Cops dish out racially defined ‘justice’

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“In my career, my only training in the Constitution was how to get around it,” (Sue Rahr, former sheriff, executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, and member of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing).

Drivers on their way to work, zipping by one of the predominantly Black neighborhoods in any major city, might not notice the presence of parked police cars and aggressive cops questioning small groups of Black youth. After all, scenes like this are an everyday occurrence, just part of the landscape. It could be— and certainly is—Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Cleve­ land, Los Angeles, etc.

If any passers-by do notice, they may not really un­ derstand what they see. In fact, they are observing criminals at work, but not those who always appear to be suspects. Stop and search, frisk and harass— these are crimes routinely committed by the police. It is the improper use of force, intimidation, and as­ sertion of state authority predominantly directed against Black people, usually young men. This is stan­ dard procedure, what the police do to keep minority youth in their place.

That’s how the law works in this part of town. In a predominantly Black neighborhood, there is no “pre­ sumption of innocence.” The police eye sees suspects everywhere, so the police act on a presumption of guilt. Throughout the nation, communities that are poor and Black typically experience a distinct and special type of justice. Critics condemn “racial profil­ ing”; the cops praise “good police work.”

In a more well-to-do neighborhood, this kind of misconduct would be correctly described as “illegal search and seizure”—the violation of a person’s pre­ sumption of innocence. Since people of means have ready access to the courts, this police offense is less likely to occur, and any instance of it would more likely result in lawsuits and punishment of the guilty cops.

In minority communities the police not only vio­ late human rights with impunity, they can also get the results they want without having to break the law. Sometimes, for instance, they bend the law be­ yond recognition in a practice known as a “pretextual stop.” This occurs when police find a legitimate but minor excuse to stop someone—on the sidewalk or in a car—and then use that pretext to escalate to a more thorough but unwarranted investigation.

So, a busted rear light on a vehicle becomes an op­ portunity to search for drugs, etc., typically resulting in questioning and arrests. Even when, for lack of evi­ dence, the person—the “suspect”—is released, the police have committed an act of harassment. These practices are routine in neighborhoods the cops have marked as “high crime areas.”

Racially-defined justice is also a highly profitable operation. These stops and searches provide an op­ portunity to issue fines and collect fees to support the city budget—literally, a racist tax. This was the con­ clusion the Justice Department reached in its report on Ferguson, where the residents were seen as “less as constituents to be protected than as potential of­ fenders and sources of revenue.”

The Justice Department report went on to note: “City and police leadership [in Ferguson] pressure officers to write citations independent of any public safety need, and rely on citation productivity to fund the City budget.”

With or without pretexts, though, police ignore the civil and human rights of minorities, especially the young, who are viewed as guilty by their race and age. They are treated as probable criminals who have not yet been caught. As a result, unwarranted police questioning can typically escalate to frisking, search­ es of individuals and cars, threats, arrests, and—as is now well known—even death.

The lead lawyer in a suit against the city of Fergu­ son, Alec Karakatsanis, has said, “There’s clear case law that police can’t illegally search you for no rea­ son, but it happens 10,000 times a day” (The New York Times, March 8, 2015).

One young man, a resident of Freddie Gray’s neigh­ borhood in Baltimore, gave this account of his en­ counters with police: “They trip you, choke you out, cuss you out, disrespect you…” Further, “the police tell him and his friends, while they are in their own neighborhood: ‘You’re not welcome around here. Keep moving. Get the eff off this corner” (The New York Times, May 3, 2015).

The protests in Baltimore have shown, by their abil­ Eduardo Muñoz / Reuters ity to inspire marches and demonstrations in locali­ ties all over America, that biased and violent police abuse directed against Black people and other minor­ ities is not some local or rare occurrence. The crimi­ nal actions of police against Black people, against young Black men in particular, are not unique to Fer­ guson, Washington or any other city or town. Only a powerful effort of self-deception can allow someone to believe that police violence is merely the occasion­ al mistake of some “bad apples” or rogue officers.

The recent death of Sandra Bland, a Black woman found hanging in her jail cell, may have resulted from suicide­—her family disputes the official claim—but the taking of her life began with police threats and violence. Ms. Bland was pulled over by a white Texas state trooper for the stated reason that she might have changed lanes in traffic without signaling.

