“Justice Is Not An Unreasonable Desire”: Eric Holder; Problems Exposed By Ferguson ‘Threaten The Entire Nation’
The problems put on display after the death of Michael Brown in the small St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, in August “are truly national in scope and that threaten the entire nation,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech on Monday.
Holder, speaking at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, said the nation needs to confront the broken relationship between many law enforcement agencies and the communities that they are supposed to serve.
“Broadly speaking, without mutual understanding between citizens — whose rights must be respected — and law enforcement officers — who make tremendous and often-unheralded personal sacrifices every day to preserve public safety — there can be no meaningful progress,” Holder said in prepared remarks. “Our police officers cannot be seen as an occupying force disconnected from the communities they serve. Bonds that have been broken must be restored. Bonds that never existed must now be created.”
Holder, who plans to resign as the nation’s top law enforcement official if the Senate confirms U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch as his replacement, visited Ferguson back in August. His Justice Department has launched an investigation into the practices of the Ferguson Police Department, in addition to a separate ongoing federal investigation into the shooting of Brown by former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson.
In his speech on Monday, Holder said that the “overall system of justice must be strengthened and made more fair” to ensure faith in the justice system.
“Without that deserved faith, without that reasoned belief, there can be no justice. This is not an unreasonable desire — it is a fundamental American right enshrined in our founding documents,” Holder said.
Calling 18-year-old Brown’s death a “tragedy,” Holder said it “sparked a significant national conversation about the need to ensure confidence in the law enforcement and criminal justice processes” and exposed rifts that “must be addressed — by all Americans — in a constructive manner.”
Holder condemned the looting and destruction that took place around Ferguson last week, saying it was “deeply unfortunate that this vital conversation was interrupted, and this young man’s memory dishonored, by destruction and looting on the part of a relatively small criminal element.”
Holder said that “acts of mindless destruction are not only contrary to the rule of law and the aims of public safety; they threaten to stifle important debate, ‘adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars,'” referencing a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “They actively impede social progress by drowning out the legitimate voices of those attempting to make themselves heard. And they are not consistent with the wishes of Michael Brown’s father, who asked that his son be remembered peacefully.”
Holder called on “those who seek to lend their voices to important causes and discussions, and who seek to elevate these vital conversations, to do so in ways that respect the gravity of their subject matter.”
“These are the moments that remind us of the values that bind us together as a nation. These are the times — of great challenge and great consequence — that point the way forward in our ongoing pursuit of a more perfect union,” Holder continued. “And these are the lights that will help us beat back the encroaching darkness — and the stars that will guide us, together, out of this storm.”
By: Ryan J. Reilly, The Blog, The Huffington Post, December 1, 2014
“A Tragic And Unacceptable Pattern”: What America’s Police Departments Don’t Want You To Know
Michael Brown’s death was part of a tragic and unacceptable pattern: Police officers in the United States shoot and kill civilians in shockingly high numbers. How many killings are there each year? No one can say for sure, because police departments don’t want us to know.
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, in 2013 there were 461 “justifiable homicides” by police — defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” In all but three of these reported killings, officers used firearms.
The true number of fatal police shootings is surely much higher, however, because many law enforcement agencies do not report to the FBI database. Attempts by journalists to compile more complete data by collating local news reports have resulted in estimates as high as 1,000 police killings a year. There is no way to know how many victims, like Brown, were unarmed.
By contrast, there were no fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada — a country with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms — police shootings average about a dozen a year.
Liberals and conservatives alike should be outraged at the frequency with which police in this country use deadly force. There is no greater power that we entrust to the state than the license to take life. To put it mildly, misuse of this power is at odds with any notion of limited government.
I realize that the great majority of police officers never fire their weapons in the line of duty. Most cops perform capably and honorably in a stressful, dangerous job; 27 were killed in 2013, according to the FBI. Easy availability of guns means that U.S. police officers — unlike their counterparts in Britain, Japan or other countries where there is appropriate gun control — must keep in mind the possibility that almost any suspect might be packing heat.
But any way you look at it, something is wrong. Perhaps the training given officers is inadequate. Perhaps the procedures they follow are wrong. Perhaps an “us vs. them” mentality estranges some police departments from the communities they are sworn to protect.
Whatever the reason, it is hard to escape the conclusion that police in this country are much too quick to shoot. We’ve seen the heartbreaking results most recently in the fatal shooting of 28-year-old Akai Gurley, an unarmed man who was suspected of no crime, in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project, and the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was waving a toy gun around a park in Cleveland.
