tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/ferguson-riots-11951/articles
Ferguson riots – The Conversation
2020-07-06T12:12:16Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/141011
2020-07-06T12:12:16Z
2020-07-06T12:12:16Z
Decades of failed reforms allow continued police brutality and racism
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343877/original/file-20200625-132955-v0z2sj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=48%2C36%2C3977%2C2981&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Black Lives Matters murals on boarded-up businesses in New York City.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/BLM-Murals-are-seen-in-SoHo-in-NYC-6-24-20/e01574f8f05e4028862e465ae350789f/1/0">AP Photo/STRF/STAR MAX/IPx</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Police brutality has a long history of being protected, reinforced and even redoubled for more than a century in the U.S. through a combination of political expediency and racism. </p>
<p>President Donald Trump’s <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-safe-policing-safe-communities/">executive order</a> and the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/883263263/house-approves-police-reform-bill-but-issue-stalled-amid-partisan-standoff">stalled bills in Congress</a> to curb police misconduct are, at best, attempts to retune an instrument that was orchestrated for abuse. </p>
<p>As a former archivist in charge of the National Archives records for the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/060.html">Department of Justice</a>, <a href="https://www.archives.gov/findingaid/stat/discovery/65">Federal Bureau of Investigation</a> and <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/129.html">Bureau of Prisons</a>, it is clear to me that the history of police violence in the U.S. informs and influences why the U.S. is again facing protests over violence, racism and unjust death.</p>
<h2>Wickersham Commission</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Police_Misconduct/yWUlDgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=police+corruption+wickersham&pg=PT52&printsec=frontcover">Violence and corruption</a> have long been the mainstay of American police. </p>
<p>In 1929, <a href="https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-3-1929-first-state-union-address">President Herbert Hoover</a>, stirred by stories of bootleggers who forged criminal alliances with police departments during the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Economics_of_Prohibition_The/JXa9MgztR2AC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=herbert+hoover+prohibition+corruption+police&pg=PA134&printsec=frontcover">Prohibition Era</a> (1920-1933), announced that his administration would “make the widest inquiry into the shortcomings of the administration of justice and into the causes and remedies for them.” </p>
<p>Hoover appointed the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, chaired by former Attorney General George Wickersham, to investigate the failure of prohibition laws. In its 1931 report, the commission said that police made frequent use of torture as a method of law enforcement and that “confessions of guilt frequently are unlawfully extorted by the police from prisoners by means of cruel treatment, <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c004793481&view=1up&seq=439&q1=%E2%80%9Cconfessions%20of%20guilt%20frequently%20are%20unlawfully%20extorted%20by%20the%20police%20from%20prisoners%20by%20means%20of%20cruel%20treatment,%20colloquially%20known%20as%20the%20third%20degree,%22">colloquially known as the third degree.”</a> The Wickersham Commission defined the “third degree” as the “employment of methods which inflict suffering, physical or mental, upon a person, in order to obtain from that person information about a crime.” </p>
<p>Rather than reform the police, however, Attorney General Homer Cummings (1933-1939), who was appointed by Hoover’s successor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, announced in September 1933 that there was a “<a href="https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2011/09/16/09-11-1933.pdf">real war</a> that confronts us all – a war that must be successfully fought if life and property are to be secure in our country…The warfare which an armed underworld is waging upon organized society has reached disturbing proportions. The prevalence of predatory crime, including kidnapping and racketeering, demands the utmost diligence upon the part of our law enforcing agencies, supported by an informed and aroused public opinion.” Cummings declared a “<a href="https://www.academia.edu/6571615/J._Edgar_Hoover_s_Domestic_Propaganda_Narrating_the_Spectacle_of_the_Karpis_Arrest">war on crime</a>” that aimed to professionalize and militarize the police. </p>
<p>Professionalization was supposed to train police in scientific methods to curtail torture in police work, but militarization armed the FBI and coordinated it with local police departments across the country. The war on crime was a signature program of Roosevelt’s <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Manufacture_of_Consent/cXjDDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=war%20on%20crime">New Deal,</a> designed to win headlines for the president when Americans were hungry for strong leadership amid the Great Depression. </p>
<h2>Kerner Commission</h2>
<p>Thirty years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson mounted his own <a href="http://bostonreview.net/us/elizabeth-hinton-kerner-commission-crime-commission">war on crime.</a> He appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, to investigate the source of riots across the country in 1967. </p>
<p>Chaired by Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois, the commission reported that to “some Negroes, <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015000225410&view=1up&seq=27&q1=brutality">police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression</a>. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a ‘double standard’ of justice and protection – one for Negroes and one for whites.” </p>
<p>The Kerner Commission documented a reality that remains unchanged: police are trained to keep order in Black neighborhoods with the use of unchecked violence. Among other things, it highlighted the “need for change in police operations in the ghetto, to insure proper conduct by individual officers and to eliminate <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015000225410&view=plaintext&seq=180&q1=need%20for%20change%20in%20police%20operations%20in%20the%20ghetto,%20to%20insure%20proper%20conduct%20by%20individual%20officers%20and%20to%20eliminate%20abrasive%20practices">abrasive practices</a>.” </p>
