“What Demand For Respect Really Means”: The NYPD Freakout Isn’t Just About Race, It’s About Inequality, Too
The recent war of words between New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the president of the city’s Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, is framed by tragedy. Specifically, the tragedies of Eric Garner’s death and the subsequent non-indictment of officer Daniel Pantaleo, and by the deaths of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, recently murdered by a mentally ill man, who imagined that he was seeking revenge on behalf of Garner and Michael Brown. In this context, de Blasio’s repeated suggestion that black citizens attract significantly more attention than white citizens do—and with a far greater chance of tragic deaths at the hands of the police—has been read by Lynch and others as a sign of great disrespect.
Respect is the price the rich are supposed to pay for their protection. Making sense of this transaction, though, requires us to stop seeing this as chiefly a matter of cops versus the community, or even as a story dominated, in some simple way, by race or color. We need to understand the function of the police in contemporary urban life, in an age marked by declining routes to social mobility, and to recognize the intersecting roles of race and class in the larger story.
As a negotiator, Lynch is a bomb-thrower. Writing in a New York Post editorial, he suggested that the NYPD had been “scapegoated for centuries of racial issues” and celebrated “extraordinary achievements in reducing crime in all communities and protecting the lives and property of New Yorkers of all races.” Speaking to PBA delegates in Queens, Lynch said that de Blasio appeared more interested in “running a fucking revolution” than in leading a city through this crisis. “If we won’t get support when we do our jobs, if we’re going to get hurt for doing what’s right then we’re going to do it the way they want it,” he said. “Let me be perfectly clear. We will use extreme discretion in every encounter.” He added, “Our friends, we’re courteous to them. Our enemies? Extreme discretion. The rules are made by them to hurt you. Well now we’ll use those rules to protect us.”
Respect is at the center of this argument. Listening to Lynch, one hears that cops are now nearly criminals, indistinguishable from the real dangerous elements. One hears that citizens should be immediately obedient and pliant when confronted by law enforcement. One hears that the policing of poor communities of color requires a very different siege mentality, with newer, bigger weapons and strong-armed, protective tactics. And one hears, finally, that the rank-and-file of the NYPD have been betrayed by the wealthy, that the city is not grateful enough to those who have made its recent and historic prosperity possible.
Uniformed officers have responded by disrespecting these imagined “enemies,” turning their backs on de Blasio as he visited a hospital where the officers died and then later as he attended funeral services for one of them. Unofficial “contracts” have been circulating, in which active police officers request de Blasio’s absence at their own funerals, should the very worst happen. And officers have followed Lynch’s call to use “discretion”: Since the double-murder, traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses—a vital part of “broken windows” theory of policing—are down 94 percent over the same period in 2013.
The PBA—a union in some ways, a fraternal organization in others—has pushed back against NYC mayors for several decades now, focusing on issues that are strikingly familiar this winter. In 1992, after rumors circulated in Washington Heights that a police officer had shot and killed an unarmed man, neighborhood residents staged massive protests. After then-Mayor David Dinkins proposed a new review board for all police shootings, the PBA organized a sweeping protest that included a march across the Brooklyn Bridge, a traffic stoppage not unlike recent community protests against the non-indictments in Ferguson and Staten Island. Dinkins, who was black, was seen as an advocate for greater civilian oversight of the police, and was imagined—like de Blasio—to be more sympathetic to the families of “criminals” than to the police. Rudolph Giuliani, then campaigning for his own mayoralty, accused Dinkins of “ceded[ing] neighborhoods to the forces of lawlessness.” Only a few months after massive riots in Los Angeles, NYPD officers took to the streets as protesters, numbering in the thousands according to the New York Times, and demanding new automatic handguns and an end to public critique. Chanting “No Justice, No Police,” many wore t-shirts that read: “The Mayor’s On Crack.”
Much of the recent press coverage of racial profiling has sought to illuminate the issue through granular details. Some have pointed to the composition of the police department, assuming that a more representative force would enjoy better community relations. According to The Washington Post’s recent consolidation of census data, de Blasio’s NYPD is 46 percent white—policing a city that is 34 percent white. Others have looked at specific rules and regulations, or training procedures, that might explain the crisis of policing racially diverse cityscapes.
