“We Deserve Good Policing”: Legal Or Not, ‘Warrior Policing Mentality’ Leads To Deadly Outcomes
When I first heard about the arrest and subsequent death of Sandra Bland in Texas after she apparently tried to get out of the way of a police vehicle and failed to signal a lane change, I immediately thought of the University of South Carolina law professor (and ex-cop) Seth Stoughton’s distinction between the “warrior” and “guardian” models of policing, as explained here at TMS a while back.
So I was pleased to see that TPM recruited Stoughton to watch the daschcam video of the encounter between Texas trooper Brian Encinia and Bland and offer his commentary.
He concludes that Encinio did nothing illegal–but also avoided several opportunities to de-escalate the situation, pretty clearly because he thought it was important to have Bland acknowledge his authority. And so an encounter that might have been brief and harmless–it seems Encinio intended to give Bland a mere warning until she started acting uppity–turned confrontational, violent, and eventually, for Bland, lethal.
Concludes Stoughton:
When Encinia ordered Bland to exit her vehicle, she refused. “I don’t have to step out of my car.” Rather than handling the remainder of the stop with her sitting in the car, or explaining why he wanted her to step out of the car, or attempting to obtain her cooperation, or calmly explaining the law, Encinia simply invoked his legal authority, shouting at one point, “I gave you a lawful order.” He was right. It was lawful. And when Bland did not obey, she was refusing a lawful order, a crime under Texas law. Her arrest, like the confrontations that led up to it, may have been lawful, but it was entirely avoidable had Encinia chosen a different approach.
We all deserve more than legal policing. We deserve good policing.
Now it’s entirely possible Encinio was strictly following his training, which, as Stoughton has noted in the past, is often based on the “warrior model” notion that every citizen is a potential cop-killer and every encounter a potential shoot-out, making it incumbent on the officer to “stay in charge” from the first moment. But if this isn’t a situation where bad policing can be blamed on a “bad cop,” it’s all the more reason to examine our policies to make sure certain Americans don’t have to assume–as Sandra Bland seemed to fear, accurately–that minor traffic offenses can turn deadly.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 24, 2015
“Change Is Upon Them, Whether They Like It Or Not”: For Aging GOP Voters, The Times They Are A-Changin’
Donald Trump will not be president of these United States, no matter the preferences of a substantial number of the Republican Party’s most loyal voters. Indeed, he will probably be a punchline by this time next year, even if he pursues the presidency as an independent.
For now, though, the real estate mogul and reality-TV darling is enjoying a moment aloft the polls as the GOP’s man to beat. A recent Washington Post survey showed him as the favorite of 24 percent of registered Republicans and GOP-leaning voters.
In that poll, Trump garnered nearly twice as much support as his nearest rival, Scott Walker, who was the top candidate of just 13 percent. Though Trump’s numbers could drop any day given his propensity for saying dumb things, his appeal so far seems to guarantee him a spot on the stage for the first primary debate, which will take place on Aug. 6.
Needless to say, GOP strategists are tearing their hair out, hardly believing their bad luck. After a grueling series of primary debates damaged their brand in the 2012 presidential cycle, they tried to rein them in, hoping to show voters a cast of serious and sober candidates.
But the superficial changes — including cutting the number of primary debates — don’t get to the much larger problem afflicting the Republican Party: Its strategists have spent decades appealing to the worst instincts of their constituents, and they are now reaping what they’ve sown. It’s the voters, after all, who are keeping Trump’s hopes alive.
Those voters have been treated to years of bombast and propaganda as Republican politicians pandered to their fears, their prejudices, their hatreds. The late Lee Atwater confessed that GOP pols perfected a strategy of playing to the bigotry of whites uncomfortable with the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. Too savvy to denigrate black Americans directly, they used a coded language, Atwater said in an interview: “… You’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites …”
That vile Southern strategy was never retired. It was simply given a 2.0 upgrade that denounces Islam, defames Mexicans and slanders gays and lesbians. Oh, and savages President Obama.
