“It’s Not Just Ferguson – It’s All Of America”: The Drift Towards Police As Warrior Cops Instead Of Guardians Of The People
There’s a very good chance that your local police arrest black Americans at a rate more disproportional than in Ferguson, MO, where the police killing of unarmed Michael Brown unleashed decades of anger over police abuse.
The awful truth is that Ferguson Police Department’s nearly 3-to-1 disparity in arresting blacks is well below the norm in many cities and towns, including those far north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
With a grand jury poised to decide any day now whether the white officer who shot Brown six times will be indicted — which seems unlikely — new protests will focus attention on Ferguson. But what we really need is a debate about the role of police, their training and their discretion.
We need to restore the idea of police as guardians. We must bring an end to the changes that libertarian journalist Radley Balko details in his important book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces
Reporters for USA Today brought to light the disproportionate arrest rates. They analyzed Uniform Crime Report data that local police departments sent to the FBI for 2011 and 2012.
Only 173 of 3,538 police departments arrested blacks at disproportionately low rates, while Ferguson PD and 1,581 other departments arrested blacks at rates significantly higher than their share of the local population.
In big cities like tolerant and cosmopolitan San Francisco and small ones like Duluth, the data reveal arrest rates by race far more troubling than those in Ferguson. In 70 cities from coast to coast, police arrest black people at 10 times the rate of people who are not black.
These numbers help explain the palpable resentment of young black men and the fears of parents.
Disparate arrest rates tell us that the legacy of slavery is far from over, no matter how blind our Supreme Court is with its decisions on voting, procedural rights and executions.
Ferguson is part of a subtle new racist phenomenon, a modern variation on “sundown towns,” which literally posted crude signs telling blacks not to be around after dark.
Back when Ferguson was mostly a white working-class town, the police chained a street leading to a neighboring black community to make a point about who belonged and who was unwelcome. Now Ferguson is mostly black, but its elected leaders and its police force are almost all white.
Today’s tactics of oppression and racial profiling defile our Constitution and waste taxpayer money.
Ezekiel Edwards, who runs the American Civil Liberties Union’s Criminal Law Reform Project, told USA Today, “We shouldn’t continue to see this kind of staggering disparity wherever we look.”
The question to ask ourselves is whether we look at all.
This disparity in arrests occurs even in Rochester, New York, which before the Civil War was among the few places that gave runaway slaves refuge and became the adopted home of the most famous among them, Frederick Douglass, and his abolitionist newspaper The North Star.
Blacks in Rochester were 2.4 times more likely to be arrested than whites in 2011 and 2012, the official data show. The Rochester city rates may reflect an ongoing gang war fueled by drug dealing in the fifth poorest city in America. But what about the surrounding suburbs, where arrest rates were vastly out of proportion?
I live five blocks south of the Rochester city line in the town of Brighton, a community of highly educated people from around the world and known for social consciousness. Brighton arrests black people at 6.4 times their share of the population, more than twice the rate of Ferguson, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported.
One could excuse that by saying, who knew? But that is just an excuse.
The right questions: Why didn’t we know? What public purpose is being served by these arrests? Do the arrests have a solid basis or do they serve to harass? Who was arrested and what for? Are these arrests for serious crimes or petty reasons? How many of these arrests result in convictions? Do these arrests help justify the current size — and expense — of our police force? Do people of color believe the police want them to feel unwelcome?
After that comes the most important question, the one that is needed to move us from thought to action: What will we do about this?
Arrest rates are an indicator, not a diagnosis, of social ills. Reading the comments in several Gannett newspapers (which include USA Today as a separate section), it is clear many people assume a direct correlation between arrests and criminal activity. However, the problem may be not with those arrested, but with the police.
We imbue police officers with enormous discretion, as exhaustively detailed in six years of litigation over the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration believed it was reducing crime by detaining young non-white males, though it would never put it quite that way. If such strategies worked, then why didn’t NYPD harass the Wall Street bankers whose white-collar crimes sank the economy six years ago?
Curiously missing from the stop-and-frisk debate was whether it was nothing more than featherbedding; creating needless work to justify the size of the NYPD and its outsized overtime costs.