Which brings me to the issue of race. USA Today analyzed the FBI’s “justifiable homicide” statistics over several years and found that, of roughly 400 reported police killings annually, an average of 96 involved a white police officer killing a black person.
Two years ago, D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the Reno (Nev.) News & Review, launched FatalEncounters.org, an ambitious attempt to compile a comprehensive crowd-sourced database of fatal police shootings. Reports of the October 2012 killing of a naked, unarmed college student by University of South Alabama police made Burghart wonder how many such shootings there were; the fact that no one knew the answer made him determined to find it.
Burghart recently summed up what he has learned so far: “You know who dies in the most population-dense areas? Black men,” he wrote on Gawker. “You know who dies in the least population-dense areas? Mentally ill men. It’s not to say there aren’t dangerous and desperate criminals killed across the line. But African-Americans and the mentally ill people make up a huge percentage of people killed by police.”
Burghart and others who have attempted to count and analyze police shootings shouldn’t have to do the FBI’s job. All law enforcement agencies should be required to report all uses of deadly force to the bureau, using a standardized format that allows comparisons and analysis. Police departments that have nothing to hide should be eager to cooperate.
The Obama administration has been laudably aggressive in pressing cities with egregiously high rates of police shootings, such as Albuquerque, to reform. But no one can really get a handle on the problem until we know its true scope.
The Michael Brown case presents issues that go beyond race. An unarmed teenager was shot to death. Whatever his color, that’s just not right.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 1, 2014
“Acting On Our Collective Fears”: Darren Wilson; America’s ‘Model Policeman’
Truth is stranger than fiction; it is also most certainly harder to accept.
In a nearly hour-long interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday, a day after thousands of protesters took to the streets from coast to coast, expressing outrage that yet another white police officer got away with the murder of another unarmed black person, Wilson stuck to his story: “I just did my job. I did what I was paid to do. I followed my training…. That’s it.”
Sure, there are plenty of reasons to doubt his account. If he knew Michael Brown was a robbery suspect, why did he politely stop him and Dorian Johnson for jaywalking only to “have a conversation,” as he described to Stephanopoulos? If the West Florissant section of Ferguson is “really a great community,” why did he testify that it was a not very “well-liked community” and a hotbed of anti-police sentiment?
And yet, despite all the equivocations, the shooting death of the teenager on August 9 and Monday’s grand jury decision not to indict Wilson were entirely unsurprising. They are the predictable outcomes of a criminal justice system doing exactly what it was meant to do. For all the dissecting and debating of the veracity of Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony this week, one thing seems crystal clear. He was in fact doing his job.
Indeed, by this standard, isn’t Darren Wilson actually a model police officer?
He certainly thinks so. When asked by Stephanopoulos if he could make “something good” come of this experience, he said he would “love to teach people” and give them “more insight in uses of force.” That he may have logged more time on first-person shooters—emptying clip after clip to take down demonic super-villains who “run through shots”—than actual police work is beside the point. Darren Wilson has the kind of experience that many Americans value.
Evidence abounds that the United States is the world’s most punitive nation. More people are behind bars and incarcerated at higher per capita rates here than anywhere in the world. African-Americans are the nation’s prime suspects and prisoners. White police officers are our chosen protectors, enforcing the law in the name of public safety.
In a Pew research poll conducted shortly after Ferguson made national headlines this summer, researchers found that most Americans have a “fair amount of confidence in local police.” Eighty-five percent of respondents, white and black, gave a fair to excellent rating on police “protecting people from crime.” And on “using the right amount of force,” 66 percent of respondents gave a fair to excellent rating; white support stood at 73 percent and blacks at 42 percent. Though a clear racial divide exists, African-Americans are only 13 percent of the population nationally. Everyone is therefore implicated in police performance writ large, if not by choice, certainly through political representatives.
Critics and protesters of police violence among African-Americans and on the political left, as polling data suggests, see things differently. They are organizing against the routine killing of unarmed men and beating of helpless women on an unprecedented scale not seen since the anti-lynching movement of the last century. Even with such evidence in hand that black men are twenty-one times as likely to be killed by law enforcement than white men, as analyzed in a recent report by ProPublica, today’s movement like the one before it might fail to overcome deeply entrenched fears of black criminality without a massive shift in white public opinion and a new model for law enforcement.
