”
Around the country, black parents like Berry report having the same difficult discussion. They coach their kids never to talk back to the police or make sudden movements around them, and to make sure officers can always see their hands. Parents have this talk because they believe some police officers view blacks with suspicion and treat them less fairly than whites. They fear their children may be hurt, or even killed, during encounters with the police.
A string of police killings of African-Americans in recent years has highlighted such fears. The killings made headlines and ignited protests nationwide after many of them were captured on video and widely viewed on social media. Civil rights leaders are calling for police to be held accountable for their actions and for an end to what they say is racial profiling. In response, many police say that they’re being unfairly judged by the actions of a few officers and that snippets of video that go viral on social media don’t always tell the whole story. Some law enforcement officials blame activist movements like Black Lives Matter for a growing anti-police sentiment that they say is making officers’ jobs more dangerous.
Tensions reached a boiling point this past summer. First, on July 5 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, two police officers shot and killed a black man named Alton Sterling while arresting him outside a store. The next day, an officer fatally shot another black man, Philando Castile, during a traffic stop near St. Paul, Minnesota. (Both Castile and Sterling were carrying guns, and Castile had a license to do so; the details of exactly what led up to each shooting are still under investigation.)
Then, on July 7, during a peaceful march in Dallas, Texas, protesting those shootings, a sniper killed five police officers. Ten days later, three officers in Baton Rouge were killed by a gunman who was targeting police. (The Dallas and Baton Rouge assailants, both black, were killed by police.)
In August, violence broke out in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after a police officer fatally shot a black man named Sylville K. Smith who had allegedly fled with a gun during a traffic stop. In the protests that followed, angry crowds injured several officers.
These tragedies mark the latest chapter in an increasingly passionate debate over racial justice, discrimination, and violence in the United States.
“If we cannot talk honestly and openly—not just in the comfort of our own circles, but with those who look different than us or bring a different perspective—then we will never break this dangerous cycle,” President Obama said at a memorial service in Dallas.
Ferguson, Missouri | The issue of racial bias in policing has been in the national spotlight since August 2014, when an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The officer said he shot Brown in self-defense after a struggle. Some witnesses supported the officer’s account; others said Brown posed no threat and the shooting was unjustified.
The officer wasn’t charged with a crime. But a follow-up investigation by the Justice Department found that police in Ferguson routinely discriminated against African-Americans and violated their constitutional rights. Black drivers were often stopped for no reason (a phenomenon many black Americans refer to as “driving while black”) and were much more likely to have their cars searched than whites. When officers used force (such as Tasers), nearly 90 percent of the time the suspects were black.
Many black Americans say that this sort of bias isn’t unique to Ferguson. While the vast majority of police encounters with people across the country end peacefully, that’s less likely with African-Americans. “None of this is new,” says Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “African-Americans have never received equal justice under the law, and police have rarely been held accountable.”
Documenting racial profiling in police work is difficult. Several factors—including higher violent crime rates in many black neighborhoods—make it hard to distinguish evidence of bias from other influences. But federal statistics show that, nationwide, blacks are 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than whites. Studies have also found that blacks are more likely than whites and other groups to be subjected to the use of force by the police. And a recent Washington Post analysis reported that blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to be shot and killed by the police.
This has led many African-Americans to distrust and fear the police. New York City police detective Derick Waller, who is black, understands those feelings. “No officer leaves his house and says, ‘Man, I want to kill somebody today,’” he says. “[But] there is something that’s rooted in America in the police department. It’s just assumed that every black person that has a car with [tinted windows] has a gun.” For his part, Waller says being stopped by a police officer fills him with fear. “When I get pulled over, I get scared. I turn my ignition off, and I put my hands out the window.”
The recent high-profile killings of black men by the police have given growing prominence to the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013 to address discrimination in the criminal justice system. Today, at least 37 different groups operate under the Black Lives Matter name, and tens of thousands of supporters identify with its cause. “Our demand is simple,” says activist Johnetta Elzie of St. Louis, Missouri. “Stop killing us.”
Black Lives Matter uses nonviolent confrontation—such as large-scale street marches—to get its message across. Yet some of its tactics (for example, staging “die-ins” to mimic death at the hands of law enforcement) have prompted criticism from some police and public officials. They say that Black Lives Matter incites hatred of men and women in uniform. Critics have blamed the movement for inspiring the gunmen who killed officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, even though Black Lives Matter leaders have condemned attacks against the police.