Eric T. Schneiderman, the state attorney general, issued a report examining 150,000 NYPD arrests from 2009 through 2012. Just one in 33 arrests resulted in a conviction of any kind, and just 1 in 1,000 in a conviction for a violent crime. But processing all those arrests created statistics that the NYPD used to assert that officers were being productive — not to mention earning overtime for end-of-shift collars.
You can examine the NYPD’s own data on stop-and-frisk from 2003 through 2013. In that last year police stopped, questioned, and frisked about 2,200 people per day – more than seven times as many as in 2002.
To get an idea of why so many white Americans see police differently from so many black Americans, read this very interesting and simple matrix showing differences in arrest rates between an area near New York University and a poor neighborhood near Yankee Stadium.
Current New York City mayor Bill de Blasio settled the case in January 2014 with a promise to stop the excessive use of stop-and-frisk.
Favoritism by police is not always racial. It can by favoritism for celebrities, as we’ve seen in the recent New York Times exposés of apparently criminal conduct by college and National Football League players who assaulted women, mistreated children and fled traffic accidents they caused. The victims discovered that the police were indeed guardians – of the offenders.
Abundant signs exist that police across America tend to treat those not privileged with white skin – and affluence – with greater suspicion.
How else to explain the story a worried Rochester executive tells? Several times a month his adult son, who works into the night, gets pulled over on the way home. As best the family can tell, some cops see reasonable cause for a stop in these facts: young black male in expensive new car driving alone after midnight.
How, other than racism, to explain a daytime traffic stop on Sunset Boulevard in which a middle-aged black man in a Rolls Royce, his daughters in the back seat, was ordered out at gunpoint? Without permission, officers ransacked his leather satchel until they found something that caused them fear and alarm – a badge identifying the driver as No. 3 in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.
Most white Americans have never had a cop pull them over for no reason except that they seemed out of place, as the late Johnny Cochran did in 1979. I have. In Beverly Hills and in Longport, NJ, officers whose initial demeanor was hostile pulled me over in broad daylight. The basis of their suspicions? My Toyota Corolla, its paint dulled by the years, looked out of place in towns whose residents drive luxury cars.
Police who instill fear are not police who catch bad guys, because it is citizens informing the police who solve crimes. Police who see “black skin” and “criminal” as synonymous need to be fired. And the burden for addressing these problems should fall squarely where it belongs – on the white majority whose values, and blindness, allow the drift towards police as warrior cops instead of guardians of the people.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, November 20, 2014
“Peek-A-Boo”: The Police Can’t Wait To Get Their Hands On Augmented Reality
Now that New York City is under the rule of a socialist dictator, the “stop and frisk” method of policing, in which hundreds of thousands of citizens who brazenly walked the streets while in a state of non-whiteness were subjected to questioning, delay, and some unfriendly touching, has come to an end. But what if the cops didn’t even need to stop you to give you a virtual pat down?
Imagine this: You walk by a police officer and notice that he’s wearing a pair of odd-looking glasses, which he points in your direction. Almost instantly, a facial recognition program visible in those glasses identifies you, pulls up your file, and informs him that though you have a parking ticket you haven’t yet paid, there are no arrest warrants outstanding for you. A combination of infrared and hopefully non-cancer-causing scanning sensors tells him that you’ve got keys and change in your pockets, but nothing that looks like a gun or a knife, so he lets you pass. That may have all happened without you even noticing.
We’ve seen these kinds of things in science fiction for a while, but they’re getting very close to becoming a reality, like within-the-next decade close. Which is why it isn’t too surprising that the New York Police Department is exploring what it can do with Google Glass, to bring augmented reality to the cop on the beat. “We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we’re trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes,” said one NYPD official.
There isn’t anything to be afraid of—yet. The capabilities of augmented reality for law enforcement are, at the moment, very limited. But they won’t be for long. There are no real large leaps in technology necessary to get from where we are now to where the cops would like to go—basically all you need is some steady and inevitable improvements in the sensors, the software they rely on, and the databases that integrate and process the information.
