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The
choking
death
of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin - and the
subsequent protests and unrest across America amid a pandemic and
economic turmoil - have shocked the conscience of the nation.
While
I, too, watch the events in America unfold with rage and disbelief, I
am not shocked. In 1997, I was a New York human rights activist who
organized the first national conference on police brutality and
misconduct, and hearings held by the Congressional Black Caucus. It
was the height of the era of former New York City Mayor Rudy
Giuliani, whose tenure was a nightmare for Black and Latinx New
Yorkers with his reign of police violence, racial profiling, and
stop-and-frisk tactics. I co-produced a documentary
on NYPD brutality and worked with the victims of police abuse and
their families, including Black and Latinx men, women, and children
who were beaten, choked, shot, harassed, and humiliated by police
officers, and, in the rarest cases, were brought to justice. In
addition, I worked with human rights groups, legal defense funds,
civil rights and liberties organizations, and judges and progressive
law enforcement organizations to find solutions to an epidemic of
abuse.
Little
has changed since that time - or since the urban
rebellions of the 1960s,
which often were precipitated by “police actions” which
“increased tensions and ultimately led to violence,” according to
the 1968 Kerner Commission report.
That
is not to say that police departments haven’t enacted reforms. Some
law enforcement agencies have instituted body cameras, although some
officers conveniently do
not activate them
when someone dies, as was the case in the recent police killing of
David McAtee, a Black man in Louisville. And some departments,
including in Minneapolis, have introduced implicit
bias training,
de-escalation training, and other measures.
And
yet, the killing of George Floyd demonstrates that these more
incremental reforms are insufficient, at least by themselves, and in
the absence of a comprehensive plan to transform law enforcement and
its stated purpose. For that transformation to happen, law
enforcement officials must realize that police violence is systemic,
not the handiwork of a few bad apples.
“Much
of the public debate has focused on new and enhanced training,
diversifying the police, and enhancing community policing as
strategies for reform, along with enhanced accountability measures,”
wrote Alex
Vitale,
professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social
Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in his book, “The End of
Policing.” “However, most of these reforms fail to deal with the
fundamental problems inherent to policing.”
Police
have assumed the role of an occupying force for years in Black and
Latinx communities, operating in these neighborhoods not to serve and
protect, but rather to contain and control. The “us vs. them”
mentality with which police regard protesters and citizens has only
worsened with the increased militarization
of police forces
across the nation.
There
are several reasons policing has been slow to change. Police unions
and the terms of their contracts shield them from accountability, and
qualified
immunity
protects them from lawsuits. A lack of strong national guidelines for
law enforcement or meaningful community control in most jurisdictions
also leaves them unchecked.
Vitale
and others have called for the defunding
of the police
and a shift to community-led
programs,
including healthcare,
housing, and jobs
for communities impacted by mass incarceration, crime, and police
violence.
And
racial justice and anti-police brutality organizations have made a
host of proposals that call for a paradigm shift in American
policing, alongside more immediate, incremental reforms - which, when
added up, and if effectively executed, could provide safeguards
against police violence and save lives in a system currently rife
with flaws.
In
its policy platform, the Movement
for Black Lives
has proposed democratic
community control
of local, state, and federal law enforcement, giving the communities
victimized by policing the authority to control budgets and policies;
hire, fire, and discipline officers; and issue subpoenas.
In
addition, Campaign
Zero,
an anti-police violence organization, has called for constructive
policies, such as an end to policing of minor offenses as well as
“stop and frisk” and racial profiling, and an implementation of
uniform standards limiting the use of deadly force. It also calls for
independent investigations and special prosecutors that remove
inherently conflicted local prosecutors from police violence cases -
consider the appointment of Minnesota Attorney General Keith
Ellison
as prosecutor in the Floyd murder - and reformed federal law to allow
more federal prosecutions of police killings. Widespread use of body
cameras, a stronger public right to record police, and racial bias
training of police officers would bring accountability, as would
ending the profit
motive
in law enforcement practices - including eliminating fines and fees,
ticket and arrest quotas, and property confiscation - and requiring
that department budgets pay for misconduct settlements.
