“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
“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
“A Forgotten Community”: Long History Of Racial Tension Set The Stage For Ferguson Protests
As Dorothy Kaiser rides down the main streets of Ferguson, the town unfolds before her like a diary. This neighborhood is newer, that one is older, she raised her children in this house, and grew up in that one herself.
As far as anyone can tell, she has lived here longer than anyone. She’s 80 now, and moved to Ferguson at 2. She understands this place.
Moving west along one of the town’s central streets, Suburban, she points and recounts and smiles. She knows every doorway and mailbox.
Then, at a narrow spot in the road, she falls silent. The diary slams shut.
“I wouldn’t really know this area,” she says.
This is where the gate used to be, she says.
The one to keep black people out.
___
At the narrow spot there’s a sign: “Welcome to City of Kinloch.”
In a few hours, a grand jury will announce its decision not to indict a Ferguson police officer who shot an unarmed black man, touching off protests around the nation, with a violent start outside the Ferguson Police Department. The grand jury, and observers around the world, spent months examining the questions of what happened, and how. But it’s here, on Ferguson’s border with a forgotten community called Kinloch, where you can find the history that helps explain the explosive aftermath.
Kinloch is the oldest black town in Missouri, and possibly west of the Mississippi River, formed in the 1890s when a real estate developer found a loophole in laws against selling property to black people. Life there centered on Kinloch Airfield, a history-making place where President Teddy Roosevelt flew in a plane built by the Wright brothers, where the first control tower was built, where a man first parachuted out of a plane.
Larman Williams grew up in Kinloch. He is now 80, like his white counterpart, Dorothy Kaiser. Like her, he knew his town block by block, and remembers it as a vibrant place. “People were wonderful,” he said.
People were poor, sure, but they worked hard. The problem was that other than the airport, all the businesses — and so, the tax base — were based in Ferguson. Black people from Kinloch could cross into Ferguson during the day to work as maids or factory men. But they had to be back across the border by sunset, when the gates closed.
The ordinance ordering black people out of town was known as the “sundown law” and cities across the nation had similar rules. Ferguson’s was around into the 1940s. And if whites and blacks had little contact or understanding of each other, that wasn’t surprising.
“Oh, I was scared of them,” Kaiser said. “They were black. They were different.”
The fear climbed in Ferguson, Kaiser said, when Missouri changed its laws against selling property to black people. “There was anxiety,” she said. “They were coming.”
And no gate could stop them.
___
By the late 1960s, Williams had finished school — a master’s degree in education — and taken a job as a teacher. He and his wife, Geraldine, decided to buy a home of their own.
“I wanted to live in a nice house,” he said recently, laughing. “I had bought us a big new car, and wanted a house to go with it.”
The house he saw on Buckeye Drive in Ferguson seemed ideal. Lots of windows, a big yard that sloped down to the street. A “for sale” sign.
“So I called,” he said. But the real estate agent could tell he was black, on the phone. No sale.
So Williams found a way around it, by calling his pastor, who went to speak to the seller on his behalf and vouched for his character, his work ethic, his spirituality. And it worked. In 1968, Larman Williams became the first black man in his neighborhood — and probably all of Ferguson — to buy property. His three children were the first black students to go to the Ferguson school.
“It was important, yes it was,” Geraldine said. She and Williams have since divorced and he lives in a home for seniors. But she still lives in the little house on Buckeye, where the day before Thanksgiving she and her grandchildren cooked in the kitchen.
Buying a house there felt important. But it didn’t feel good. Neighbors stood off from them, at first. Other kids wouldn’t befriend theirs.
Then one day, things started to change. “My neighbor called out to me from his yard,” Williams said. “He wanted to apologize. He had seen humanity in us, with time. People started to see us as part of the neighborhood.”
___
By the 1980s, everything in Ferguson changed.
The Kinloch Airfield, which had grown to become the St. Louis airport, needed land as it expanded. Lots of land. So it began buying up homes in Kinloch, scarfing up property at prices above the going rate — creating a pressure shift between Kinloch and Ferguson. Suddenly black people had enormous incentive to leave Kinloch and cross the border permanently.
“You had people with enough money to buy houses they couldn’t have afforded otherwise,” said former Ferguson Mayor Brian Fletcher. “Houses they couldn’t afford to maintain. So things went down.”
At first, black residents wound up clustered in neighborhoods where it was easier for them to buy property. Then, in relatively short order, they became the predominant demographic in Ferguson. In 1990, roughly three-quarters of residents were white, and one quarter was black. In 20 years that ratio reversed.
Kinloch imploded. Its population dwindled to just a couple of hundred people.
As Ferguson became more black, its political structure stayed white. The specifics would later be picked apart on cable news: A white mayor. An almost exclusively white City Council. Among scores of police officers, only a couple who were not white.
Fletcher said the city struggled during his term to find black police officers. Ferguson wanted them, he said, but they could make much better money in wealthier neighboring towns with lower crime rates. “They got the cream of the crop,” Fletcher said. “We just couldn’t make the ratios.”
Fletcher now runs the “I Love Ferguson” shop downtown, where he sat recently surrounded by Ferguson souvenirs. He spoke with enormous passion about his town.
Yes, there was a problem, he said. But no one knew how to solve it.