<p>The problem of police brutality was not untrained or rogue cops, but the design of America’s system of policing. The commission noted that “many of the serious disturbances took place in cities whose <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015000225410&view=plaintext&seq=180&q1=routine%20police%20actions%20such%20as%20stopping">police are among the best led, best organized, best trained and most professional</a> in the country.” President Johnson ignored its <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/1968-kerner-commission-got-it-right-nobody-listened-180968318/">recommendations</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344831/original/file-20200630-103636-dn7dm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344831/original/file-20200630-103636-dn7dm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344831/original/file-20200630-103636-dn7dm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344831/original/file-20200630-103636-dn7dm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344831/original/file-20200630-103636-dn7dm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344831/original/file-20200630-103636-dn7dm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=660&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344831/original/file-20200630-103636-dn7dm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=660&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/344831/original/file-20200630-103636-dn7dm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=660&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Kerner Commission’s recommendations to address poverty and structural racism in the U.S. were never adopted.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Kerner-Commission-50-Years/f5e0bbebe4e6485da5bbf370ed976f98/8/0">AP Photo/File</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>War on drugs</h2>
<p>The next administration made the problem of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-anti-left-anti-black-war-on-drugs-2019-7">police brutality</a> worse. </p>
<p>In June 1971, President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs. Borrowing language from the war on crime, Nixon announced that “America’s <a href="https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2016/06/26404/">public enemy number one</a> in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive,” he said. </p>
<p>Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, later recounted that the drug war was designed to link the Black community with narcotics and thereby <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/">“arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”</a> </p>
<p>The war on drugs not only targeted the Black community but justified the mass incarceration of Black men. <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/why-america-cant-quit-the-drug-war-47203/">Every president since Ronald Reagan</a> has expanded the war on drugs, from programs that equipped police with <a href="https://www.voanews.com/usa/why-american-police-officers-look-soldiers">military gear</a> to patterns of enforcement that disproportionately policed people of color. Such outfitting dressed officers as soldiers and cast Black people as combatants. </p>
<h2>Undone reform, post-Ferguson</h2>
<p>Protests against police violence erupted once again in August 2014 when police in Ferguson, Missouri, killed an unarmed Black teenager and left his body displayed on the street for hours. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/us/michael-brown-a-bodys-timeline-4-hours-on-a-ferguson-street.html?searchResultPosition=1">Angry crowds gathered, protested and rioted</a>. Police responded by showcasing their <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2014/08/14/us/missouri-ferguson-police-tactics/">military equipment</a> including tear gas, rubber bullets, stun grenades, M-16 rifles, M-14 rifles, M-1911 handguns, tactical vests, undercover apparel, riot shields, armored personnel carriers, mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles and high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles. </p>
<p>President Barack Obama issued <a href="https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/publications/LEEWG_Report_Final.pdf">guidelines</a> for the Justice Department in 2015 that prohibited the transfer of some military equipment to local police departments. He explained that Americans have
“seen how <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/05/18/remarks-president-community-policing">militarized gear</a> can sometimes give people a feeling like there’s an occupying force, as opposed to a force that’s part of the community that’s protecting them and serving them.” </p>
<p>Obama also created the <a href="https://time.com/4398392/obama-police-reform-report-task-force-on-21st-century-policing/">Task Force on 21st Century Policing</a> in 2014. It recommended new policies to build trust between racial minorities and the police, but they were sparsely adopted. After <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/07/07/statement-president">police killed</a> Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016, Obama lamented that “change has been too slow and we have to have a greater sense of urgency about this.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343876/original/file-20200625-132951-1ohdf67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343876/original/file-20200625-132951-1ohdf67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343876/original/file-20200625-132951-1ohdf67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343876/original/file-20200625-132951-1ohdf67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343876/original/file-20200625-132951-1ohdf67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343876/original/file-20200625-132951-1ohdf67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343876/original/file-20200625-132951-1ohdf67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343876/original/file-20200625-132951-1ohdf67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Black Lives Matter movement began in Ferguson, Missouri, when Michael Brown was shot and killed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/Search?query=ferguson+missouri+riots&ss=10&st=kw&entitysearch=&toItem=15&orderBy=Newest&searchMediaType=excludecollections">AP Photo/Jeff Roberson</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>President Trump rescinded <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/08/31/2017-18679/restoring-state-tribal-and-local-law-enforcements-access-to-life-saving-equipment-and-resources">Obama’s guidelines</a> to demilitarize the police in 2017. Trump’s order reinstated the military gear and sent a “strong message that we will not allow criminal activity, violence, and lawlessness to become the new normal,” said <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-sessions-delivers-remarks-63rd-biennial-conference-national-fraternal">Attorney General Jeff Sessions</a>. </p>
<p>Today, the efforts of the White House and Congress to reform the police is an attempt to <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_End_of_Policing/Iv2mDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=reform">reinvent an old institution</a>. Ideas advanced by Republicans and Democrats rely on the police to tear down the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2019/01/31/blue-wall-of-silence-policing-the-usa-cops-community/2604929002/">blue wall of silence</a>, an unofficial loyalty oath among police that is customarily respected by judges and prosecutors, and which leads to a lack of accountability for police violence and abuse. <a href="https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759?fbclid=IwAR1lM0C0fw4AcfYaXN1DIhh8tIRefINJDKmwjIYR-zxy2JsFi1KClFgMTUU">Police culture protects itself</a>. </p>
<p>Like before, America is again scrutinizing the role and function of the police in the wake of public corruption and brutality. But there is no promise that reform efforts now will lead to any more changes than they have in the past. </p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141011/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen M. Underhill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
What will it take to change a brutal and militaristic style of policing in America? Political will.