Having been fed that drivel for half a century, aging GOP voters are hardly going to suddenly surrender their gospel truths. Trump, a narcissistic opportunist, knows that, so he’s gone into overdrive coddling their prejudices, saying, among other things, that Mexico is sending to the United States “rapists” and drug smugglers. Guess what? His incendiary rhetoric has catapulted him to the top of the GOP primary heap.
No, Trump’s appeal won’t last. But the prejudices that are animating so many GOP primary voters are more enduring. And that’s where party leaders need to start their work.
They could begin with Roger Ailes, the former GOP strategist who heads Fox News, the premier right-wing communications network. His talking heads regularly pump out the most bigoted ideas, feeding an audience anxious to have its antediluvian views validated. (GOP bigwigs might also try talking to radio talkmeister Rush Limbaugh, but he’s likely a hopeless cause.) If Ailes cares about anything other than ratings, he’ll dial back the paranoia.
Then, the Republicans’ biggest names — Mitch McConnell, are you listening? — need to speak frankly to their constituents. Many of them are fearful of a country whose demographics are changing quickly. They can’t quite get their bearings with a black man in the Oval Office, a mosque under construction across town, and a lesbian couple across the street. As an aging (and angry) white Southern reader once said to me: “I’m being told that everything I was taught as a child is wrong!”
OK, I understand that change is difficult, challenging, disorienting. That’s especially true if the changes may make it harder for you to maintain your position at the top of the economic and social ladder.
But the nation, happily, has long been about the business of perfecting the union, coming closer to its creed of equality for all. So change is upon them, whether they like it or not. If they can’t learn to accept it, the GOP will remain shut out of the White House.
By:Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, July 25, 2015
“A Stark Difference”: Republicans Fear Their Activist Base. Democrats Don’t
We’ve gotten so used to Republican infighting over the last few years that it would have been easy to forget that historically it’s the Democrats who have been the most consumed by internecine arguments. Over the weekend we got a reminder, as a group of protesters disrupted a forum at the Netroots Nation gathering of liberal activists where Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley were speaking. By all accounts, neither Sanders nor O’Malley handled it particularly well.
But if we look at this event in combination with what’s happening on the Republican side, we can see the stark differences in the relationship of each side’s base, its activists, and its candidates.
If you want a moment-by-moment account of the event, I’d recommend this one from Eclectablog or Dara Lind’s insightful analysis of the different forces at play. If the protesters wanted to make the point that Sanders in particular is not spending enough time talking about racial injustice, then he did their work for them by reacting in a somewhat combative way and trying to forge ahead with what he wanted to say about economics. But it’s hard to avoid this question: Is Bernie Sanders the guy you want to be protesting? To what end?
I say that not because Sanders has a strong record on civil rights, though he does. And if the complaint is that Sanders isn’t talking about race as much as he could, well that’s true, too. The truth is that however good his intentions, Bernie Sanders is a longtime Democratic politician who has never really needed the support of the single most important Democratic constituency, African-Americans. He represents the whitest state in the union — only one percent of Vermonters are black. So he may not have the instinctive feel for what African-Americans care about that another politician who had of necessity spent years courting them and working with them would have developed.
But you know who does have that instinctive feel? Hillary Clinton. She spent her political life in Arkansas and New York, where there are plenty of African-Americans. She’s spent more Sundays in black churches than you can count. Toni Morrison famously called her husband the first black president. Yes, there was plenty of tension and ill feelings when black voters left her and got behind Barack Obama in 2008, but I promise you that they’ll be with her in 2016.
But Clinton didn’t attend Netroots Nation this year, and Sanders and O’Malley did, so they’re the ones who got protested, for little reason other than the fact that they were handy. And while they suffered some discomfort, one thing the protesters weren’t demanding was that Democrats vote against either one of them in the primaries. In fact, I’m sure that if you asked the protesters what primary voters should do, they’d say that it’s not their real concern — elections aren’t the point.