There are a couple of important things to keep in mind as this technology matures. First, law enforcement agencies are going to want them, and bad. Just imagine how much easier it would make their jobs if they could identify every person they come across as either a civilian with a clean record or a potentially dangerous criminal who needs a second look. Second, when privacy advocates raise objections, they’re going to make persuasive arguments for why they should be allowed to use the technology. One scenario they like to bring up is a cop chasing a suspect into an abandoned warehouse, whereupon she immediately sees the blueprint of the warehouse to identify possible exits, then switches to infrared to locate the suspect hiding behind a cabinet. Got him! Or, they’ll say, what about if they get a call about a suspect wielding a knife in a parking lot, they get there, scan and identify him, and learn his entire history of mental illness; then they can call in their colleagues who are trained to deal with that kind of suspect, instead of shooting him.
There are going to be controversies and lawsuits about the details, sorting out what kinds of sensors cops will be allowed to use and when. But law enforcement is almost certainly going to win the argument, first because people usually opt for safety at the expense of privacy, and second because at least parts of what the law enforcement officials claim will have genuine merit. It really will make some kinds of policing more efficient and effective. It really will catch some criminals. Getting scanned by a cop wearing augmented reality glasses as you walk by him is certainly preferable to getting slammed against a wall and frisked. And by the time we’ve fully considered whether the privacy invasion is too high a price to pay, it’ll be firmly in place and there’ll be no going back.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 7, 2014
“A Powerful Legacy”: Positive Steps On Stop And Frisk, Drug Arrests
For all who believe in colorblind justice — and want to see fewer African American and Hispanic men caught up in the system — there are two recent items of good news: a judge’s ruling ordering changes in New York’s “stop-and-frisk” policy and Attorney General Eric Holder’s initiative to keep nonviolent drug offenders out of prison.
First, stop-and-frisk. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is having a hissy fit over U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin’s finding that the policy amounted to “indirect racial profiling.” On his weekly radio show, he wouldn’t even say Scheindlin’s name, calling her “some woman” who knows “absolutely zero” about policing. In an op-ed for The Post, Bloomberg went so far as to accuse Scheindlin of being “ideologically driven.”
If and when Bloomberg calms down, I’d like to ask him the fundamental question posed — not in these words, of course — by Scheindlin’s ruling: Would it kill you to stop and frisk some white guys, too?
Blacks and Hispanics make up about half of New York City’s population but were targeted in 87 percent of the 532,911 “stops” last year under Bloomberg’s policy, which encourages police to detain and search individuals if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person “committed, is committing, or is about to commit” a crime. The reason most often cited for a stop is that the individual made “furtive” movements.
In nine out of 10 cases, the person is stopped — and sometimes frisked — but no evidence is found of any offense. Bloomberg argues that this kind of proactive policing actually prevents crime, and he credits stop-and-frisk for making New York the safest big city in the country.
I’m all for safe streets. I’m also aware that there is no consensus crediting stop-and-frisk with any impact on the crime rate, but I’m willing to accept the premise that an active police presence can deter criminals. My problem is that African Americans and Hispanics are being singled out disproportionately for these arbitrary searches.
Bloomberg says this is because most violent crime occurs in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, with black and Hispanic victims. By all means, police should continue walking and cruising these beats. But the numbers indicate that African Americans and Hispanics are being given too much stop-and-frisk scrutiny — and that whites are being given too little.
According to an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union, blacks and Hispanics who are stopped are more likely than whites to be frisked. But just 2 percent of blacks and Hispanics who are frisked are discovered to be carrying weapons, while 4 percent of whites who are frisked have weapons. So if the aim is to find illegal guns, police should frisk more whites.
Why such fuss over a few minutes of inconvenience and indignity? Because blacks and Hispanics who come into contact with the criminal justice system for any reason are more likely to be arrested, charged and convicted than whites and are likely to serve longer prison sentences.
More than 26,000 stops were made last year for alleged marijuana offenses, for example; 61 percent were of African Americans and only 9 percent were of whites. But surveys show that whites are equally or more likely than blacks to be marijuana users. Police don’t find white potheads because they’re not looking for them.
