“A New Test For Conservatives On Ferguson”: We All Should Care About The Pathologies That Affect Policing In America
Just when we thought the news out of Ferguson, MO was getting more hopeful, the Ferguson PD, apparently trying to confirm their reputation as America’s worst police department, has now endeavored to make this situation even more rancid than it already was. As expected, they finally released the name of the officer who killed Michael Brown on Saturday. They did not, however, release any information on the shooting. No description of the officer’s story, no synopsis of accounts of the multiple witnesses, nothing about the shooting at all.
But there was something else they released: a report on a robbery that occurred at a convenience store some time before. They now claim that Michael Brown was a suspect in that robbery. That they are saying this for the first time is more than a little strange. But it threatens to pull this case back into a familiar pattern, just when it looked like liberals and conservatives could agree on some things.
If you watched the news last night, you would have seen something incredibly heartening in Ferguson. After nights of tear gas and rubber bullets, law enforcement officers stood amid protesters, talking to them, listening to them, even hugging them. There was no violence. And it happened because the Missouri governor told the inept Ferguson police to stand the hell down, and brought in the state highway patrol to bring a little sense to the situation.
Meanwhile, there were signs that a cross-ideological effort to address some of the problems the case highlighted might be a real possibility. Even some conservatives were talking not just about the militarization of law enforcement, but also about the unequal treatment of black people by the police. Rand Paul wrote an op-ed about it. Conservative pundit Erick Erickson, not ordinarily anybody’s idea of a conciliator, wrote a piece essentially pleading with his white audience to care about this (“just because Michael Brown may not look like you should not immediately serve as an excuse to ignore the issues involved”).
That isn’t to say that some conservatives out there weren’t taking a different tack. Fox News’ coverage offered clips of looting on the first night after the shooting running on an endless loop, along with plenty of talk about “riots” and “violent protesters.” However, there was a division among conservatives, with more than a few rejecting the storyline of violent, threatening black people out of control.
But today, after the geniuses at the Ferguson PD put out their new information, plenty of conservatives on Twitter are saying, essentially, “See? Michael Brown was no innocent kid!” (If you want to read some, Jamelle Bouie has been retweeting them.) The same message is no doubt going to show up on talk radio this afternoon. The implication is clear: he had it coming.
We don’t yet know whether the person who took the cigars from that convenience store was Michael Brown. The police officer didn’t know either — if indeed the reason he confronted Brown was because Brown matched a description he had been given of the suspect. But the point is, that’s utterly irrelevant. Being suspected of shoplifting isn’t grounds for a roadside execution.
We have to give credit to the conservatives who were able to step out of the usual divide we so often see in cases like this one, and say clearly that we all should care about the pathologies that affect policing in America. Now that some of their brethren are going to be trying to convince the country that Michael Brown was a thug who got what he deserved, they’ll face a test. Can they stand up for the principles they’ve already articulated, even as the debate gets uglier? Let’s hope so.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, August 15, 2014
“Excessive Police Violence Must End”: Out of Control, Some Things Haven’t Changed Very Much
A Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in 1968, awakening now, would see TV news footage that was achingly familiar: An American city under siege as mostly white police officers, firing tear gas, face off against mostly black civilian protesters, some violent but most just angry. The two elections of a black president notwithstanding, some things haven’t changed very much.
Among those areas where little progress has been made is the criminal justice system, which still reeks of institutional racism and a plethora of human prejudices. Black men, especially, are viewed as dangerous, predatory, criminally inclined. They are not usually given the benefit of the doubt — not viewed as innocent until proven guilty — by white police officers, prosecutors or jurors.
That helps explain the anger that has exploded in Ferguson, Missouri, where black residents make up 67 percent of the population but black drivers accounted for more than 86 percent of the traffic stops last year, according to a report by the Missouri attorney general. Police in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, searched 12.1 percent of black drivers they stopped, compared to 6.9 percent for whites.
Are black drivers more likely to carry illegal substances? No. Contraband was found 22 percent of the time when the driver was black and 34 percent when the driver was white. The police department, by the way, has three blacks among its 53 officers, according to The Washington Post.
The troubling racial disparities do not absolve the looters, the rioters, the thugs who have attacked police and damaged property since protests began. There is no excuse for criminal conduct; moreover, it detracts from legitimate gripes with the police. Those who use the protests as cover to steal or toss Molotov cocktails should be arrested and prosecuted aggressively.
However, it’s also true that police officers, sworn to protect the public, have a duty to act without causing more harm. Let’s remember how the troubles began: An unarmed black man, 18-year-old Michael Brown, was shot dead by a police officer. What brought this young man to the cop’s attention? Was he breaking into a car or assaulting a passerby? Nope. He was walking in the street.
The police officer who shot Brown after ordering him to the sidewalk claims he was attacked and a struggle for his gun ensued. However, one of Brown’s friends, a witness to the episode, relates a very different version of events. President Obama, while calling for calm, said he had ordered the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate.