If she had been a white man in a business suit, the matter could more easily have been overlooked. In­ stead, Ms. Bland was stopped for what even Illinois Senator Richard Durbin called “a highly question­ able traffic violation.” From that point, Ms. Bland was treated as if she had no civil rights. The trooper told her to put out her cigarette, and her proper refusal was met with a threat—the cop said he’d “light her up” with his stun gun. Ms. Bland was removed from her car, handcuffed as she lay on the ground, and ar­ rested on a third-degree felony charge of assaulting an officer. After three days in jail, held on a $5000 bond, she was dead, a tragic combination of race, class, and gender.

But why does police brutality occur? Why do police, from departments all across the United States, con­ tinue to harass and even shoot Black people, includ­ ing those who are unarmed? Shouldn’t the cops real­ ize by now that their actions are likely to be recorded by any eyewitness with a cell phone and splashed all over the media? To commit these offenses in public would appear to defy logic and common sense. What is the explanation?

Conservative and even some liberal commentators Jan Janner / Austin American-Statesman / AP (Above) Lanitra Dean speaks about her friend Sandra Bland at July 17 rally outside Waller County courthouse in Hempstead, Texas.

are quick to point out the dangers inherent in po­ lice work, asserting that police violence is actually self-defense carried too far. This argument holds that cops only seem trigger-happy. As they make split-second decisions in potentially life-threat­ ening circumstances, they are really acting on the instinct for self-preservation.

This familiar answer is a rationalization that fails to account for the racial difference in deaths at the hands of police. It’s as if killing Blacks at several times the rate of whites somehow “just happens”

or is the acceptable cost of “public safety.”

Of course, even an excuse is not completely false.

After all, any number of people armed with knives and guns actually do attack police. Yet, statistics consistently show that most on-duty fatalities re­ sult from traffic accidents.

In truth, the terrible pattern of cop violence is a sum of symptoms and underlying causes, all flow­ ing from the social function of the police to protect a social system based on inequality and oppression.

Most efforts of social reformers are aimed only at the symptoms of police violence. These efforts in­ clude a reduction of the militarization of local law en­ forcement, changes in tactical training, increasing the use of cameras, and enlarging the authority of civilian review boards, etc.

Taken together, these reforms can be helpful in trimming the worst excesses of the police, but new methods alone cannot solve the old problems of bru­ tality and racism. Reforms don’t address the underly­ ing causes that allow police to act above the law. Even with better formal procedures in place, a young Black man fleeing the cops will likely be beaten if captured (what cops call a “foot tax”), perhaps maimed, or even shot and too often killed.

Before Baltimore police subjected Freddie Gray to the “rough ride” that killed him, that department had undergone decades of reform. For instance, a lawsuit from the 1980s spurred integration efforts favoring minorities and women. Nonetheless, according to the chairman of a group representing Baltimore’s Black officers, “This department is a very racist police de­ partment. The issues that you see manifesting them­ selves on the outside are the same problems we have been dealing with on the inside for years” (The New York Times, May 10, 2015).

There is good reason to be skeptical of what can be accomplished by reform. Consider, first of all, that po­ lice are typically accountable only to themselves or to prosecutors and courts that work with and support them. Since most police violence takes place with no eye witnesses present, and therefore no publicity, the legal system typically accepts the accounts of the po­ lice instead of the victims. (The familiar videos that have been aired on television and the internet cre­ ate a misleading impression by suggesting that many (continued on page 5, in “Is the Sanders campaign a ‘new movement’?”)

SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 2015 3

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kclabor.org/wordpress sentatives of a bio-science company; and promotion of Israeli condemnation of a deal with Iran.

They reckon we won’t think about what we don’t know about. That’s why we have to rely on sources based elsewhere, such as AFP, Aljazeera, and the Guardian, even for details of a definitive report com­ piled by our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

While “technical details and political squabbling” are palpable obstacles to meaningful action, they are symptoms—not the core malignancy posing a mortal threat to our biosphere. Bickering is inevitable as long as the futile goal is trying to contain the damage from global warming without harming global capitalism.

Assuring an ecologically sustainable future for hu­ man civilization will require changes in energy pro­ duction, transportation, housing, and agriculture on a scale far beyond the capabilities of a market economy. Only governments engaged in international collabora­ tion can effectively do the job. It means planning not for corporate profits but for the health of our planet and all creatures great and small upon it. It will be ac­