Stephen M. Underhill, Associate Professor of Communication, Marshall University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/65621
2016-10-06T14:55:35Z
2016-10-06T14:55:35Z
Clinton and Trump need to address police violence in debate
<p>On Oct. 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will come together for the <a href="http://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2016-debate-schedule/2016-presidential-debate-schedule/">second presidential debate</a> – taking the stage only eight miles from Ferguson, Missouri. </p>
<p>Since the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-under-siege-after-police-shooting.html?_r=0">police shooting of Michael Brown</a> in Ferguson on Aug. 9, 2014, the greater St. Louis area has been the epicenter of a national discussion – sometimes loud, often heated – about police violence. </p>
<p>This presidential debate should take up that discussion about race and policing – not only because of the significance of the location but also because of the timing. The town hall style debate comes after weeks of unrest in cities across the country, following the police shootings of <a href="http://www.essence.com/2016/09/19/medical-examiner-tyre-king-shooting">Tyree King</a> in Columbus, Ohio, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/us/video-released-in-terence-crutchers-killing-by-tulsa-police.html">Terence Crutcher</a> in Tulsa, Oklahoma, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/22/us/keith-lamont-scott/">Keith Lamont Scott</a> in Charlotte, North Carolina and <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3810837/Unarmed-black-man-acting-erratically-shot-police-San-Diego-suburb-amid-claims-cops-confiscated-witnesses-cell-phones.html">Alfred Olango</a> in El Cajon, California. </p>
<p>These incidents have once again brought to the surface the systemic problem of police violence in black communities. Today, black teens are <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/8/14/12472896/milwaukee-wisconsin-riots-police-shooting">21 times</a> more likely to be shot and killed by the police than their white counterparts. As several historians have recently acknowledged, black Americans die at the hands of police at a rate that is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/25/mike-brown-shooting-jim-crow-lynchings-in-common">almost equivalent</a> to the number of documented lynchings during the early 20th century.</p>
<p>This issue has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/09/the-bahamas-travel-advisory-for-the-u-s-use-extreme-caution-around-the-police/">received international attention</a>. A recent report by one U.N. Working Group of Experts <a href="http://www.ushrnetwork.org/our-work/project/un-working-group-experts-people-african-descent-visit">stated</a>, “Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.” This year alone, almost 200 black people have been killed by police – <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database">a figure</a> that represents only documented and reported incidents.</p>
<p>These staggering statistics underscore the urgent need for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to move beyond symbolic gestures and instead clearly articulate how they intend to address this issue if elected president of the United States. </p>
<p>But what can be done by the next president? This is a question that concerns us as black millennials and as historians <a href="http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/index/charleston_syllabus">who write</a> about <a href="http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/book/hardcover/stamped-from-the-beginning/9781568584638">American racism</a>.</p>
<h2>A blueprint for action</h2>
<p>“A Vision for Black Lives,” the comprehensive <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/platform">list of demands</a> released by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), provides one blueprint for how the next U.S. president can address the issue of race and policing. The M4BL is a coalition of <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/about/">more than 50 organizations</a> across the country, mostly led by black millennials who support Black Lives Matter (BLM).</p>
<p>Originally released on Aug. 1, 2016, “A Vision for Black Lives,” includes six policy demands that <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/tag/m4bl/">seek to bring an end to anti-black racism and state-sanctioned violence</a> in black communities. The activists call for “<a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/end-war-on-black-people/">an end to the war on black people</a>,” arguing that black youth have been criminalized and dehumanized in all areas of society. </p>
<p>They also demand “<a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/reparations/">reparations for past and continuing harms</a>” and “<a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/invest-divest/">investments in the education, health and safety of Black people</a>.” Reflecting the influence of <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/joseph-the-radical-democracy-of-the-movement-for-black-lives/">black power and black nationalist movements</a> of the 20th century, M4BL activists emphasize the need for <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/economic-justice/">economic justice</a>, <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/community-control/">community control</a> and <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/political-power/">black political power</a>. </p>
<p>“In recent years,” the <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/platform">platform</a> notes, “we have taken to the streets, launched massive campaigns, and impacted elections, but our elected leaders have failed to address the legitimate demands of our Movement. We can no longer wait.”</p>
<p>Yet, we have all been forced to wait as public officials continue to ignore these demands. Two months have passed since the release of “A Vision for Black Lives” and neither Trump nor Clinton have directly or concretely offered a response. </p>
<p>Regardless of one’s point of view, there is no denying that the next U.S. president must have a plan to address race and policing in a more tangible and extended fashion than in <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/21/politics/police-shootings-politics-trump-clinton/">the first debate</a>. No doubt many Americans – including <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/about/">thousands of activists</a> who support the <a href="https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/">M4BL platform</a> – will be expecting both candidates to confront this critical issue.</p>