That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not nearly enough. If demands for justice come mostly from black voters, if a thorough investigation is seen as a predictable political response from a black U.S. attorney general, if outrage is voiced only by the talking heads at the liberal outpost of MSNBC, then there will be many more Fergusons to come. The overuse of force by heavily militarized police ought to concern every American, not just those most likely to be on the butt ends of police rifles.
It’s clear, no matter the details of Brown’s death, that local police have handled the aftermath poorly, inflaming tensions with excessive force. Heavily armed officers in desert camouflage have pointed large-caliber weapons at peaceful protestors. A couple of reporters were arrested last week because, apparently, they failed to move along quickly enough.
If there is any good news here, it’s this: The sense of outrage seems to have finally broken out of the usual bounds of race and partisanship. In an essay published in Time, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) wrote: “The outrage in Ferguson is understandable — though there is never an excuse for rioting or looting. There is a legitimate role for the police to keep the peace, but there should be a difference between a police response and a military response.”
Demilitarizing police departments won’t rid the criminal justice system of endemic racism, but it may help to curb the unnecessary, violent confrontations by officers who have forgotten their oaths to “protect and serve.” And that could keep a few more young black men alive.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, August 16, 2014
“What White Folks Get Wrong About White Privilege”: For White People, Society Pretty Much Works As Advertised, Not So For Others
Tal Fortgang, a Princeton undergraduate, has become something of a hero on the right for bravely standing up for embattled whites everywhere who have been told to “check their privilege” when discussing politics. In a head-shakingly dense essay that tracks his family’s own underdog roots as poor Jewish immigrants, Fortgang says, “[T]hey can’t be telling me that everything I’ve done with my life can be credited to the racist patriarchy holding my hand throughout my years of education and eventually guiding me into Princeton.”
Perhaps. But Fortgang’s essay doesn’t even begin to scratch at the problem of white privilege. On a purely functional level, society simply works for white folks in a way that it doesn’t for others.
On the extreme end, just imagine if a black family had confronted law enforcement with a heavily armed militia, a la Cliven Bundy. Would the feds have simply walked away? Would conservatives be comparing them to Mahatma Gandhi and George Washington?
On the more mundane side, just consider this brilliant and terrifying post by Tressie McMillan Cottom about being confronted by an angry cab driver, in which she has to weigh the imperative to call the police against the consequences of putting a black man in contact with the criminal justice system:
As a black woman, I am the keeper of many things. Chief among them is the hope of black men. A black man introduced into the criminal justice system for any violation, no matter how minor, becomes a son who cannot care for big momma, a brother who can’t hold down his siblings, a mate who can’t promise a paycheck, and a father who is a parent only when the penal system says he can be.
Black women calling the police on black men has a long, tragic history. That history isn’t just about protecting black mens’ futures. It’s also about how that leaves black women trapped between a rock and a hard place beneath an open sky.
Last night I called the police on a black man. [Some of us are brave]
I highly encourage you to read the rest — it’s bracing stuff. What jumped out for me was that I have never in my life been burdened with such an excruciating decision. I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to experience the extreme emotional stress of violent confrontation, while simultaneously calculating the risk of getting yet another black man pulled into the crushing vortex of the prison-industrial complex.
This is the kind of situation that makes Fortgang’s “check your privilege” complaint even more petty. It also simplifies the issue for liberals, who often speak of their privilege with a distinct air of hair shirt self-flagellation, as something that must be constantly apologized for. In many cases, the system simply needs to work for everyone in the way that white folks take for granted.
How to achieve that is a more complex question, of course. But the end goal is obvious. Nobody should have to worry about calling the police if some strange, threatening man is banging on the door. Nobody should have to worry whether that person will be punished wildly disproportionately, by being put away for half a lifetime, or beaten to death for “resisting arrest,” or shot and killed.
They should be able to call for help without a second’s hesitation. This is just a case of bringing everyone up to the same basic level.
Of course, American law enforcement is by no means scrupulously fair when it comes to white folks either, especially not poor ones. In fact, as Radley Balko and others have long been documenting, cops are increasingly treating everyone with the same preposterous hyper-aggressiveness that has traditionally been reserved for minorities. Even being the white mayor of a city won’t save you these days from the SWAT team doing a no-knock raid on the wrong house and shooting your dogs for no reason. Or consider Cecily McMillan, convicted of felony assault yesterday for elbowing a police officer when he allegedly violently groped her.
It’s all the more reason for whites to be wary of the cruelties of the U.S. criminal system — and to understand what white privilege really means.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, May 6, 2014
“Paul Ryan Is Victim-Blaming Men Now”: No, Men Don’t Lack A “Culture Of Work”, They Lack Decent Jobs
Last week Paul Ryan provoked an outcry when he claimed that poverty in America was in large part a product of a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working, just generations of men not even thinking of working, or learning the value and the culture of work.” Ever since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, the phrase “inner city” has been criticized as a GOP dog whistle for “black people,” so Ryan has rightly faced a backlash for his comments. (While claiming they were “inarticulate,” he insists his comments had “nothing to do with race whatsoever.”)
