Most people wouldn’t guess this, but I once considered becoming a cop. I took several criminal justice courses in college and received my level-3 reserve officer certificate in California after basic arrest and firearms training. Many of my friends took a similar path and are police officers today. I ultimately decided against it. I would consider myself socially conservative, but I’m morally opposed to America’s war on drugs and couldn’t see myself perpetuating it.
I later became an outspoken critic of drug prohibition, writing dozens of articles and even a book against the policy. Because police are tasked with enforcing these regrettable laws, I’ve also said many critical things about their involvement—especially the overreach, abuse, and corruption that prohibition encourages.
That said, I’m profoundly grateful for police and the peace and security they provide my city and street. It’s never perfect, but it beats the alternative. Still, I also know it’s easy for me to say that; I’ve never personally had a negative experience with police, except one bizarre traffic stop in which an officer lost his cool, reamed me out, and drove off without so much as writing me a ticket. That’s not the case for others, especially minorities.
Some people may be inured to the numbers and numb to the stories, but as the father of two black sons I am fearfully aware of what they might forecast and grieved by what they say about our present moment. Eight in ten African Americans say blacks receive unfair treatment from police, according to a June 2016 Pew report. And two in ten report being unfairly stopped by police in the last year alone.
Throw high-profile police abuse into the mix, and black confidence in law enforcement is at an all-time low. Another Pew study—this one from 2014—found six in ten blacks possess just some or very little confidence they’ll get a fair shake from law enforcement. The same number say cops are prone to excessive force, and seven in ten are convinced police departments don’t do enough to hold abusive cops accountable.
They’re right. Between 2011 and 2015 locals filed almost twenty-nine thousand complaints of police misconduct in Chicago. Disciplinary measures followed just two percent of complaints, according to New Yorker reporter Margaret Talbot. Perhaps that slender slice is all that warranted discipline? Impossible to know because 40 percent of allegations were never actually investigated, according to an analysis by Chicago’s own Police Accountability Task Force. It’s like the Comcast help line of justice; call and wait for nothing. Also pertinent to this discussion, says Talbot, “while African-Americans filed most of the complaints, those lodged by whites were more likely to be upheld.”
And it’s not just Chicago. Across the country, police departments offer special treatment for officers in cases of suspected criminal activity, including delayed inquiries—time for memories to fade and stories to straighten—and access to information from their own misconduct investigations. It’s virtually impossible to get justice if you’ve been wronged by the police.
That’s especially true in the case of homicide. “Very few of the 1,000 or more incidents in which people are killed by police officers each year lead to charges against the officers,” writes FiveThirtyEight’s Carl Bialik. How few? Only “four or five police officers each year are charged criminally for on-duty fatal shootings.” We’re not talking convictions—only a day in court.
The precise number of police killings is notoriously hard to determine, but whatever tally you examine, blacks are overrepresented in the figures. African Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for as many as a third of reported police killings.
So back to those Pew statistics. They’re not just figures. They represent real fears of real people. There are literally tens of millions of Americans who believe they cannot get equal treatment from police. An overwhelming number of these same people assume they could be hurt or killed by the very people whose job it is to protect them, and nothing will be done to address the wrong. That is their daily, waking experience.
Imagine suffering a terrible trauma, either you directly or someone close to you. Imagine living in fear it could happen again, that it probably will happen again. Then imagine no one cares—or worse, they assume you have it coming. That’s what happens when whites dismiss the current crisis, roll their eyes at Black Lives Matter hashtags, leap to defend law enforcement as infallible, or blame blacks for all their woes.
When whites do that, they’re forgetting several basic facts. The first is obvious but somehow scandalous to say. Some cops, even if only a fraction of the total, are bad actors. Misrepresenting events to shield one’s actions, shading the truth to secure warrants, unnecessarily roughing up suspects—these aren’t plot points on cable cop dramas. They’re regular occurrences in our cities and towns.
“On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with,” says Redditt Hudson, a five year veteran of the St. Louis police and now a board member of the Ethics Project. He credits the line to Col. K. L. Williams, the current police chief for the City of Kinloch in north St. Louis County.
Whether at the top or the bottom of the command structure, bad actors have an outsized effect on a community. “Institutional racism . . . in police culture, though often flatly denied by the many police apologists that appear in the media now, has been central to the breakdown in police-community relationships for decades in spite of good people doing police work,” says Hudson.
We’re loathe to admit this in public, even to ourselves. It’s like we’re somehow dishonoring the good when we flag the bad. Same with criticizing the military. But that’s like pretending My Lai or Abu Ghraib didn’t happen.
Power, as Lord Acton famously said, tends to corrupt. We’re all humans, none is perfect, and some are more flawed than others. A badge doesn’t miraculously change the human heart. Instead, it allows that heart to sometimes express itself with impunity. It’s not anti-cop to say as much. No one honors the body by protecting the cancer.
And whatever advances we’ve made along these lines, they cannot erase the deep-seated distrust of a community brutalized by police under decades of Jim Crow and state-sanctioned mistreatment. That reality is within the living memory of many—including its victims.
Such memories might be salved if their scars weren’t constantly raked and opened by news of excessive force and rough handling. The stories passing from mouth to ear and screen to screen in the black community are backed by the numbers.
A team led by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. spent several thousand hours combing and collating data provided by various jurisdictions. In New York City, Fryer found, “[b]lack suspects were 18 percent more likely to be pushed up against a wall, 16 percent more likely to be handcuffed without being arrested and 18 percent more likely to be pushed to the ground,” according to a New York Times summary. “Even when the police said that civilians were compliant, blacks experienced more force.”