<p>Trump continues an <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/trump-black-supporters/502502/">uphill battle to attract black voters</a>, with as few as 6 percent currently supporting him. Clinton is still struggling to gain the support of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/us/politics/young-blacks-voice-skepticism-on-hillary-clinton-worrying-democrats.html?_r=0">black and non-black</a> millennials – a voting bloc she will need to win this election.</p>
<p>Trump’s emphasis on “law and order” policies like a nationwide <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/fighting-stop-and-frisk-policing-from-rockefeller-to-trump/">stop-and-frisk campaign</a> and his dismissal of the BLM movement all suggest he is uninterested in proposing sweeping policy changes to stem police violence. But, he is not alone. <a href="https://mic.com/articles/148107/hillary-clinton-supports-black-lives-matter-in-wake-of-police-shootings#.f4hpONBjp">Hillary Clinton has publicly supported BLM</a> but ignored the movement’s recently released platform – even after scolding the activists last summer for <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/analysis-clintons-approach-black-lives-matter-activists-n413151">not having</a> “a plan” she could advance.</p>
<p>Both candidates have an opportunity in the upcoming debate to lay out a clear plan and vision for ending the unjust police killings of black people in the United States. While presidential debate topics are vast and the challenges facing the nation are many, the issue of police violence is one of the most critical domestic challenges of our time. It should not be ignored during the next debate – in St. Louis, of all places.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65621/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Will the candidates acknowledge the Black Lives Matter platform during the debate in St. Louis? Millennial voters will be listening.
Keisha N. Blain, Assistant Professor of History, University of Iowa
Ibram X. Kendi, Assistant Professor of African American History, University of Florida
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/46931
2015-09-02T04:28:31Z
2015-09-02T04:28:31Z
Prophets of pain: the art of NWA’s F*** tha Police
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93490/original/image-20150901-25723-1hbj4ke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ice Cube and his bandmates had a point, albeit one mired in controversy. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Eva Rinaldi</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One of the most viscerally exciting scenes in the new biopic about NWA – <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1398426/">Straight Outta Compton</a> (named after the band’s <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11791-straight-outta-compton-efil4zaggin/">1989 album</a>) – recreates the infamous Detroit concert where the group had apparently been warned by local police not to perform the controversial hit <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5fts7bj-so">Fuck tha Police</a>, a song considered so inflammatory the FBI felt compelled to issue a veiled warning to the group.</p>
<p>Despite the geographic and temporal distance between 1989 Detroit and 2015 Brisbane, Australia (where I saw the film in a packed advance screening), as the performers worked up the courage to defy the authorities, the onscreen tension was palpably transferred to an electrified audience. The eventual release of middle-finger-brandishing defiance created a tangible rush in the room. </p>
<p>This ability to move a crowd legitimates NWA’s success in terms that are not often acknowledged or recognised: gangsta rap is music. Organised sound, created to excite and entertain (usually a group of) people. To understand it, you have to hear it and for best results, experience it physically.</p>
<p>The aesthetics of gangsta rap are mostly overlooked, however, because of the immense web of social, economic, racial, gendered, political and cultural issues that surround it. </p>
<p>The social and political debate tends to obscure all but the angriest of emotional states embodied in NWA’s music. It’s unfortunate that a more compassionate sense of the deep emotional wellspring of discontent tapped into by many of the songs on Straight Outta Compton is drowned by the hype, controversy, and commodification. </p>
<p>Naturally, however, it’s impossible to fully grasp the significance of the music without first acknowledging contextual issues.</p>
<h2>Order, order, order …</h2>
<p>Emerging from the de-industrialised urban environment of 1980s South Los Angeles, significantly impacted by the slow death of its middle-class and Reagan-era social policies, members of NWA have always maintained that a form of street reporting defined their lyrical style. Fuck tha Police is essentially a protest against police harassment. </p>
<p>Given the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Gates#Operation_Hammer">aggressive practices</a> of LA police chief Daryl Gates’ law enforcement approach at the time (essentially a paramilitary response to the spread of crack cocaine in 80s urban environments), a robust artistic response should hardly have been surprising.</p>
<p>Yet Fuck tha Police became exhibit A in the case for moral panic about the state of black male youth across America. It was a win-win situation: social conservatives had evidence of transgression and threat, and NWA had an album that would soon go double platinum, all without a major label, radio airplay (too profane) or significant touring.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93491/original/image-20150901-25756-9ukbaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93491/original/image-20150901-25756-9ukbaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93491/original/image-20150901-25756-9ukbaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93491/original/image-20150901-25756-9ukbaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93491/original/image-20150901-25756-9ukbaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93491/original/image-20150901-25756-9ukbaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93491/original/image-20150901-25756-9ukbaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93491/original/image-20150901-25756-9ukbaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A protester raises his hands as he blocks the road in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Alexy Furman</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Of course the <a href="http://www.southcentralhistory.com/la-riots.php">post-Rodney King trial conflagration of 1992</a> imbued NWA with a retrospectively-applied prophetic veneer. This has in turn been amplified by recent unrest in contemporary <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-ferguson-erupts-45930">Ferguson</a> and the steady drip-feed of video footage capturing the tragic results of failed police practices across America, a full quarter of a century since the release of Straight Outta Compton.</p>