Most whites do not realize they are reading from very old racial scripts. When Ida B. Wells, the world’s leading anti-lynching activist and black social worker of the early twentieth century, tried to explain to a wealthy suffragist in Chicago that anti-black violence in the nation must end, Mary Plummer replied: blacks need to “drive the criminals out” of the community. “Have you forgotten that 10 percent of all the crimes that were committed in Chicago last year were by colored men [less than 3 percent of the population]?”
Like Mary Plummer, Darren Wilson is emphatic that the issue is not racism. Brown’s African-American neighborhood is “one of our high-crime areas for the city,” he said during the interview. “You can’t perform the duties of a police officer and have racism in you. I help people. That’s my job.” On that day, “the only emotion I ever felt was fear,” before my training took over. “We are taught to deal with the threat at hand.”
Implicit bias research tells us that most Americans are afraid of black people and subconsciously associate dangerous weapons and animals with them. They see things often that are not there. Stanford psychologists Rebecca Haley and Jennifer Eberhardt note in a study last month that the more people perceive blacks as criminals or prisoners, “the more people fear crime, which then increases their acceptance of punitive policies.”
The truth is that Wilson has no regrets. He wouldn’t do things differently. He’s looking forward to a new chapter in his professional journey as a teacher, trainer or a consultant. He’s our representative figure—a model policeman—acting on our collective fears.
By: Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Nation, November 29, 2014
“Trademark Arrogance”: Ferguson Nightmare Widens: Rudy Giuliani, The NFL And Cops Doubling Down On Their “Right” To Kill
The single worst moment in Officer Darren Wilson’s testimony about the day he shot Michael Brown came when he called the unarmed teenager “it,” saying at one point, “it looks like a demon.” He also compared him to “Hulk Hogan” and described him as “bulking up” as if to magically “run through” his bullets. But somehow the word “it” cut through the delusional, self-aggrandizing dramatics and showed the problem at the heart of their encounter: To Wilson, Mike Brown wasn’t human. “It” was a “demon.”
Yet Wilson’s often incredible testimony about the threat posed by Brown carried the day, and the grand jury declined to indict the cop for killing the unarmed teen. The decision has not only worsened the nation’s racial tension, but provoked despair over the possibility of change. Hundreds of politicians and pundits are criticizing the most disruptive Ferguson protesters, including President Obama, but almost no one is talking to the police about the way they consistently escalate these controversies – in the street, with young black men, but also in their dealings with communities afterward, when they tolerate no criticism.
That trademark arrogance has been taken to an extreme by the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association’s demand that the NFL discipline five St. Louis Rams players who participated in a pre-game “hands up, don’t shoot” protest of Mike Brown’s killing Sunday night. Appropriately, the NFL says no such discipline will be forthcoming; the cops also want an apology.
That a local police association thinks it is somehow bigger than the NFL, and that it has the power to curtail the First Amendment rights of football players, is just another example of the preemptive, aggressive self-defense that keeps police officers unaccountable for their transgressions.
Prosecutor-in-chief Rudy Giuliani set the tone for the Ferguson debate a day before the grand jury’s decision was announced. Giuliani minimized the problem of white police killing young black men on “Meet the Press,” telling Michael Eric Dyson “the white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70-75 percent of the time” and asking “why don’t you cut it down so so many white police officers don’t have to be in black areas?”
A stunned Dyson shot back: “Look at this! This is the defensive mechanism of white supremacy in your mind, sir!”
I missed the Giuliani-Dyson debate when it aired, and when I searched for it online I was shocked to see the way right-wing sites were framing it: Newsbusters, Breitbart and others accused Dyson of “attacking” Giuliani, when the former New York mayor was clearly on the offensive. Dyson became the bad guy by calling Giuliani’s mind-set what it was. And the black guy is always the “attacker” in the right-wing mind, anyway.
As was the case with George Zimmerman’s acquittal, the Ferguson grand jury may have theoretically reached a defensible position given the letter of the law. They only had to believe Wilson had a “reasonable” belief that his life was in danger in order for the shooting to be justified. Thus leaders from President Obama to Mike Brown’s parents themselves have urged calm on angry communities, and counseled protesters to live with the verdict.
Dyson is among many to point out why that response, especially from the president, is so unsatisfying. While Obama strongly denounced “criminal acts” and insisted “I do not have any sympathy” for people destroying “your own communities,” his comments on the events that led to the violence were weirdly “vague, halting and non-committal,” Dyson wrote in the New York Times.
He slipped back into an emotional blandness that underplayed the searing divide, saying there was “an impression that folks have” about unjust policing and “there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion.”