Skipping that egregious finding, some observers jumped on the fact that Fryer’s study found no disparity on lethal force. Looking at data from several cities and counties, Fryer determined that police were no quicker to fire on blacks than whites.
Another Harvard economist, Sendhil Mullainathan, came to the same conclusion. He looked at the number of police killings, expecting to find racial bias at fault. It wasn’t. Instead, he found, “African-Americans have a very large number of encounters with police officers. Every police encounter contains a risk: The officer might be poorly trained, might act with malice or simply make a mistake, and civilians might do something that is perceived as a threat. . . . [H]aving more encounters with police officers, even with officers entirely free of racial bias, can create a greater risk of a fatal shooting.”
So why do blacks have a disproportionate number of such encounters? We’re right back to racial bias. Part of the answer lies in quota policing, in which officers are tasked with a certain number of stops or arrests. Pressured by brass to up their numbers, police target those least able to protest arbitrary enforcement. That means going after blacks and other minorities.
In the most perverse scenarios, police become regressive taxmen, shaking down the poor and minorities for fines and penalties to backfill municipal budgets. The Institute for Justice is currently suing over one such case, but there are many more instances. The practice was even at the epicenter of racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, where such fines account for almost a quarter of city funds.
The war on drugs likewise brings many blacks into the ambit of the criminal justice system. Drug laws have been racist from Day 1. Advocates for drug prohibition have shamelessly and mendaciously stoked racial fears since the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, peddled and pushed with stories of “negro cocaine fiends.” You can read about that in chapter 1 of my book, Bad Trip, but the information is two clicks away for anyone who bothers looking.
Similar fear-baiting has played a part to a greater or lesser degree in most every major law enforcement initiative from Nixon to Clinton. This is particularly so when it comes to illegal drugs—hence the radical sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, which overwhelmingly affects poor, black drug users.
There’s hardly any difference between drug use among blacks and whites. Estimates of the former come in at 10 percent, the latter at 8. But, as Judge Andrew P. Napolitano recounts in Dred Scott’s Revenge, “Despite these similar figures, of every 100,000 black Americans, 359 are imprisoned on drug charges; of every 100,000 white Americans, only 28 have the same fate.”
And this disparity starts early. “For [juveniles] charged with drug offenses,” says Napolitano, “blacks are forty-eight times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison.” Whites get leniency. Blacks get jail. How do you get any traction in economic or domestic life when you get your GED behind bars and can’t find work on release?
Conservatives are quick to pin these woes on the breakdown of the black family. It’s an important factor, but the diagnosis comes with delusional assumptions about simple, bootstrapping initiative and self-discipline as the cure. Where help is needed, liberals assume reform measures and new laws will solve the problem. Both make convenient means to either congratulate ourselves or simply stop thinking about the ongoing effects of past policies.
Beyond massive disruptions caused by overpolicing and anti-drug efforts, there are grievous, inherited damages to consider. Through a combination of official and unofficial segregation and discrimination, great numbers of blacks find themselves in poor neighborhoods, largely shut out of wider employment and wealth networks.
Poverty is largely an information and network issue. People in poverty don’t know how to function in the way or on the level that will secure them high-paying jobs—and they don’t have access to those jobs because they have no connection to the people offering them. Poor blacks are to a significant degree shut out of some or even most opportunities available to others. That’s true for all poor people, but the perverse and lasting effects of segregation have hampered the black community worst of all.
The lower down the economic ladder you either are forced or fall, the harder it is to survive further jolts and knockdowns—self-inflicted or not. When whites complain about unemployment or crime in the black community, they fail to see how racist attitudes and actions isolated and repressed that community in the first place. Taking a man’s wallet makes it hard to blame him for begging or stealing lunch.
Forging families that can stand such stresses would be hard under any circumstances. Add generations of lockout and exclusion, repression and upheaval, and we’re far past that. It’s not impossible. And there countless inspiring examples. But only the cruelest of onlookers would sneer at the unknowing or incapable.
White Americans can brush off talk about privilege. After all, we can look at what we’ve done. We know what we’ve accomplished. We forget that some of our grandparents actively prevented others—going so far as to enlist the state in their efforts—from doing and accomplishing the same. The aftereffects of those actions are with us today.
The frustration boiling among African Americans today is our own making. In no way does that justify the violence we’ve seen in Dallas and elsewhere. But neither does the violence in Dallas excuse our own culpability. If we travel that path, we only speed the downward spiral. Racial violence of the 1960s—think 1965’s Watts riots—gave birth to the aggressive, militarized policing tactics of today. What’s next?
If we wish law enforcement to be respected—and I certainly do—it needs to cull its bad actors and pull back from invasive, incendiary tactics. Trust is earned, not coerced.
But we all have both a share in this crisis and a part to play in its resolution. A few months before the Watts riots, two ministers were killed in Alabama as they worked for civil rights. One was black, the other white. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked religious leaders to gather in Selma to honor these men, hundreds answered the call, among them Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church.
He cut a strange figure with his beard, staff, and robe. In what sense did he belong? “I came to this Memorial Service . . . to show our willingness to continue this fight against prejudice, bias and persecution,” said Iakovos. “Our Church has never hesitated to fight, when it felt it must, for the rights of mankind; and many of our Churchmen have been in the forefront of these battles time and time again. . . .”
This time, too? I pray for the sake of my sons and millions more that’s the case. As Iakovos modeled, it will take engagement. It will take the shedding of ego and self-defensiveness. It will take mourning with those who mourn and suffering with those who suffer. Aren’t we obligated that much at least?
If we really believe that all lives matter, we must oppose the policies that mean black lives matter less than our own. Those policies have wreaked enough harm already.