Respect is an abstract thing, though. The city has always needed a multi-ethnic police force to serve as a social engine, absorbing new immigrants and roughly reflecting the community—a diverse force whose basic purpose has been to ensure that the lives of the truly rich are protected, that property values are safeguarded, that commerce can proceed. The wage for this service isn’t just a modest bit of social mobility—a few lace curtains, an extra bathroom, a nicer neighborhood—but also this intangible thing called respect, with its peculiar class inflections. Put simply, joining the police force is a well-trod route to gaining respect from the city establishment. In exchange for that respect—and even for their occasional valorization as “heroes”—the rank-and-file are supposed to use maximum force on even the smallest challenges to the status quo.
And no challenges are too small. The city has enjoyed a renaissance as a consequence of the “broken windows” policy, which suggests that cutting down on petty crime in poor neighborhoods will catch a greater number of serious criminals—an approach that shifts the focus of policing onto black and brown bodies, naturalizes crime as a feature of minority communities, and justifies the excessive use of force.
The last few decades, in the U.S. but especially in New York City, have been marked by at least two distinctive and contradictory trends: a vast and growing divide between the truly rich and the truly poor; and a series of repeating crises related to race and policing. But they are not unconnected. The new NYPD battling for what they define as workplace rights and lobbying hard, as well, for the intangible and much-desired benefits of respect. But such respect is only awarded to the working-class and racially diverse force for its role in the city’s ongoing war against crime—a war with casualties disproportionately drawn from the poor and the desperate and the racially marginal.
To see this just as a black/white thing, or to think about it only as a matter of cops and communities, is to miss the awful backdrop. To truly understand what is happening in New York, we need to look harder at class. This is a story about rich people in a minority-majority city, policed by a force that is now similarly minority-majority—but a force that, per the city’s orders, defines criminality in terms that impact black and brown peoples most of all. It is a story about who, exactly, is being protected and served. And it is about the wages—literal and, as W.E.B. Du Bois once put it, psychological—demanded for the protection of some but not all, and at the expense of others.
By: Matthew Pratt Guterl, The New Republic, December 30, 2014
“Typical, Old-Fashioned, Indulgent Louisiana Republican”: Why Nobody Who Knows Louisiana Believes Steve Scalise
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) has admitted that he delivered a speech to a so-called “white rights” conference in 2002 that was held by an organization known as EURO, headed by the neo-Nazi leader David Duke. Scalise has also insisted that he shares American society’s abhorrence of such “hate groups” — and that he did not know what kind of group he was talking to. He is asking the public to believe that he did not notice any of the virulent racist and anti-Semitic talk by the Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and assorted white nationalists in attendance at this gathering.
But Louisiana Republicans have had a David Duke problem since 1989, when Duke won a state assembly seat. He had been a neo-Nazi ideologue since his youth; he had paraded one night in full Nazi uniform with a swastika armband at the state university; and he had made the “international Jewish conspiracy” central to his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Even after he was elected, Duke was still selling Holocaust denial books from his state legislative office.
Yet the Louisiana State Republican Party Central Committee refused to either investigate Duke’s views or pass a censure motion, despite the repeated efforts of Beth Rickey, a Central Committee member. When Duke said he had changed his beliefs, his fellow Republicans and many white Louisianans decided to believe him.
Then in 1990 and 1991 Duke ran in two consecutive statewide elections in Louisiana — for U.S. senator and governor — and won a majority of the white vote both times. The state was saved by black voters, whose ballots defeated him. Again, the state Republican Party refused to investigate Duke’s actual positions. Nevertheless, his worldview became the central issue in those campaigns. And after Duke equated affirmative action with the extermination of European Jews, President George H.W. Bush stepped in to denounce him. Once more, local Republicans remained silent. Scalise, who was 25 years old in 1990, could not have missed this debate, which made national news.
A few years later, Duke finally gave up his Republican “my views have changed” smokescreen. He published an Aryan primer as an autobiography in 1998, was convicted of tax fraud and went to federal prison in 2002, and began a prolonged public rant and rave about Jews that continues to this date. At the time of the EURO meeting with Scalise, Duke was overseas, attempting to avoid indictment, and addressed the gathering in Metairie, LA, via long-distance video hookup.