Which is where the contrast with Republicans couldn’t be more stark. The Tea Party started just as much as a movement of self-styled outsiders, but unlike activists on the left, they pursued an inside strategy from the outset, one focused clearly on elections. They saw the path to achieving their goals running through Congress and the White House, and they all but took over their party by mounting successful primary challenges to Republican incumbents. How many prominent Democratic incumbents have faced the same kind of strong grassroots challenge from the left in recent years? There was Joe Lieberman, who was beaten in the 2006 Democratic primary in Connecticut by Ned Lamont. But apart from a backbench House member here and there, that’s about it.
In contrast, Republican activists have gotten one prominent scalp after another, from incumbent senators like Richard Lugar and Bob Bennett to important House members like Eric Cantor. The result is that Republican politicians regard their base with barely-disguised terror. You can see it in how they’ve approached Donald Trump, a spectacular buffoon who has tied the party in knots. Even when he was saying one bigoted thing after another about the demographic group the party desperately needs if it’s ever to win back the White House, his opponents stepped gingerly around him, lest they offend his supporters. It was only after Trump’s remarks about John McCain’s war record (which, frankly, he sort of got baited into making) gave them an excuse removed from any policy area that most of them finally started criticizing him.
Even if Trump pulled out of the race tomorrow (sorry, Republicans, no such luck), the rest of the candidates would still operate from fear of their base, which means that activist conservatives will be able to extract commitments from the candidates on the issues that they care about. You can argue that in the long run this hurts the GOP by radicalizing the party and making its presidential candidates unelectable, and you’d probably be right, but in the short run, it probably feels to those conservative activists like success.
The situation on the Democratic side isn’t the same at all. The activists involved in Black Lives Matter and similar efforts would say that they don’t want just to become players in the Democratic Party, because they’re looking to create change on entrenched issues with roots that go back centuries. And they might be right that an outside strategy will be more effective at achieving that change than a strategy focused on making gains within the party. After all, you can argue that while tea partiers have almost taken over the GOP, they’ve gotten very little of the substantive change they wanted — the Affordable Care Act lives, Barack Obama got reelected, and history keeps marching forward despite their efforts, even if they’ve managed to stop things like comprehensive immigration reform.
On the other hand, circumstances will eventually produce another Republican president, even if it isn’t next year or four years after that. And when that president gets elected, the conservative activists will come to collect on the commitments he made.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 20, 2015
“Every Candidate Should Have A Plan”: Structural Racism Needs To Be A Presidential Campaign Issue
This year, as with every other year, nearly every presidential candidate is white, with the only exceptions being long shots in the mushrooming Republican field. Most candidates are making at least rhetorical efforts to present themselves as allies in the increasingly amplified struggle for black liberation. Hillary Clinton has spoken forcefully of a universal voter registration plan, and her husband told the NAACP this week that the 1994 crime law he signed in his first term as president “made the problem worse,” jailing too many for too long. Rand Paul, an advocate of prison sentencing reform, has embraced Martin Luther King, Jr.’s frame of “two Americas.” Last month, Ben Carson, the only black candidate, published an op-ed after the Charleston church murders, writing, “Not everything is about race in this country. But when it is about race, then it just is.” On July 2, Rick Perry made a speech that is as close to an apology to black voters for ignoring them as a Republican may deliver this entire election season.
Republicans aren’t stopping there. They announced a “Committed to Community” initiative earlier this week, a partnership with black broadcasting giant Radio One to make a direct appeal to African American voters, who turned out at a higher percentage than white voters in 2012. They may very well be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but you’ll forgive me if I have my doubts that they suddenly realize, after generations of the “Southern Strategy,” that black voters matter.