We know that nationwide, according to federal figures, African Americans are four times as likely as whites to be arrested, charged and imprisoned for minor drug offenses. Once young black and Hispanic men enter the criminal justice system, too often they become trapped in a loop of incarceration, release, unemployment and recidivism.
On the national level, Holder has taken direct aim at this vicious cycle with the announcement last week that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders will no longer face federal charges that carry long mandatory prison sentences.
Holder is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors and also supporting legislation that has received bipartisan support in the Senate, where some conservatives now see excessive prison terms as a waste of money.
“We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate, not merely to warehouse and to forget,” Holder said in a speech to the American Bar Association. President Obama is expected to make prison reform one of his priorities this fall.
Ending the presumption that African American and Hispanic men are beyond redemption would be a powerful legacy for the first black president and the first black attorney general to leave behind.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 19, 2013
“What Does ‘Some Woman’ Know?”: Commissioner Ray Kelly, “No Question” More People Will Die Without Stop And Frisk
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly enthusiastically defended the New York Police Department’s use of the controversial “stop and frisk” program during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning. Kelly went so far as to claim that more New Yorkers would die without the procedure in place.
Stop and frisk is a commonly used practice wherein NYC police officers question tens of thousands of pedestrians and may frisk them for weapons and contraband. The program disproportionately targets young black and Latino men, leading many to claim that it constitutes racial profiling — a view that was affirmed by federal judge Shira Scheindlin, who ruled the practice to be unconstitutional last week.
Host David Gregory asked Kelly if more Americans would die if the judge’s ruling — which Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (I) administration has already appealed — were to stand and the program be dismantled. Kelly replied, “No question about it, violent crime will go up,” before launching into a more extensive defense of stop and frisk premised on higher crime rates among minorities:
We need some balance here. The stark reality is that violence is happening disproportionately in minority communities. And that unfortunately is in big cities throughout America. We have record low numbers of murders in New York City, record low numbers of shootings, we’re doing something right to save lives. […]
This is something that’s integral to policing. This happens throughout America at any police jurisdiction. You have to do it. Officers have to have the right of inquiry, if they see some suspicious behavior. So I can assure you, this is not just a New York City issue. It’s an issue throughout America. And this case has to be appealed in my judgment because it will be taken as a template and have significant impact in policing throughout America.
In her ruling against stop and frisk, Scheindlin wrote, “[T]he policy encourages the targeting of young black and Hispanic men based on their prevalence in local crime complaints. This is a form of racial profiling.”
More than 5 million New York residents have been stopped and frisked under the program since Bloomberg took office in 2002. Over 86 percent of those who have been stopped are either black or Latino. But the mass random stops haven’t been particularly efficient — a staggering 4.4 million of New Yorkers who were targeted under the program, which cost taxpayer $22 million in civil rights lawsuits last year, were innocent.
There have also been incidents where a stop and frisk ends with deadly consequences. In March, overzealous NYPD officers shot and killed 16-year-old black male Kimani Gray after stopping him for “suspiciously” adjusting his belt. The NYPD claims that Gray had drawn a weapon on the officers — but eyewitness testimony disputes that account, and an autopsy revealed that several shots were fired from behind Gray.
That hasn’t stopped the Bloomberg administration from singing the practice’s praises. Bloomberg recently dismissed Scheindlin as “some woman” who knows “absolutely zero” about policing. “Your safety and the safety of your kids is now in the hands of some woman who does not have the expertise to do it,” he said during a radio interview Friday.
By: Sy Mukherjee, Think Progress, August 18, 2013
“Ending Stop-And-Frisk But Keeping The Racism”: Systematic “Post-Racial Colorblind Racism” In All Its Glory
On Monday, US district court judge Shira Scheindlin dealt a serious, but non-lethal blow to the New York City police policy known as “stop-and-frisk.” After weeks of testimony and evidence presented in the case of Floyd v. City of New York, Scheindlin ruled that stop-and-frisk violated individuals’ Fourth Amendment right to privacy and Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection under the law. She did not, however, call for an end to the policy altogether, instead opting to appoint an independent federal monitor to oversee the program and the implementation of reforms that would bring it in line with the Constitution.