<p>NWA’s free speech, street reportage angle is of course notoriously problematized by the confrontingly violent, misogynist and homophobic lyrics that come with the package.</p>
<p>So the social and political commentary around NWA and gangsta rap generally is clearly necessary and compelling, not to mention bewilderingly complex. </p>
<p>But the noisy debate obscures and often diminishes the artistic impulse behind songs like Fuck tha Police, ironically extinguishing any chance of hearing the emotional message being communicated beneath the hype.</p>
<p>To start with, some pain might have been avoided (although possibly less money made) if a simple basic fact had been acknowledged from the beginning: Fuck tha Police is meant to be a bit funny.</p>
<h2>A gang is with whoever I’m stepping …</h2>
<p>The first thing to remember is that “gangsta rap” was <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/music/who-invented-the-term-gangsta-rap-its-complicated-5540741">not an established term</a> when Straight Outta Compton was created and released - to be sure, gangster-themed music existed – NWA were not the first. But this was a group of young men operating in a hip-hop tradition, rapping about street life (sometimes called reality rap).</p>
<p>One of the most fundamental traits of much hip-hop music is the use of irony or parody, and Fuck tha Police is clearly set up as an ironic parody of the justice system.</p>
<p>The song’s introduction (which isn’t featured in the movie) depicts a humorously inverted scene in which <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/dr-dre-507628">Dr Dre</a> is the presiding judge over a court case where members of the LAPD are on trial. <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/ice-cube-21265309">Ice-Cube</a>, <a href="http://www.mtv.com/artists/mc-ren/biography/">MC Ren</a> and <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/eazy-e-21257001">Easy-E</a> are the lead prosecutors. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93492/original/image-20150901-25771-11qawgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93492/original/image-20150901-25771-11qawgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93492/original/image-20150901-25771-11qawgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93492/original/image-20150901-25771-11qawgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93492/original/image-20150901-25771-11qawgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93492/original/image-20150901-25771-11qawgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93492/original/image-20150901-25771-11qawgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93492/original/image-20150901-25771-11qawgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Street memorial to Easy-E, who died in 1995, aged 31.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Christiaan Triebert</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The emcees take turns indicting the police for their unacceptable harassment, at the same time indicting themselves as murderously-inclined wannabe cop-killers - a contradiction that reflects the rich seam of ambivalence and ambiguity running through hip-hop.</p>
<p>To understand gangsta rap in a historical continuum is to recognize the evolution of the thug/gangster personae from the oral traditions of African-American folklore (such as the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03007766.2012.671098#.VeUp-dOqpBc">Badman</a> and the <a href="http://gotheretoknowthere.blogspot.com.au/2010/09/trickster-figure.html">Trickster</a>). The rapping gangster persona was an extension and recontextualization of existing vernacular types, less than a radical new glorification of criminal life (of NWA, only Easy-E had a criminal past).</p>
<p>Back in the courtroom, the defendant is finally found guilty, not of harassment, or abuse of power, but of being a “redneck, white-bread, chicken-shit motherfucker”. </p>
<p>In the end, the policeman is not even deemed worthy of a violent end, and is merely laughed out of court. The mocking tone of this pseudo-conviction was possibly just as genuine an irritant to the collective law and order psyche than the hyperbolic intimations of physical violence.</p>
<h2>Lights start flashing behind me …</h2>
<p>To be clear, individual lines within Fuck tha Police are profoundly serious (“police think they have the authority to kill a minority”) and violent (“and when I’m finished, it’s gonna be a bloodbath of cops, dying in LA”). </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93493/original/image-20150901-25759-1a3p0h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93493/original/image-20150901-25759-1a3p0h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93493/original/image-20150901-25759-1a3p0h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93493/original/image-20150901-25759-1a3p0h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93493/original/image-20150901-25759-1a3p0h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93493/original/image-20150901-25759-1a3p0h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1366&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93493/original/image-20150901-25759-1a3p0h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1366&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93493/original/image-20150901-25759-1a3p0h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1366&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dr Dre in 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the song’s courtroom parody frame and the lurid ludicrousness of some aspects of the emcee’s testimonies are signs that raise the whole thing to the level of metaphor rather than literal expression of intention.</p>
<p>This lyrical complexity is typical – ambivalently juxtaposing incontrovertibly violent imagery with artistically sincere poetic aspiration. It also partially accounts for why debates over songs of this sort are never resolved.</p>
