Many of our conversations on this site currently hit at the important nexus of poverty, race, and policing. These are vital conversations; frankly, they're conversations that I feel like I've been waiting to see happen for several decades. Yet I keep hitting against a feeling of disappointment at how these conversations are actually going here. It's possible that that's just an artifact of How Blogs Work -- those with the most vehement opinions are often the ones dominating conversation, and nuance is easy to lose in those conversations. It's also possible that it's an artifact of How Political Discussions Work -- it's much easier to motivate people through righteous statements than through complex discussions on policy.
It still all leaves me in the cold. A lot of posts here have felt to me a bit like they're starting from a worldview and fitting things to it, and that strikes me as yet another means to sort of co-opt these incredibly longstanding problems around poverty, race, and policing into being "about" something other than themselves. Whether that's my skewed perception, I can't say.
I can say that I'm not here for backslaps or high fives. I'm bound to say somethingorother that somebody will find doesn't fit their preferred narratives, and meet their wrath, or say something stupidly that comes off in ways I don't necessarily mean. I'm writing this because I think we need to get beyond backslaps and highfives and outrage, and actually work, discuss, strive to understand the underlying issues that we have to contend with if we actually want to change a damn thing at that nexus of poverty, race, and policing.
What I'm hoping for here, whether I'm the best Emcee for it or not, is a meaningful discussion on the factors involved in police brutality in predominantly poor, Black neighborhoods, and hopefully some thoughts on possible policy solutions that can help to tackle what has long been a huge and under-acknowledged issue in our country as a whole.
For reference, my background includes a lot of time in poor, underserved, and often majority-minority neighborhoods, at least as an adult. As a kid, I grew up in a country town, and I will say that while my family was relatively well off, the incredible scale of rural poverty -- something few people on this blog seem to be familiar with, honestly -- was an incredible thing for me to see, experience, have shared with me by many friends. Was a huge motivator for my later political evolution. When I moved to the city, as a young adult largely estranged from my family, I could only afford to live in what well-meaning people here referred to as "the ghetto." That I walked home after midnight from my job made a lot of well meaning and left leaning friends hyperventilate. That I saw how my Black and Latino and Arab neighbors were treated by others, including law enforcement, only solidified my desire for justice for real humans, and treated me to a world of racism that I had known intellectually existed, but had never seen in action.
I live now on the outskirts of "the ghetto." There is a street, four houses down, that marks the boundary. You cross that street, and property values drop by more than $100,000. You cross that street, and schools change. You cross that street, and racial demographics change. You cross that street, and policing changes.
Most of the time, though not always, the police helicopter is not circling over us. It's circling a few houses across the street from us. Most of the time, though not always, the gunshots we hear are about a block down, on The Other Side. Most of the time, our neighbors, at least many of them, blame problems here on people from Over There. We're actually in a sort of middle ground, realistically -- of course people cross the street. We cross, and folks from Over There cross, and we all bring each other's problems back and forth alongside, because reality never has that clean a line.
I'll never forget, when huge, loose dogs mauled our dog while my partner had her out on a walk, the vehemence with which Our Side insisted that the dogs must have come from Over There. This turned out, by the way, not to be true at all.
I have taken to listening to the police scanner here. This is not, I assure you, out of a huge loyalty or sympathy for cops in general, though it has informed me that it is one hell of a weird job. I actually really strongly suggest listening to your most local city scanner, to any of you who actually want to approach police problems from a place of broader information. If you want to talk policing, shit yeah, there are problems, and figuring out what they are and how they can possibly be corrected, what the reasons are for the things that need to change, is incredibly helpful for coming up with realistic answers that don't begin and end at "Cops Are Pigs."
In all of this, I have seen and heard some terrible policing, and mostly aimed at poor communities of color -- people searched for nothing, people chased for nothing, whole neighborhoods treated with suspicion from the first second on a call. I have also seen and heard bright spots, cops who take hours to bring my highly schizophrenic, unmedicated ex-neighbor to a calmer arrest for Whatever Thing He Did This Time (no, it usually wasn't no big deal, sadly, and no, the police couldn't possibly have fixed that.)