Black Lives Matter supporters say they are not anti-police. “The Black Lives movement is about civil rights,” protester Shyheim Aiken said at a demonstration in New York City. “It’s not about any one group. Those who say the movement is against cops simply don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Still, police report that their jobs have gotten harder in recent months as tensions have risen between them and many of the communities they serve. “Before it was just criminals that didn’t like you,” says a police officer in Florida. “Now everybody believes we’re the bad guy.”
A Way Forward | With more than 350 million firearms in the United States, police officers say they face the daily threat of being killed and must make split-second decisions, which can then be endlessly second-guessed in videos that go viral.
“One of the worries that cops have is that no cop can control what another cop does, but all cops will be judged by what the other cop does,” says Brandon del Pozo, a police chief in Vermont. “We’ll sit there . . . watching police videos all over the country, trying to make sense of what we’re seeing and trying to make sure we’re doing the best job we can.”
What happens now? For starters, a growing number of police departments are training officers in how to defuse volatile situations before force becomes necessary. Such training teaches them to use time and distance to resolve tense interactions. (Last year, top American police officials visited Scotland—where 98 percent of police do not carry guns—to learn how officers there handle confrontation.)
The federal government has also funded body cameras for officers in more than 30 states. Proponents of these cameras say that officers will be more mindful of their actions if they know they’re being recorded. In addition, a presidential task force has released ideas for building trust between police and communities. One suggestion is to create citizen advisory boards to provide input and oversight for local police departments. But the pace of change is slow and hostility remains.
“There is no doubt that police departments still feel embattled and unjustly accused, and there is no doubt that minority communities . . . still feel like it just takes too long to do what’s right,” Obama said in July. “I think it is fair to say we will see more tension between police and communities this month, next month, next year, for quite some time.”
Following the violence this summer, Obama invited Black Lives Matter activists and police officials to meet at the White House.
“We still need many in law enforcement to recognize that action needs to happen,” activist Rashad Robinson of the racial justice group Color of Change said afterward. “What we heard was a willingness to listen, which means that we need to continue to raise everyday people’s voices.”
By the Editorial Board
The New York Times
July 7, 2016
Videos of two fatal shootings of African-American men have again documented what appear to be almost casual killing by the police. They prompt the deepest shock at what the nation has witnessed over and over again: a chance encounter with the police and an innocent black life ended.
On Thursday night, a peaceful march in Dallas against the shootings ended in violence when snipers on rooftops killed five officers and wounded seven others. One suspect, who was killed in a stand-off with police, said he wanted to kill whites, according to the Dallas police chief. This horrendous attack on the police and the two killings this week demand sober reflection by the nation’s political and law enforcement leadership.
Of the two videos, the first showed Alton Sterling on Tuesday pinned to the ground outside a store in Baton Rouge, La., when he was shot in the chest and back at close range by police officers.
The second showed the death of Philando Castile, who was stopped for an alleged traffic infraction in a St. Paul suburb and was shot several times by a police officer. The video, which was taken by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was sitting next to him in the car, starts seconds after Mr. Castile was shot. “He was just getting his license and registration, sir,” Ms. Reynolds calmly tells the officer. She says to the camera that he was not reaching for the gun he was licensed to carry.
“Would this have happened if the passengers, the drivers were white? I don’t think it would have,” Gov. Mark Dayton said at a news conference on Thursday. “All of us in Minnesota are forced to confront that this kind of racism exists.”
Mr. Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, said she told her son: “If you get stopped by the police, comply. Comply, comply, comply.” She added, “I think he was just black in the wrong place.”
The Justice Department has been called on to investigate the two shootings. It speaks volumes that local law enforcement is not to be trusted to carry out investigations, as communities take to the streets to demand justice.
The shootings seem part of some gruesome loop of episodes of law enforcement gone amok. For African-Americans, the threat of police abuse — in the form of random stops, assaults and violations of civil rights — has long been part of life. Yet this grievous reality became a national issue only with the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in an encounter with a white officer in Ferguson, Mo.
After a year and a half of racial upheaval in Ferguson, the local government there agreed to reforms of a law enforcement system that Department of Justice investigators found regularly violated constitutional rights. Minority citizens were routinely harassed by police officers and shuttled through a court system that further exploited and victimized local residents.
Unfortunately, after Ferguson, police shootings of black citizens have continued, with the police too often maintaining their wall of resistance with the help of local prosecutors. Until ordered to do so by a judge, Chicago officials fought release of a dashboard video of the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. He was shot 16 times by a police officer later indicted on charges of first-degree murder.
The killing in Minnesota on Wednesday was the 123rd killing of a black person by law enforcement in America so far this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Fortunately, the rise of social media and smartphones in the hands of witnesses has delivered video evidence to much of the nation of what black communities have known all too well.