But another aspect of this much-remarked-on incident has drawn no notice: his focus on inner city men. Ryan’s comments seem to be based on an unstated assumption that what he calls the “culture of work” is especially relevant to men.
That assumption in turn is a product of an increasingly anachronistic and indeed reactionary world view, in which working for money is the epitome of what it means to be a man. More precisely, to be a man, on this view, is to work a “real job” — that is, a job that at least pays enough to allow him to be the provider, the breadwinner, for his family.
Ryan’s inner city men, who have never “learned the value and the culture of work,” are therefore not merely failing, but failing specifically as men, by failing to provide for their families.
The problem with this neat little morality tale is captured by what ought to be some startling statistics. Note that another unstated assumption behind comments such as Ryan’s is that the American economy actually produces enough decent-paying jobs to allow a reasonable number of Americans to have such jobs, as long as they embrace “the culture of work.”
To say this isn’t the case is an understatement. What is a “good” job, financially speaking? One which pays $50,000 per year? $40,000? $30,000? The latter figure, which represents take-home pay of less than $2000 per month, and which is only twice the minimum wage (which itself has declined sharply in real terms since the 1960s), is an extremely generous definition of what constitutes a decent-paying job.
But let’s use it anyway, to determine how many Americans of working age have such jobs. If we make a couple more unrealistically optimistic assumptions — that nobody under 18 or over 69 is working, and that no one has more than one job — the answer is: three out of 10.
Nearly 70 percent of American working-age adults do not have jobs that pay at least $30,000 per year, because there are only three such jobs for every 10 American adults between the ages of 18 and 69. In other words, the vast majority of working age Americans cannot possibly acquire decent-paying jobs, even if one defines a decent-paying job extremely broadly, because there aren’t nearly enough such jobs, not because people fail to embrace “the culture of work.”
Here’s another statistic that those who embrace the culture of math will find relevant to Ryan’s claims that inner city men in particular are poor because they have a bad attitude toward gainful employment: the labor force participation rate. This is the percentage of non-institutionalized adults who are either employed or actively seeking work.
The year Paul Ryan’s father reached working age (1948), 86 percent of American men, but only 32 percent of American women, were participating in the labor force. (A large portion of women who worked outside the home were poor, usually non-white, domestic workers. It was fairly unusual for a white middle class woman over 30 to work for income).
Since then, the labor force participation rate among men has declined by 18 percent, while the rate among women has nearly doubled. Another consequence of this social shift is that most men make less money than they did 40 years ago, even though the country as a whole is vastly wealthier: for 60 percent of men, real wages are actually lower now than they were in 1973.
Republicans love to talk about the wisdom of the free market in general and the irresistible laws of supply and demand in particular, but Ryan (who is currently touted as his party’s economic whiz kid) seems to be failing Econ 101. Poverty in America has nothing to do with the shiftless “inner city” men haunting Paul Ryan’s all-too vivid imagination, and everything to do with the fact that seven out of 10 American adults of working age can’t get a decent-paying job, because those jobs don’t exist.
In a culture in which it’s now assumed that every non-elderly adult who isn’t a full-time student or the primary caretaker of small children should be working for wages, this fact has especially devastating consequences for precisely those men whose plight Ryan addressed in such an “inarticulate” way.
By: Paul Campos, The Week, March 19, 2014
“Making The Discussion Relatable”: Contrary To Right Wing Wishes, There Is No Such Person As “Race-Baiter In Chief”
President Obama joined the national conversation on race Friday, addressing the death of Trayvon Martin, the slain Florida teenager whose main offense seems to have been his skin color. After a week of protests in the wake of shooter George Zimmerman’s acquittal, some of which lamentably turned violent, Obama spoke of the pain felt in the African American community.
“I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away,” the president said. He continued:
There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.
And there are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.
And he posed this question to Americans who aren’t open to challenging the “stand your ground” law that let Zimmerman shoot Martin in self-defense:
And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these ‘stand your ground’ laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?
The Atlantic’s prolific Ta-Neshi Coates has written frequently on the Martin case since news of Zimmerman’s acquittal broke Saturday, including this must-read: “The Banality of Richard Cohen and Racist Profiling.” Still, it’s “The Good, Racist People,” an Op-Ed he wrote for the New York Times in March, that I can’t stop thinking about. In it, he details an incident that happened at his neighborhood deli in New York, where an employee accused Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker of shoplifting and then frisked him.
“In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist,” Coates wrote, arguing that we live in a society that targets black people with “a kind of invisible violence.” He goes on:
The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years. […]
I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.
It’s hard to read Coates’ Op-Ed without your heart rising into your throat. But we should read it, all of it. And we should appreciate that Obama, our first black president, has joined the conversation on race with such a personal and thoughtful statement. Here’s the full transcript.
Some accuse Obama of race-baiting and stoking racial tensions. But that’s not fair, and it’s not what he did. What the president did was make himself relatable, and then he used his position of power to suggest a path forward for a “more perfect union.”
The people who object to Obama saying that we need to “bolster and reinforce our African American boys” are just in the way.
By: Alexandra LeTellier, The Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2013
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