I have huge problems with the state of policing in this country. Here are a few suggested reasons for some of the problems:
1. Recruitment. Many of the people who want to be cops are people who already have a weird Heroic Righteous Get-The-Bad-Guys thing going on. Most are white and relatively privileged. Too many have a sort of authority complex from the start, and too few have any sensitivity or understanding for how police might be perceived in any situation other than White Supportive Suburbia. Too few have the patience for the job.
I'll put this as problem 1a: The police are framed into a job position in which it is not on them to deal with guilt or innocence, they are simply the tools that apprehend the people that are accused of doing the bad thing. But that's a vastly oversimplified view of police work, which actually involves interactions with the community to a huge degree, untangling complicated situations, and ideally calming things down in order to figure out just what the hell is going on. A huge chunk -- maybe up to half -- of the calls in my area are essentially domestic violence calls or somewhat violent family disputes. These are not always situations in which the police can just march in and arrest somebody without conversation or deescalation. Yet we don't focus on patience and communication skills as central skills in law enforcement. If you can't keep your temper, even while a Very Upset Person cusses you out, you shouldn't be a cop, as far as I'm concerned. Your job involves interacting with people during crises and at times when they are likely to be at their worst. That's the job, not just "oh, hey, there's the bad guy, get him cuffed."
2. Public sentiment. We spent decades in this country, from the 80's into the 90's and beyond, focused on Law And Order. People were fed up with crime rates that did indeed, for many potential reasons, go up through the 70's and a while beyond. Some of it also has always struck me as a sort of conservative backlash against the perceived permissiveness of the hippie days. Regardless of causes, it led to the ever-losing War on Drugs, hugely increased budgets for police, zero-tolerance policies, three-strikes laws, and teevee shows like "Cops." Our good-guy-bad-guy thing flourished against "criminals," the death penalty returned, we all loved shows and movies about Cops Who Broke The Rules To Get The Bad Guys, and a huge chunk of white america moved to gated communities. That's not ultimately the fault of the police, but it changed policing to a huge degree. Just catch the thug and throw away the key, screw inconveniences like "civil rights" and "trials" and stuff! If the guy dies, whatever, he was scum anyway.
This may sound extreme, but it's pretty much the tone I witnessed in the public toward law enforcement through the 90's and 00's, and is still alive and well. As is always true, it's people of color that bear the greatest brunt of it, because we're already all sort of primed to see that young Black guy as probably up to no good anyway.
This is why you see people acting as though stealing some cigarillos makes it totally fine for Michael Brown to have been shot a bunch of times.
3. Militarization of police. There may be history that goes farther back, but I'm mostly aware of this via the WTO protests -- the so called "Battle in Seattle." I wasn't there. I had sympathy for the protests. I also noted that law enforcement, whether they were federal, state, or local, reacted to those protests as though some smashed stuff or some burning trash cans were absolutely the same thing as terrorism. These were not some protesters taking things a little far, these were Enemies of The State. Originally, this happened under Bill Clinton, though I doubt he had a huge voice in the policing policies -- dunno. Regardless, this trend continued and worsened under GW Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, when any form of public protest could increasingly be treated as Nigh On Chaos.
4. Lack of support for police. This one probably strikes you all as odd, because jeebus, aren't we supporting them too much? Bear with me here. These are people, you will find if you bother to listen to the police scanner, who are seeing absolutely horrible things constantly, who are dealing with pretty horrible people on a regular basis, who are quick to the scene of nasty car accidents, shootings, domestic violence situations that would make you puke. And while, as a society, we all high five them and talk about how awesome they are and never admit that they might do anything bad, we also don't provide them with a whole lot of meaningful support for dealing with those experiences outside of other law enforcement officers. This creates a clannishness, and it leaves plenty of cops who undoubtedly do want to do their best by their communities unable to work out the realities of dealing with the shit they interact with every day. Think of this one a little like you might think of veterans -- it's not that helpful to give them parades, and certainly not if you're not going to actually provide them with support for PTSD.
5. The silence of the many. Good cops, if they really are good cops, need to turn in the nasty ones. Otherwise, I have extremely limited sympathy. If they witness something that is not ok, they need to speak up, superiors need to take them seriously, and the cops they're turning in need to be investigated. This is about culture within police departments. On our end, outside of law enforcement, we need to hold them to that standard, and raise a ruckus if they cover for people who aren't working in the best interests of their whole communities. I'm pro-union generally, but the police unions need to stop protecting cops who shouldn't be out there, and focus on making sure investigations are fair. Protecting police from being fired for brutality is in nobody's best interests, including the police.