The latest killings are grim reminders that far more reforms are needed to make law enforcement officers more professional and respectful of the citizens they have a duty to protect. Intensive training, stricter use-of-force standards and prosecutions of officers who kill innocent people are necessary to begin to repair systems that have tolerated this bloodshed.
And beyond that, with killings happening in cities, suburbs and rural communities, there needs to be leadership in every police department in the country that insists on cultural and attitudinal change. Credible civilian oversight of the police has to be a factor if community trust is ever to be restored. The latest ghastly images show how much has not been done, two years after Ferguson.
By William J. Bratton
The New York Times
Sept. 16, 2016
I am a police reformer and have been since I was promoted to the rank of sergeant in the Boston Police Department in 1975. There were many good cops in Boston in those days, but there was also an insular culture that had some racist, brutal, corrupt and lazy elements. I was motivated to advance in rank to get above the bad actors and to try to do something about them. I had a vision of policing, shared by others of my generation, that looked beyond the stultifying bureaucracy, the curdled cynicism and the sheer indifference that characterized a lot of police work then.
A few years later, as a lieutenant, I helped to develop an early community-policing pilot project in the Fenway neighborhood. Those of us involved wanted to break out of the blue cocoon surrounding policing and work closely with neighborhood residents to protect their communities.
I have carried those experiences and ambitions to the six police departments I have been privileged to lead. In each case, I have worked to change the culture and reach and motivate the officers, connect with the community and reduce crime. My best work in motivating cops was probably in the New York City Transit Police in 1990 and 1991; my best crime fighting, in the New York Police Department in 1994 and 1995; and my best community work, in the Los Angeles Police Department from 2002 to 2009.
The opportunity to come back to New York for a second time awakened the old ambitions, and working with a superlative team at the department and having the unstinting support of Mayor Bill de Blasio, I tried to fold everything I had learned over the years into a reform package that would revitalize a great police agency.
There are police reformers from outside the profession who think that changing police culture is a matter of passing regulations, establishing oversight bodies and more or less legislating a new order. It is not. Such oversight usually has only marginal impact. What changes police culture is leadership from within.
You have to understand the police and their worldview. Officers now live in a transparent world, with continual monitoring by cellphones, dashboard cameras and body cameras, which sometimes reveal genuine wrongdoing but also can lead to second-guessing of officers’ actions by politicians and the public. You have to show them you care about them, their safety, job satisfaction and careers. And you have to prove it by making fundamental changes in management, equipment, working conditions, training, discipline and operations.
Then you have to motivate other leaders in the organization to share your vision and sense of urgency. You have to reach out to the idealist who lives in the heart of many a cynical cop, the officer who joined the police to help people and make a better world. This is a profession in which you can have a life of significance, a life that matters.
Here is how we have worked to reform from within.
We remade the training regimen. Instead of new officers patrolling high-crime “impact zones,” without introduction to those neighborhoods, new officers do six months of field training and work with more than 800 community partners citywide. For veteran officers, training now includes three full days of instruction in de-escalating confrontations and treating people, including criminals, with respect and fairness. In the subway and elsewhere, we are applying a less arrest-driven approach to calming and controlling emotionally disturbed people and agitated substance abusers, as well as matching the variety of homeless people with the services they need, rather than time in jail.
We have renewed and improved every aspect of police technology and taken the giant step of putting a smartphone in the hands of all police officers so they have faster and more complete information about breaking situations, thus cutting response times and greatly increasing situational awareness.
Challenged by the Islamic State and its bloody attacks in Europe and lone wolf attacks here at home, we have expanded the counterterrorism capabilities built by Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. The new Critical Response Command fields more than 500 highly trained, fully equipped counterterror officers who can respond, if necessary, to simultaneous attacks all across the city.
Last, we are transforming the patrol model. The old one, with most officers running from service call to service call, left no time to work closely with residents. The public was alienated from the cops, and vice versa.
The neighborhood-based policing program, which will be in half of the precincts and all of public housing police service areas by October, is designed to set things right. Anchored in specific areas instead of answering calls across entire precincts, officers are being given the time, training, resources and encouragement to work with community members at problem solving.
By localizing police service, we are breaking down barriers and building trust with truly productive partnerships. We are also changing the police culture by orienting the daily work of officers toward service and communications. My successor as commissioner, James P. O’Neill, was the principal architect of this plan, and he will bring it to full flower.
My youthful vision of neighborhood policing on the streets of Boston’s Fenway as I began my career is becoming a reality on the streets of New York as I end it.