It is hard to believe that Steve Scalise, a sentient adult, missed all this, particularly as he was running for re-election to the state legislature in 2002. It is much easier to believe that he had the typical, old-fashioned, indulgent Louisiana Republican attitude toward David Duke. The question remains: Are there any national Republican leaders who will stand up, as President George H. W. Bush did in the 1990s, and speak the truth?
By: Leonard Zeskind, The National Memo, December 30, 2014
“The Stats Are All On Bill de Blasio’s Side”: Crime Has Changed; The NYPD Should Change Too
Back before a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing Eric Garner, before a Baltimore man named Ismaiiyl Brinsley assassinated officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in Brooklyn as some deranged form of response, and before New York’s politics descended into chaos, with a crowd of hundreds of officers turning their backs on their mayor when he spoke at Ramos’s funeral and the head of the police union saying that de Blasio was acting less like the city’s responsible chief executive and more like the head of a “fucking revolution” — before all of this blazing December heat over the politics of crime, Mayor de Blasio gave a speech at a public housing project in Brooklyn addressing the city’s spectacular public safety record this year. In 2014, he noted, nearly all major crimes continued to decline and New York looks likely to see even fewer murders than it did last year, which set a record for the lowest total in modern history. These stats are particularly important to de Blasio politically, because he has promised that the less heavy-handed policing regime he envisioned (fewer stops, less harassment, more transparency and accountability) would not lead to more crime, and in this year’s crime data he could claim a little bit of proof. “We think it’s normal that we can bring crime down while bringing police and community closer together,” the mayor said, at the Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene, on December 2. It was a striking speech, because de Blasio, adopting a technocratic tone, was arguing that crime had changed and therefore policing could change, too.
Before Ferguson, this could be seen as part of a broader political correction, in that the country in general had seemed to turn against the crime and punishment regime that has basically stood since the 1980s. Even most of the major Republican presidential candidates (Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, and Chris Christie) have made it clear that they believed major reforms to reduce sentences and inmate population were overdue. States had been cutting prison populations to the extent that by 2013 the number of prisoners they housed was getting smaller rather than larger for the first time in 40 years. Scholars found that those states that cut their inmate population most dramatically had, unexpectedly, seen the largest drops in crime, which made it hard to argue that closing prisons would return us to the dark days of the ’80s. When de Blasio built his campaign in part around the case against stop-and-frisk, and when Bill Bratton agreed to implement radical changes to the policy, they were taking a risk, in that any major increase in crime could be blamed on these decisions. But you could see their calculation: Politically speaking, they were riding a pretty strong wave.
But something strange has happened during the past month, both in the politics of New York and those of the country. In the debates over policing that followed the tragedies of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and officers Ramos and Liu, race has assumed the central role, displacing crime. This has brought about a more direct confrontation with our remaining national sickness around race, but it has also surfaced an atavistic, tribal strain in our politics, reminiscent of the racialized fights of an earlier era. It is probably no accident that some of the central figures of New York’s recent past returned to the public stage last week, and that their view diverged from de Blasio’s. Instead of a reasonable, technocratic decision to adjust policies of policing and punishment to a place where there is much less crime, they saw the debate as a declaration of allegiances — of whose side you were on.
“We’ve had four months of propaganda — starting with the president — that everyone should hate the police,” Rudy Giuliani said. “That’s what the protests were all about.” Ray Kelly suggested that de Blasio’s public statements that his son Dante, who is half-black, take “special care” when dealing with police “set off this latest firestorm.” George Pataki called the slayings of Ramos and Liu a “predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric” from de Blasio and Eric Holder, Obama’s long-serving attorney general.
With all the talk of race, in New York and elsewhere, doubtless some of the police and their defenders feel as if they are being blamed for things that are not their fault, that a whole ugly national history is being dumped on their heads. On Fox News and CNN, Giuliani kept returning to his conviction that de Blasio was defaming the NYPD as racist. But in the responses to the assassination, it was possible to sense a deep perceptive chasm in addition to the emotional one — not merely over how the police should operate, but on what the nature of crime is. De Blasio called Brinsley a “heinous individual” and a “horrible assassin,” but his emphasis was always on the individual maniac, not anything he stood for or anyone he represented. There was surely some political calculation to this, alongside genuine belief, but it still differed noticeably from the police view. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, police sources told the Daily News that they were focused on the suspicion that Brinsley was “a member of the Black Guerrilla Family,” a large criminal gang with black nationalist politics, and that the slaying was a consequence of a concerted plot by the gang to “get back at cops for Eric Garner and Ferguson.” The story was quickly debunked — no one could find any connection between Brinsley and the BGF. But it seemed to reveal a basic difference in perspective — that crime is a function not of poverty but of individual pathologies and pathological networks, and that, without continued vigilance, it could still return.