<p>One thing is certain though: Fuck tha Police took America by storm not because its youth had been waiting for NWA’s moral support to go out and murder law enforcement officers, but because the song was effective as music. The excessive focus on rhymes results in the neglect of beats, the other crucial component of hip-hop. </p>
<p>It’s therefore worth considering Fuck tha Police as sonic expression, as music. To understand how it works as sound is to acknowledge that it transcends the vulgar and blunt piece of profanity its critics like to paint it as.</p>
<h2>I’m a sniper with a hell of a scope …</h2>
<p>Hardwired into the DNA of hip-hop is the art of sampling, and the genes of gangsta rap are particularly linked to 1970s funk. </p>
<p>It’s funk’s propulsive rhythmic irresistibility that underpins the entire vibe of Fuck tha Police. Like most rap of this time, it’s based on the most utterly funky bits of the most unbelievably funky music ever created.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/51t1OsPSdBc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Fuck tha Police.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sampling and looping the grooviest parts of earlier songs is one of the defining features of hip-hop musical culture, a practice that evolved from the earlier DJ practice of alternating between two copies of the same record on a double turntable in order to keep repeating the instrumental breaks that crowds best responded to in street parties.</p>
<p>A whole tradition of making music based on the funkiest and grooviest parts of another genre that was already itself devoted to funk and groove.</p>
<p>Indeed the skill with which a DJ/producer selects, edits and most importantly layers samples is crucial to the aesthetic success of a hip-hop track.</p>
<p>The song opens with a scratch as fanfare, a signal that there’s a DJ in charge. Dr Dre then sets the scene over a funky instrumental break from Marva Whitney’s It’s My Thing:</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LDie0tv6DAg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Sample appears at 1:40.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The cascading drum fills create an improvised feel, and Dre’s deliberate slowing down of the Whitney sample (from the original’s 110 to 102 bpm) creates a slightly chilled vibe that other producers would have likely picked up on – an encyclopaedic knowledge of sample-able breaks is one of the less widely known nerdish qualities hip-hop producers have.</p>
<p>Slowing down the tempo also creates a less disruptive connection with the sample underpinning the rest of the song, Roy Ayer’s The Boogie Back:</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LYLJhc4NHEQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Sample appears at 0:12.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ice-Cube is the first to take the stand (0.31) - the Boogie Back sample kicks in, and there is a discernible change in tempo and feel. While the overall speed of new section is slightly slower (from 102 to 99 bpm), elements of the new sample such as the fast hi-hat actually the create the impression of an increase in speed.</p>
<p>What matters more than the specifics of tempo is that the looped repetition of sample-based hip-hop creates its own sense of propulsion, a groove that is subtly different to that which the original music would have presented. </p>
<p>The simple fact of repeating a musical idea gives it a sense of heft and import it likely didn’t convey in the original, and the mechanically cyclic nature of looping creates its own distinct aesthetic sensation. </p>
<p>So when the pattern and tempo change at 0:31, after a period of tightly controlled and predictable repetition, the effect of changing gears constitutes a distinctly pleasurable aural novelty, as the ear and body take a few milliseconds to resolve the disorientation and adjust to the new groove.</p>
<h2>Put in my clip, yo, and this is the sound …</h2>
<p>The effective use of contrast in both large and small degrees is a fundamental element of effectively organised music, and Dre’s choice of sample here includes guitar lines in dialogue creating an intertwined <em>horizontal</em> melodic counterpoint to the overwhelmingly <em>vertical</em> percussive rapping and punchy vibe.</p>
<p>A single metallic knife-like sample stabs each downbeat, creating a slightly industrial machine-like quality, appropriately enough sampled from Wilson Pickett’s Get me Back on Time, Engine #9:</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n7sfOlQbD28?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Sample appears at 5:14.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The syncopated rhythmic complexity created between the rapping voice and the funk accompaniment is most skilfully exploited by Ice-Cube, and some of his most striking lines are deliberately enhanced by the unexpected dropping-out of the accompaniment (e.g. “Black police showing out for the white cop”).</p>
<p>Virtuosity imparts its own sleek form of aesthetic pleasure, and the skill with which Ice-Cube rhymes “product” with “narcotics” is enviable. The finessed placement of the “cs” at the end of narcotics artfully preserves the rhyme as well as clarity of the word.</p>
<p>But it’s the intervening cuts (choruses) and scenes that give Dr Dre a chance to shine as producer - he creates a stifling, almost nauseous atmosphere (to be sure, my highly subjective response). </p>
<p>During another beautifully placed dropping out of the instrumental accompaniment, Ice-Cube here announces, “Yo Dre I got something to say”, and the anthemic line is launched.</p>
<p>Scratches alternate with a sampled solitary “fuck” (Eazy E’s voice, although I’m unsure of the origin), articulated three times (if you’re going to say it, why not milk it?) followed by “tha Police”.</p>
<p>I break down this particular line because it’s one of my favourites from a musical point of view. Due to the way “fuck” is sampled separately to the spoken “tha police”, it’s articulated differently than when one simply says “fuck the police”.</p>
<h2>Yeah, I’m a gangsta, but still I got flavour</h2>
<p>Usually, the “ck” of “fuck” elides with “the” - the end of one consonant is grafted onto the beginning of the next, and the expirative release of the “ck” is swallowed.</p>
<p>But in this song, because of the sampling, there’s a brilliant percussive effect created by the break between “fuck” and “the” (an incredibly crisp triplet rhythm, if you listen carefully). The staccato sound creates the satisfying sensation of vigorously spitting the words out.</p>