I suspect it isn’t the party’s sudden rediscovery of a conscience that’s behind this. I think it’s this past year. Friday marks one year since NYPD police officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner on a Staten Island sidewalk. The death of the 43-year-old father of six from a supposedly prohibited chokehold was captured on oft-played video, and his pleading— “I can’t breathe!” over and over, until he suffocated—became a mantra that energized a movement. #BlackLivesMatter dates back to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, but Garner’s death last July began a year in which Americans unaware of how fragile and frightening living a black life can be could no longer ignore reality. And it set a template for how we would come to digest all of the violence and injustices done in silent service of structural racism, which continues to survive as the deaths mount.
Sandra Bland took a road trip to Texas last week to take a job, and instead became a hashtag. It happened over the course of a weekend. This is a process we’re terribly familiar with: A black person finds her or himself in an encounter with police that proves injurious, harassing, or, all too often, fatal—and if we’re lucky, someone has a camera on it. It has become formulaic.
A bystander took video of the 28-year-old Chicago native’s Friday arrest for allegedly not signaling before making a lane change. Bland, who reportedly had just landed a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, is heard questioning their rough treatment, which went unreported by the arresting officers. “You just slammed my head into the ground,” she tells an officer. “Do you not even care about that? I can’t even hear!”
Police found Bland dead in her jail cell on Monday morning, allegedly suffocated by a garbage bag. There are a lot of practical reasons to question the law enforcement narrative on this, but a year of seeing what we’ve seen is more than enough to make anyone suspicious not only of what the cops say, but about whether any of them will ever suffer any consequences for it.
We’ve become familiar with this pattern because abuse and death resonates, first across social media and then ricocheting through traditional media with an urgency that can feel discombobulating to those unaccustomed to seeing black lives mattering to people who aren’t living them. Increased media attention means people remember names. Before they would have forgotten them or not even bothered to learn. Justice is sought where shoulders once simply shrugged. Media organizations like the Guardian and the Washington Post count those killed by police, doing the job a government should.
We haven’t gotten the candidate statements on Bland’s case yet, but they’ll come. The remarks will be taciturn and consoling, and will call vaguely for change. But we need to demand more from each and every presidential candidate, and they will need to offer more than rhetoric. The violence has not slowed. The inequity has not lessened. It’s just lain bare with each new death, with every numbing video. We’ll never end racism and racial discrimination. But we can make policies to end the ways racism infects the very structure of American life. Those policies need to be on the platform of every presidential candidate.
If you look at a typical presidential campaign site under a heading like “Issues,” you’ll see that there isn’t a bullet point that lists a candidate’s plans to attack the complicated issue of structural racism with specific steps. This should change. And in this, candidates can take a lesson from President Obama.
His administration, even as it nears its end, recently offered an example of how a politician can chalk up wins against structural racism. Two weeks ago, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro announced that previously unenforced Fair Housing Act rules would now become requirements. As the Los Angeles Times reported, HUD will now require towns and cities to study patterns of segregation and how they are linked to access to jobs, high-quality schools, and public transportation—then submit specific goals for improving fair access to these resources. This is a policy, not a speech.
It is not an empty appeal to voters. It is not telling them, as Perry did, that the poor, brutalized, and marginalized amongst us are that way because they had faulty political leadership. That is avoidance, perpetrated by people who would have us mistake political courage for actual courage.
Structural racism needs to be a campaign issue. It needs to be something every 2016 candidate is asked about on the trail, in debates, in town halls, and hell, even at the local ice cream shop. Even if they can’t offer firm plans this summer, someone running to be the de facto leader of her or his party should at lease seize the opportunity to shape the Democratic or Republican agenda on this issue.
If ending structural racism is a priority for either party, there is no need to dance around the issue. Because right now, the most a lot of families can hope for their loved ones is that they manage to navigate a country that clearly doesn’t care much for their bodies or their lives. If they can’t, the only kind of justice they’ll see is financial. (On Monday, Garner’s family reached a settlement with New York City for $5.9 million.)
A year after Eric Garner’s death and mere days after Sandra Bland’s, our presidential candidates cannot deny America’s racial realities. If you’re running for president, you can no longer plead ignorance. You’ll have to confront it.