Nearly every New Yorker now lives, in some meaningful way, in a post-peak-crime city marked by gentrification and safety, even in what were very recently very poor neighborhoods. The statistics that de Blasio rattled off at the Ingersoll Houses were astonishing: 80 percent reductions in murder and robberies since the early ’90s. (Perhaps even more amazing is the statistic that the criminologist Frederick Zimring of the University of California-Berkeley likes to cite, that auto thefts have declined by 95 percent.) The mayor is, as my colleague Chris Smith astutely pointed out, lying low right now. But when he reemerges, one way to further de-escalate tension might be to continue in the cooler vein he displayed at Ingersoll: talk about the achievements of the NYPD in reducing crime; about the accomplishments of the last year as the department has scaled back stop-and-frisk while seeing continued declines in violence; about the false choice of the trade-off between security and freedom. He could talk, in other words, less about policing and more about crime, which has the added benefit of giving the police credit for accomplishments so sustained that they have enabled a new approach. The tide that national politicians of all ideologies sensed before Ferguson, of liberalizing attitudes toward punishment, still exists. The stats are all on de Blasio’s side.
By: Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Daily Intelligencer, New Tork Magazine, December 30, 2014
“Southern GOP Politics”: Steve Scalise’s David Duke Scandal Says More About Republicans Than The Party Will Ever Admit
If you happen upon an end-of-the-year list of 2014’s biggest political bombshells, chances are Eric Cantor’s primary-election defeat to a right wing-backed neophyte named David Brat will make the cut. Because it took basically all of Washington by surprise, it has embedded itself in the psyche of the political establishment over the last six months as a seminal event. And for the last six months, I’ve been an evangelist for the theory that, while surprising, Cantor’s defeat ultimately proved to be pretty inconsequential.
In the end I was wrong, but not for the reasons everyone still reflecting on that story predicted back in June. Republican policy hasn’t moved substantially to the right since then. The hardline flank of the Republican Party is no more influential now than it was before. If anything, GOP leaders have become more willing and better equipped to tamp down rebellions than they were earlier this year.
But by beating Cantor, Brat shook up the leadership hierarchy in the House, and spooked the remaining leaders into welcoming one of those hardliners into their ranks as a token. That token was Steve Scalise, the Louisiana conservative who copped this week to addressing a David Duke–founded neo-Nazi group in 2002, after a local blogger found evidence of his participation, which had gone unnoticed for a decade, lying in plain sight on a prominent white supremacist website.
Scalise may survive this revelation. But another shakeup could be in the offing, and there lies the potential for real conflict among House Republicans. As an emissary to conservatives, Scalise represented a compromise between figures with closer ties to the leadership and more rebellious backbench members. If he has to be removed for this reason, leadership will feel burned and so will the right.
But the more important issue is what happened back in 2002, and what it says about Republican politics, especially in the South.
If more details emerge, and it turns out Scalise was closer to white hate groups than he’s let on—if he knew his audience and was speaking their language—he’s finished. But on the whole, and in a strange way, that might be a better outcome for the party than if Scalise muddles through, claiming ignorance.
Let’s assume that Scalise is telling the truth—that poor staffing explains his participation, and that he rushed in and out of the event too quickly to realize what was up, or that he was led into the hotel conference center blindfolded, ears plugged, and fled the scene the moment his remarks concluded.
There’s a problem with southern Republican politics if an up-and-coming star stumbles heedless into a white supremacist convention in the course of his constituent outreach, and then doesn’t notice the mistake for more than a decade.