Undoubtedly, this is a huge victory for the activists who have been doing work around the issue of stop-and-frisk for years, and perhaps an even bigger victory for the black and Latino young men whose lives have been disproportionately disrupted by repeated violations of their rights. In her ruling, Scheindlin wrote that “the policy encourages the targeting of young black and Hispanic men based on their prevalence in local crime complaints. This is a form of racial profiling.” The ruling may not put an end to stop-and-frisk in its entirety, but at the very least there was a recognition from the court that for years the city’s police force has engaged in a racist practice that has infringed upon the rights of millions.
The same can’t be said of NYC’s current political leadership. In a press conference yesterday afternoon, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly were visibly dismayed with the ruling. Stop-and-frisk has been a signature crime-fighting tool during the Bloomberg years, one that defines his legacy. Kelly has received praise from high places, in large part because of the work he has done in executing the stop-and-frisk policy. For a judge to rule their “success” unconstitutional surely grates. But their defense of “stop-and-frisk,” despite weak attempts to deny as much, went on to show just how racist it is.
To start, Bloomberg noted the racial diversity of the NYPD, presumably to protect against charges of racism by pointing to the fact that people of color are active parts of the police force. But having your rights violated by someone who looks like you doesn’t somehow make that violation less racist. The fact is that out of roughly 5 million stops conducted over a decade, an alarming majority of them involved black or Latino men, and almost 90 percent of those stops turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. You can add some color to the faces conducting the stops, but that’s an institutionalized form of racism that doesn’t rely on white skin to operate.
He didn’t stop there. Bloomberg then deployed some lazy racist rhetoric about how the greatest perpetrators of crime happen to be young black and Latino men, so it only makes sense that the stops would disproportionately affect them. It’s the close relative to his argument that the NYPD has been, given crime statistics, stopping too many white people. Bloomberg and Kelly added the paternalistic line of reasoning that it was young black and Latino men who would also disproportionately be the victims of crimes stop-and-frisk has prevented, so the policy is really for their own benefit. Aside from erasing the opinions of those whom the policy is supposedly meant to protect, that reasoning also perpetuates the racist idea that black and Latino men are inherently violent and criminal, and therefore ignoring their rights is a necessary measure of protection. It also flies in the face of the evidence—stops of white people turn up higher rates of criminal activity. Based on the results of their own policy, it would have been prudent to shift the tactic to include more stops of white people, something that never happened and would likely have caused actual riots in the street.
But none of that is what Bloomberg and Kelly wanted us to focus on. Their most compelling argument: stop-and-frisk works. The city’s homicide rates are down and the police have recovered more than 8,000 guns that may have been used in potential crimes. For the sake of argument, let’s say that stop-and-frisk actually did reduce crime (a claim for which there is no actual evidence, only Bloomberg’s anecdotal belief that it instills fear in would-be criminals to the point they decide a life of crime isn’t worth the police harassment they’re going to receive). Even if that were the case, it still does not justify the use of a racist tactic that violates basic rights guaranteed to every citizen of this country. It’s disingenuous to suggest that the only way to reduce crime is to decide that the rights of certain segments of the population can and should be violated. Not only does this ignore the true drivers of crime (and not call into question whether some of these infractions should even be crimes, e.g., marijuana possession), it’s a frustratingly insidious justification for racism.
To recap: Bloomberg and Kelly denied that stop-and-frisk is racist, but then claimed it wasn’t racist enough, and now want everyone to believe that even if it is racist it doesn’t matter because it works. This is post-racial colorblind racism in all its glory.
Going forward, it will be interesting to see what type of reforms to stop-and-frisk are implemented in order to make it constitutional, though I doubt it can be any less racist. We are a society that starts with the presumption the greatest purveyors of crime are young black and Latino men. Any policy based around the idea of reasonable suspicion that then leaves that up to the discretion of people reared with that pervasive racist ideology will be disproportionately suspicious of men of color. Declaring stop-and-frisk unconstitutional is an important first step, but undoing the racism that creates the justification for the policy will be a much longer process.
By: Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation, August 13, 2013
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