By: Jamil Smith, Senior Editor, The New Republic, July 17, 2015
“David Brooks Will Never Get It”: Isn’t The New York Times Embarrassed By This Lazy Ignorance?
The New York Times’ resident moralizer David Brooks is at it again. This time his lecture podium is pointed at Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the new memoir “Between the World and Me.” Coates’ book, mostly a meditation on race in America, is written as a series of open letters to his teenage son. Let me confess now: I haven’t yet read Coates’ book, though I’ve read much of his writings on race. Few write with the force and clarity that Coates does, and fewer still write about topics as urgent as race and power.
David Brooks isn’t convinced, however. He’s not sure if Coates, a black man from Baltimore chronicling his own life, really understands “the black male experience.” No, Brooks thinks Coates is too angry, too pessimistic about America’s past, too fatalistic about its future. First, it’s worth noting that Coates isn’t talking to the David Brookses of the world. His letters are addressed to his son and to black Americans, not to cloistered elites writing for the country’s most prestigious paper.
In any case, Brooks begins, as he often does, with a kind of faux-olive branch, a perfunctory offering: “The last year has been an education for white people,” he writes. “There has been a depth, power and richness to the African-American conversation about Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings that has been humbling and instructive.” Brooks, of course, promptly commends Coates for his “contribution to that public education.”
But then, right on cue, Brooks begins to miss the point of the person at whom his lecture is aimed. He’s especially miffed at Coates’ dismissal of the American dream as a quaint fantasy built on the backs of enslaved black people. Brooks writes the following:
“You write to your son, ‘Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.’ The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below. If there were no black bodies to oppress, the affluent Dreamers ‘would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.’
Brooks finds this critique “disturbing.” He tells Coates directly (Brooks’ Op-Ed is also written as an open letter — surely a failed attempt at cleverness): “I think you distort American history.” By distort Brooks means that Coates is too consumed with the ugly parts — the slavery, the lynching, the plunder, the redlining, the false imprisonment and so on. For Brooks, all this brooding over the past and its impact on the present obscures the obvious (and more pleasant) truth, namely that “America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life…the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise.” As for that slavery business, sure, it was horrible, but “There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K.”
Brooks’ point, which no one disputes and which is obvious in any event, is that America isn’t all bad; that injustice is inherent in America, but doesn’t come “close to the totality of America.” Fair enough. But Coates’ argument seems to be much more complex than that. At least in his other writings, particularly his essay on reparations, Coates argues that much of what makes America great was born of everything that made it unjust; and that awareness of this truth depends, more often than not, on which side of the line you fall.
Brooks doesn’t really want to hear that, though. He doesn’t want to hear that our distant sins aren’t really distant at all; that the legacy of racism stretches into the present; that Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston are part of a living history from which we can’t divorce ourselves. Brooks, for instance, says he finds “the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.” He finds it inadequate, in part, because he sees events like Baltimore in a vacuum, ignoring all the antecedent causes that led to it. This is precisely the error people like Coates are exposing. Brooks’ privileged perch affords him the luxury of not understanding how these things are connected; they enter his life only as abstractions, not concrete truths. I imagine it’s far less abstract for a black man from Baltimore, or for his teenage son, or for anyone else encumbered by the past.
How easy it must be for Brooks to focus on tomorrow, to write in earnest that we can “abandon old wrongs and transcend old sins for the sake of better tomorrow.” Those untouched by the pangs of history find it easier to dismiss, I suppose. But Coates is talking about the present as much as he is the past. Brooks, despite making the appropriate gestures, is blind to this part of Coates’ argument. He does not — and apparently cannot — see how our past defines our present and constrains our future.
Brooks rarely makes the effort to see the world from the perspective of the other. When he’s writing about poverty or middle-class virtues or racism, his analysis is always removed, abstract and condescending.
Today’s column continues that tradition in fine form.
By: Sean Illing, Salon, July 17, 2015
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