Conservatives have compared the Scalise revelation unfavorably to Chris McDaniel’s neo-confederate sympathies, which establishment Republicans happily deployed against him when he was poised to topple an incumbent senator in Mississippi; and to the Klan-curious comments that got Trent Lott, another Mississippian, ousted from Senate leadership in 2001.
But whether Scalise’s transgressions are worse than McDaniel’s and Lott’s is a subjective and unnecessary question. The appropriate question, whether Scalise stays or goes, is, Why does this kind of thing happen at all? Conservatives are much less interested in that kind of introspection than in making tu quoque allusions to Robert Byrd and New Black Panthers. But that’s because they’re confusing a structural argument for an ad hominem attack, and responding in kind.
White identity has always driven politics in the South, but where it once propelled Democrats to power, it now, with less outward vitriol, helps elect Republicans. The Byrd reference is unintentionally appropriate for this reason. In the last years of his life, Byrd became the exception that proved the rule. Whites fled the Democratic Party hastily, and it is now virtually impossible for white Democratic candidates to win statewide elections in the deep South (or even in Byrd’s West Virginia). But whites didn’t abandon Democrats because white identity politics changed; they abandoned Democrats because Democrats stopped reflecting the interests of those politics. And white voters aligned with Republicans because Republicans took up their mantle.
Today, that is mostly reflected in conservative rhetoric and Republican social policy, less in visible allegiance between politicians and white supremacists. Things aren’t as bleak as they once were. Under fire, and with 12 years of separation, Scalise and his staff are unafraid to denounce Duke and his hate group. Back in 1999, when Duke was considering a run for Congress, Scalise wasn’t able to be so blunt. “The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.”
There’s a generous and an ungenerous way to read that statement. But the generous read isn’t particularly exculpatory. Presumably Scalise wasn’t offering voters a delicate assurance that he or another Republican would submerge their white supremacism more skillfully than Duke. But if in 1999 you said “the first and most important thing” about Duke wasn’t his despicable racism, but merely that he couldn’t get elected, it says something important about the voters you were trying not to offend. Many of those voters are still alive today.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, December 30, 2014
“Today In GOP Outreach”: House Majority Whip Admits Speaking At White-Power Event
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), the third highest-ranking member in the Republican caucus, admitted on Monday that he spoke at a white-power conference in 2002.
Scalise’s presence as an “honored guest” at a 2002 European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) conference was first reported on Sunday by Louisiana-based blogger Lamar White, Jr. EURO, which was founded by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, is classified as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
According to posts that White, Jr. uncovered from the white-power site stormfront.org, Scalise — who was a state representative at the time — addressed the crowd and “discussed ways to oversee gross mismanagement of tax revenue or ‘slush funds’ that have little or no accountability,” and “brought into sharp focus the dire circumstances pervasive in many important, under-funded needs of the community at the expense of graft within the Housing and Urban Development Fund, an apparent give-away to a selective group based on race.”
On Monday, Scalise’s spokeswoman Moira Bagley confirmed his attendence at the event to The Washington Post:
“Throughout his career in public service, Mr. Scalise has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints,” Bagley said. “In every case, he was building support for his policies, not the other way around. In 2002, he made himself available to anyone who wanted to hear his proposal to eliminate slush funds that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars as well as his opposition to a proposed tax increase on middle-class families.”
She added, “He has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question. The hate-fueled ignorance and intolerance that group projects is in stark contradiction to what Mr. Scalise believes and practices as a father, a husband, and a devoted Catholic.”
Bagley’s statement does not specify if or when Scalise realized that he had addressed a group that believes that “the Jews are the enemy of the White race, and they are largely responsible for the ‘browning’ of America,” or that “the beautiful Germany of the 1930s with blonde children happily running through every village has been replaced with a multi-racial cesspool.” Furthermore, her claim that he “has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question” is rather undercut by the fact that he gave an apparently well-regarded speech to their annual conference.
Scalise is not the first prominent Republican to associate with white supremacists; Scalise’s former colleague in the House, Ron Paul, once praised Duke in a newsletter. But Paul never held a position nearly as powerful as majority whip.
It remains to be seen whether the new revelations will cost Scalise his position; GOP leaders are reportedly “monitoring” the situation.
Meanwhile, the news seems extremely unlikely to help Republicans in their mostly forgotten quest to reach out to minority voters.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, December 29, 2014
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