“I mean, yeah, there was tension,” he said. He shrugged and held his shoulders hunched. “But there’s always going to be tension. Right?”
___
The night the grand jury announced its decision not to indict police Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown, people gathered on the street in front of the Ferguson Police Department.
The crowd organized itself in identifiable concentric rings. On the edges there were people who came for the spectacle, laughing, jubilant. Toward the middle were people concerned but not violent; they had come to speak out. And at the middle, pressed against the barricades, was a core of people who spat at the police facing them.
“How can you live with yourself?” yelled 55-year-old Marvin Skull, who wore a ski mask and a bulletproof vest. He singled out the lone black officer in the line of police. “Hey, there’s some trash over here! Why don’t you come tidy it up for your masters?”
At the center of the protest someone used a bullhorn to castigate the police, in the minutes before the grand jury announced its findings. A few seconds after the announcement, the bullhorn arced through the air, end over end, and crashed into the police’s riot shields. The time for words had given way.
The rest of the night played out on front pages and television screens around the world, as looters plundered stores and some businesses went up in flames.
In his tiny room at the senior center, Larman Williams sat among the signifiers of his life: his Bible, his diploma, a photo of his parents, a photo of his children. He watched as the events unspooled on his television.
At first Williams understood the protesters and their wants. He had lived in this town — with this police force — longer than any of them. But once the violence started, he said, he felt nothing but heartbreak.
Many protesters were young — born decades after blacks had to leave Ferguson by nightfall. Many weren’t even from Ferguson — agitators who poured into town from other parts of Missouri or other states.
“It’s not the way we do this,” he said. “It’s so much foolishness.”
He searched a moment for his eyeglasses on a table, and finally looked up.
“I’m tired,” he said.
By: Matthew Teague, The National Memo, December 1, 2014
“What Does ‘Black-On-Black Crime’ Have to Do With Ferguson?”: The Issue Isn’t Us; It’s How White America Views Blackness
The answer to the question posed in this post’s title is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not one thing. Nada. Zip. Zero.
The “Black-on-Black crime” moniker is racist rhetoric functioning under the guise of concern for the state of Black America. People of all races — Blacks included — seemingly love to discuss how not killing our own and being more respectable will alleviate the effects of racism.
It’s dangerous, however, to tell Black people to dress better, work harder or be respectable because it diverts attention from the gaze of the oppressor to the behavior of the disenfranchised. It showcases how deep anti-blackness runs within our society. This highly misinformed line of thinking negates the complex historical implications surrounding a white cop killing an unarmed Black teenager.
Authority has a long history of not respecting Black people so why some folks think becoming more respectable will solve anything is confusing. Our respect means nothing to those who see no value in Black life. They don’t care for or want our respect — they want our compliance. They want our submission.
“Black-on-Black crime” highlights the fear surrounding Black masculinity, the lack of Black femininity, and perceived inherent Black criminality. And, when Black people are shamed for committing the same crimes at almost the same rates as whites, it illustrates how much the white supremacist gaze has been internalized.
The term, which originated in the 1980s, cites Black people as a problem as opposed to poverty, poor educational opportunities, proximity and other factors that lead to increased crime rates within all communities — regardless of color.
Research conducted by David Wilson explains how the media picked up on a new wave of violence within Black communities — which was undoubtedly fueled by job loss, debased identity and “rampant physical decay”– and constructed the misperception that intraracial crime was a malady only plaguing Black America.
But racial exclusivity is apparent in the majority of violent crimes. Around 91 percent of Black victims are murdered by Black offenders while 83 percent of white victims are killed by another white person, based on the most recent FBI homicide statistics.
The “Black-on-Black” crime argument alludes that there’s nothing normal about Black intraracial crime. “White-on-white” violence is simply called crime. Why is Black intraracial violence depicted as some rare Pokémon in crime discussions when it is only slightly more prevalent?
Flawed white perception is not assuaged is these talks — Black behavior is, instead, attacked. This places Black folk in a “Catch 22.” No matter how “respectable” we are or become, as long as our skin is Black we will never amount to white standards though we are expected to be a reflection of them.
Respectability will never be a solution because the issue isn’t us; it’s how white America views blackness.
Mike Brown’s death, and the subsequent lack of justice, isn’t about the myth of “Black-on-Black crime.” It’s about how Blacks are disproportionately, and often unjustly, targeted by law enforcement. It’s about how systemic racism frames the way in which Black people, especially men, are viewed. It’s about how Black corpses are criminalized and put on trial but their white killers often go unindicted.
The circumstances surrounding Mike Brown’s death represent a much larger racially oppressive government and police structure that excuses white killers but refuses to humanize black victims due to the inherent guilt attributed to black people and blackness.
And when you tell Black people to be more respectable and not kill one another, you’re identifying us as savage brutes who deserve to be gunned down due to this assumed lack of humanity.
The protests in Ferguson do not show the supposed intrinsic animalistic nature of Black people. They showcase a community — and reflect a nation of people — tired of constantly being at the mercy of a justice system that sees no value in their livelihood.
Ferguson is illustrating what happens when people are fed up with being targeted. Ferguson is spearheading a movement. Stop detracting from that with baseless “Black-on-Black crime” discussions.
By: Julia Craven, The Blog, The Huffington Post, November 30, 2014
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