<p>A blaring synthesizer chord in the background generates a sustained, dissonant and slightly sickening feel that balances against the generally rapid fire texture - a core of angst to the song.</p>
<p>After each of these chorus-like sections there is a scene, the first two of which depict the emcees bearing the brunt of vicious police harassment on the street, the events that landed the LAPD in the dock in the first place. </p>
<p>Spinning through these scenes is a guitar sample based on the same intervals of the Twilight Zone theme’s famous motif: </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XVSRm80WzZk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Twilight Zone theme.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This allusion (which I have no evidence is deliberate) enhances the sense of surreal dread anyone would feel when targeted by the very institution charged to “protect and serve”. </p>
<p>After these chaotic interludes, the return to the courtroom is underscored by a familiar sample – the famous break from James Brown’s Funky Drummer: </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dNP8tbDMZNE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Sample appears at 5:35.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The return to narrative order is supported by and reflected in a return to musical normalcy.</p>
<p>As the guilty policeman is removed from the courtroom (revealing his racism in a final insult) the song finishes with another round of “fuck the police” and the blaring synthesizer emphasises the fundamentally bizarre nature of the song with hints of microtonal pitch-bending, also exacerbating the underlying nauseous quality that sound already conveyed.</p>
<h2>Shining the light in my face, and for what …</h2>
<p>Beyond the ironic courtroom framing device, I haven’t delved into the lyrics of Fuck tha Police (such analyses are easily found on the web), so as to focus on aspects of the song that are less discussed in the general commentary. For the same reason, I haven’t been able to address the role NWA played in the evolution of gangsta rap, their effect on future generations of hip-hop artists, or the issues of violence, misogyny and homophobia that swirl around their lyrics and biographies.</p>
<p>Instead, this modest analysis has focused on some of the musical features of Fuck tha Police in order to suggest that deeper appreciation of what goes into this genre apart from provocative raps can change the way songs like this are perceived and received. </p>
<p>The notion that Fuck tha Police was intended to be at least partially funny can mitigate the fear-based reaction to transgression and aggression.</p>
<p>And evidence that a sophisticated and tradition-based process of musical craft underpins the song allows us to re-conceive Fuck tha Police more richly as an artistic object of complexity, one that exists in the aesthetic realm as well as the social, communicating emotions as well politics.</p>
<p>Perhaps if the art of Fuck tha Police were not obscured by reactive controversies, the message of the song might have been clearer. Not the lyrical message so much as the tinder-box emotional quality that was coded into the total musical object.</p>
<p>And if that emotional message had been fully apprehended back in 1989, if those in power had been able to hear and respond compassionately to the rising discontent in the hearts and minds of black American youth, perhaps (admittedly a big ‘perhaps’) things could have been different in 1992 and beyond.</p>
<p><br>
<em>Straight Outta Compton is in Australian cinemas from September 3.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46931/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liam Viney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Some pain might have been avoided (and probably less money made) if a simple basic fact had been acknowledged from the beginning: Fuck tha Police is meant to be funny.
Liam Viney, Piano Performance Fellow , The University of Queensland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45480
2015-08-10T19:52:35Z
2015-08-10T19:52:35Z
Why the silence of moderate conservatives is dangerous for race relations
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91197/original/image-20150807-27587-9ptaa7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Letter from a Birmingham Jail - 1963
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freedom_quote_from_Martin_Luther_King,_Jr%27s_Letter_from_a_Birmingham_Jail.jpg">Jason C Tillmann</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The past two years of racial turmoil have removed any and all doubt about the continuing significance of race in the United States. </p>
<p>Both whites and blacks <a href="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/_Today_Stories_Teases/130724-July-NBC-WSJ-poll.pdf">have exhibited</a> increasingly negative views on race relations since 2011. A recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/05/us/05poll-doc.html">New York Times/CBS News poll</a> finds that Americans’ perceptions of racial progress have drastically deteriorated over the last year. </p>
<p>The current racial environment stands in stark contrast to 2008, when numerous commentators mused about <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=geQxhys4rf8C&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=post+racial+america&ots=t_Y7laDbI4&sig=CNt14M4XHXdUp-eKPMUXXAUXF_g#v=onepage&q=post%20racial%20america&f=false">a post-racial America. </a></p>
<p>We believe the post-racial narrative began to lose substantial support after George Zimmerman eluded incarceration for the murder of Trayvon Martin, reached a flashpoint with the shooting of unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson by a police officer, continued to loose steam with the high-profile killings of blacks such as <a href="http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/freddie-gray/">Freddie Gray</a> and <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-cop-verdict-servin-edit-0423-20150422-story.html">Rekia Boyd</a> and was permanently disabled after <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-charleston-43821">the grisly massacre </a>of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina. </p>
<p>Beyond such headline-grabbing events, race also affects the likelihood of obtaining a <a href="http://www.cepr.net/documents/black-coll-grads-2014-05.pdf">job</a>, how one is treated at every stage in the <a href="http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data">criminal justice system</a> and even <a href="http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301395">health outcomes</a>. </p>