Campaign
Zero also advocates ending the federal government’s 1033
program
- which allows local police departments to procure military equipment
- and enacting local restrictions prohibiting law enforcement
agencies from obtaining military weapons.
Meanwhile,
Color
of Change
recommends making officer misconduct records and disciplinary
histories publicly accessible, creating a national registry of
officers recommended for termination because of misconduct, and
responding to mental health crises with healthcare rather than police
intervention, thereby reducing fatal police shootings.
While
proper training isn’t a panacea, it’s also still important. And
President Obama’s Task
Force on 21st Century Policing
- which was designed to build trust between law enforcement and the
community and strengthen community policing - said, “Law
enforcement culture should embrace a guardian, rather than a warrior,
mindset to build trust and legitimacy both within agencies and with
the public.” The task force also recommended policies and practices
based on “procedural justice” and “a culture of transparency
and accountability to build public trust and legitimacy.”
But
high-level changes to training might not make much of an impact
without more substantial restructuring of police unions and police
departments. When Minneapolis banned warrior-style
police training
- instilling in officers that every encounter with a civilian could
be their last
- the local police union decided to still make the training
available.
The
culture of police unions and the tone set by the White House also
undermine incremental reforms. The Minneapolis Police Union
president, Lt.
Bob Kroll,
spoke at a 2019 Trump rally, where he praised the president for
“letting the cops do their jobs,” and criticized Obama for “the
handcuffing and oppression of the police.” Trump has urged police
officers and immigration officials to be “rough”
with suspects,
whom he referred to as “animals.”
Color
of Change has also urged elected leaders to refuse political
contributions from police unions, who have enabled and encouraged
police violence for years. “These unions are toxic, and they should
be treated as such,” said Color of Change President Rashad Robinson
in a recent statement. “Accepting their money is no different than
accepting money from the gun lobby, or big tobacco. It’s a signal
that you are on the side of white supremacy,” he added.
And
the protestations from some officers and their supporters that
policing is a tough job belie the toxic and criminal culture of some
departments, which act as a repository for domestic
and sexual
abusers
and should not exist at all.
As
I heard the police helicopters, sirens, and gunfire in Philadelphia
during the citywide curfew on the eve of June 1, the 99th anniversary
of the
Tulsa race massacre,
I was reminded that these problems are rooted in centuries of
history.
The
U.S. never came to terms with its legacy of institutional and
systemic racism, of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, and now it has
come back to bite us. Among the first police forces in America were
the slave
patrols,
which deputized white men in the South to monitor and search the
plantations, prevent slave rebellions and escapes, and take Black
lives without
punishment.
The patrols stopped slaves they found on the road and ordered them to
produce a pass from their master to prove they were authorized to
leave the plantation and weren’t breaking the law. Even today,
policing has not shed that slave patrol mentality in Black
communities. This is because society and its institutions have not
divested from institutional racism and structural inequality, opting
to reduce racism to a matter of bad people hurling epithets rather
than systems of oppression, power, and privilege. However, as
institutions do not exist in a vacuum and are led by people, it is
necessary to educate society on this country’s history
of slavery,
race,
and violence.
A true transformation will come when law enforcement no longer views
its mission as protecting property over human lives, monitoring and
waging violence against low income and working communities,
instilling fear, and suppressing social justice movements.
Given
the outrage over the ways police departments operate in communities
of color and poor communities in particular, the time and the
conditions are ripe for systemic change - not just the tweaking of a
fundamentally broken institution.
Police
use of excessive force against peaceful protesters and journalists in
Minneapolis and across the country suggests the U.S. has reached a
seminal moment in its history. Citizens are questioning the role of
law enforcement because its current configuration has been rendered
unsustainable. Now is our opportunity to take advantage of this
turning point in history and transform policing, lest we repeat our
mistakes and produce more George Floyds.
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