Of course even that relatively mild rebuke got Obama charged with inciting the Ferguson unrest by the right. The loons at Front Page Mag claimed Obama’s remarks stoked a “lynch mob” mentality while others called it “race-baiting as usual.” Milwaukee’s conservative sheriff David Clarke, who is African-American, insisted Obama’s call for calm after the verdict “was done with a wink and a nod,” because the president’s overall “political strategy of divide and conquer fuels this sort of racial animosity between people.”
Predictably, Rudy Giuliani escalated his rhetoric this past Sunday on Fox, telling Chris Wallace that it’s black people who bear responsibility for the outsize, and occasionally excessive, police presence in their communities.
“I think just as much, if not more, responsibility is on the black community to reduce the reason why the police officers are assigned in such large numbers to the black community.” He added: “It’s because blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I’d put all my police on Park Avenue instead of Harlem, thousands more blacks would have died during my time in office.”
When it comes to controlling the public debate over these killings, the police lobby consistently uses excessive force — and gets away with it. Their outsize response to peaceful protest by the St. Louis Rams is only the latest example, and here’s hoping the NFL and the team don’t back down.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 1, 2014
“We Need More Ferguson-Style Grand Juries”: A Model For How To End The Over-Incarceration Of African-Americans Today
We need more grand juries like the Ferguson grand jury. In an ironic twist, Ferguson’s grand jury provides a blueprint for a radical civil rights revolution that could help end the worst racial injustice in America today. Here’s why.
Many observers have noted that the grand jury result in Darren Wilson’s case is highly unusual. Federal grand juries indict in more than 99 percent of cases; state grand juries aren’t quite at that level, but still indict in an overwhelming number of cases. The grand jury deck is heavily stacked to favor prosecution. For instance, prosecutors have no obligation to present all of the evidence in a case, just enough evidence to get an indictment. The old adage is that if a prosecutor asked them, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.
Other than sandwiches, who are grand juries indicting, and how? They disproportionately indict young African-American men, and they usually do it very quickly. Grand juries often hear dozens of cases in a single day, and may hand down an indictment based on ten minutes or less of testimony. As one news article notes, “Prosecutors present as many as 40 cases a day to grand juries,” who in turn “indict most suspects in less time than it takes to brew a pot of coffee.”
This is why the grand jury in Darren Wilson’s case was so unusual. It isn’t just that the result was out of the ordinary— the process was also unique. The grand jury heard an incredible 70 hours of testimony from 60 witnesses over a three month period. In another unusual move, the grand jury considered not only the basic elements of the crime, but also affirmative defenses. Ashby Jones writes at the Wall Street Journal blog that “It’s not disputed that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year old Michael Brown on August 9. The question jurors were likely asked to consider went beyond that: whether Mr. Wilson was justified in shooting Mr. Brown.” And in yet another atypical move, prosecutors presented this grand jury not just a cherry-picked case for prosecution but “absolutely everything … Every scrap of paper that we have. Every photograph that was taken.”
This approach should not be condemned; it should be expanded upon. While cases like the Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin killings receive media attention, they aren’t actually representative of the way that most African-American young men interact with the justice system today. Instead, today’s criminal justice system mostly interacts with young Black men by putting them behind bars at an alarming rate. In recent years nearly one million African-Americans have been incarcerated at the federal, state or local levels. As many as one in three Black men born today will spend time incarcerated.
When they do leave prison, these men are largely unemployable and ineligible to vote, and often end up back in the system. This mass incarceration is destroying the Black community — it is, as Michelle Alexander writes, the New Jim Crow. And it depends on grand juries who act as a conveyor belt, quickly funneling tens of thousands of young Black men into prison.
The contrast with the Wilson grand jury is a stunning illustration of the racial double standards in criminal justice. We should undo that double standard by offering similar protections to every young Black man who is arrested in this country. If grand juries across the United States regularly deliberated for twelve weeks rather than twelve minutes, it would become physically impossible to incarcerate a million African-Americans. If every grand jury heard seventy hours of testimony from sixty witnesses over three months, it would mean the end of mass incarceration in America.
Of course, racial double standards have been lived reality throughout American history. But perhaps the sheer visibility of the grand jury in this case will call attention to the problems of how grand juries usually operate. Ironically, the Ferguson grand jury provides a model for how to end the over-incarceration of African-Americans today. I hope that a thousand more grand juries will follow its lead.
By: Kaimipono Wenger, Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California; The Daily Beast, November 30, 2014
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