Overall: this is broad, but important. It's very easy to be angry with the police. I am angry with the police. But under the assumption that we will continue to have police -- which is likely, and even I have had to call them from time to time over some actually really dangerous shit -- we need to not let our anger turn into simply writing this off as Evil Police Officers. What we need is policy. There will always be shitty cops -- what policies are in place to deal with them, to get them off the street before they cause harm, or to deal with the consequences if they do cause harm? There will always be mediocre cops -- what do we do to make them actually do their jobs and view all members of their communities, Black or Latino or Asian or white -- as the people they are bound to serve and protect? What policies can reduce tensions, encourage good police work, discourage brutality? There will also always be some good cops -- to be clear, I say with reservation under current circumstances -- what policies can we push for that encourage them to report the problems, how can we support them in shifting the systemic problems toward better policing for communities?
Here are some thoughts on problems we need to stop putting on the police, and understand as our problems as citizens of this country.
1. Poverty rates among people of color are a major issue. I would say poverty in general, and that would also be true, but the reality of poverty rates among people of color in this country is a thing that should be a huge source of cultural shame until such time as we figure out how to get it gone. The disparities are huge. And they bring with them massive, disproportionate unemployment rates, terrible educational situations, crap for resources, and correspondingly high crime.
The cops in my city spend the bulk of their time on three neighborhoods, ultimately; one is the one four houses down and across the street, one is a bit south, and the other is far north of here. All are run down, majority Black or Latino areas. All have serious problems with gang violence, property crime, weapons calls, domestic violence. All have huge numbers of folks on needed forms of assistance, all have huge rates of disability, all have poor service via public transit and almost no local employment, all have shitty schools, and all are overrun with slumlords who leave families living in places where the stove doesn't work. This is not only a problem of poverty, it is also a problem of continuing legacies of racism. These neighborhoods have been utterly neglected because they are majority of color. We have written people off. The police have serious calls to respond to in these areas constantly, because while the vast majority of people living in them are fine people who work their asses off at shit jobs (when they can find them,) there are also a chunk of people who have found that their only opportunities, and their only sources of pride or dignity, are through gangs, drug dealing, being Tough As Shit, and generally doing stuff that I guarantee you don't really want to see happening in your neighborhood. The police respond to the calls they receive. This is not a problem they can fix, and we shouldn't scapegoat them here. This is a problem we all have to fix, together and consciously and with care, and any of us sitting in our cozy houses where stuff works, taking our cars to get to our decent jobs, or generally feeling secure are just as culpable in as anybody else.
2. The justice system is hugely culpable here. Many of the calls the police are dealing with wind up escalating due to probation violations. Some of these are undoubtedly serious issues, but many of them aren't, and that's about our justice system as a whole. We are very quick, in this country, to throw the book at Black people over relatively minor offenses -- in truth, many of the original crimes involved in some of these things, if one bothers to look, are incredibly trivial, but they build into probation issues that lead to police chases that too often lead to tragedy.
Should the police pursue? Realistically, to me, it has come to depend on the current situation. It's easy to box these things into narratives, and it turns out, to my ear, like there's no one answer. The fact that this relies on police judgment just makes it that much more important that police department recruiting and standards for behavior change.
Do not blame the police for the legacy of racism in this country. None of us are clean, and if anything, we're putting the police on the frontlines of dealing with the results of that racism. They often handle it poorly, through a combination of bad personalities for the work, bad policies, and systemic sorts of "missions" that have historically been very much about protecting us "white people" from "them" at just about any cost. But the problems involved transcend the police, too, and I think it's too convenient for the rest of us to put all of the blame for so much of this on police, particularly if we're unwilling to have real conversations about what's wrong and how to fix it.
I open the floor to anybody with thoughts to add. I suppose it's open to those who would prefer to throw tomatoes at me, too (or lemons -- one thing I heard on the scanner the other day, about a supposedly "armed subject" -- resulted in a rather bewildered, mildly bemused police officer announcing to dispatch that the subject was only armed with, um, lemons.) I may or may not be around much to respond.