<p>Why does race continue to haunt us, 150 years after the Civil War, 50 years after the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, and six years into the Obama presidency?</p>
<p>The persistence of racism, we argue, rests in no small part on the inability of moderate conservatives – from politicians like Speaker of the House John Boehner to columnists like The New York Times’ David Brooks – to recognize the ways in which it continues to affect the life chances of blacks. </p>
<p>We have been here before. </p>
<p>As social scientists well-versed in <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/american-government-politics-and-policy/civil-rights-and-making-modern-american-state">the history of the civil rights era</a> and the <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9083.html">backlash against it,</a> we see a direct parallel between today’s conservative moderates and those of the Jim Crow South to whom Martin Luther King Jr addressed his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963. </p>
<h2>The Birmingham Campaign</h2>
<p>“If you win in Birmingham, as Birmingham goes, so goes the nation.” </p>
<p>These were the words that longtime activist Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth used to encourage King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to come to Birmingham and take part in nonviolent direct action protests against segregation. </p>
<p>When they arrived, King, Shuttlesworth and the SCLC launched a formal campaign called <a href="http://crdl.usg.edu/events/birmingham_demonstrations/?Welcome">Project C</a> (C for confrontation) in which – through sit-ins at lunch counters and marches on City Hall – nonviolent protesters let Birmingham and the rest of the nation know that the city’s days of treating blacks as second-class citizens needed to end. </p>
<p>Attempting to quell the momentum, Birmingham issued an injunction barring further protests in the city. Two days later, on Good Friday, April 12 1963, King and a group of Birmingham Campaign supporters were arrested after they openly defied the injunction. </p>
<p>While in jail, King reflected on the slow pace of racial progress and placed the dire situation squarely at the feet of white moderates.</p>
<h2>Southern white moderates: a sacred middle ground</h2>
<p><a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail">Letter from Birmingham Jail</a> was written in response to a <a href="http://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen/09a/mlk_day/statement.html">Call For Unity</a>, a public statement by eight white clergymen who acknowledged that American racism was wrong but argued that direct action – protest in the streets – was too extreme. </p>
<p>They favored a less confrontational strategy – one that took place in the courts, an approach they hoped would avoid inciting further hatred and violence on the part of white reactionaries. </p>
<p>King’s letter does a skillful job in unmasking this type of lukewarm moderate support for civil rights and recasts it as shortsighted, condescending and ultimately dangerous to the black freedom movement. </p>
<p>King is particularly critical of white moderates who disapprove of black anger while turning a blind eye to the circumstances responsible for the anger. He explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Expressing grave disappointment, King ultimately concludes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Finally, the letter calls into question the tired refrain of “wait” for change, as moderates often believed blacks were impatient about the pace of progress. </p>
<p>In one of the most cited passages, King writes, “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”</p>
<p>Moderates occupied a sacred middle ground between the progressives and the reactionaries in the South, and King wanted their support.</p>
<p>He would not get it. </p>
<p>Southern reactionaries, led by Eugene (Bull) Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, feeling the ground shake beneath them, did not flinch in their defense of white supremacy.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3RxjSQnuKF4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Aided by the silence of southern moderates, the reactionary white establishment felt it had a green light to inflict harm on the black community. </p>
<p>With the world watching, they turned <a href="http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/activism/civil-rights-demonstrations/birmingham-demonstrations">high-pressure fire hoses on black students</a>, allowed police dogs to attack demonstrators and arrested over 1,000 nonviolent protesters. </p>
<p>The violent events in Birmingham were instrumental in showing an international and a domestic audience the ugly side of American racism. </p>
<p>Soon after, moderate whites beyond the South <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5939918.html">became a key force </a> in drumming up support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.</p>
<h2>2015: moderate conservatives are still key</h2>
<p>Fast forwarding to today, the racial climate is eerily similar to what we observed more than 50 years ago. </p>
<p>However, now it’s the entire country, not just the South, that is riven with racial violence. </p>
<p>This time around, as one of us together with Matt A Barreto show in our book <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9954.html">Change They Can’t Believe In</a>, it’s the Tea Party pushing a reactionary agenda. And, much like their forebears during Jim Crow, moderate conservatives, who are relatively progressive on race, refuse to assert themselves where race is concerned.</p>
<p>If David Brooks, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/opinion/05brooks.html?_r=0">who has castigated the Tea Party</a> for their refusal to compromise and for having “no sense of moral decency,” represents the sentiments of moderate conservatives, it’s easy to see why race remains a problem in America. </p>
<p>Consider the following. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/anes_timeseries_2012/anes_timeseries_2012.htm">We analyzed data</a> from the American National Election Study (2012) to investigate the distribution of reactionary relative to establishment conservatives among self-identified conservatives in the American electorate. </p>
<p>Our analysis indicates that approximately 22% of all conservatives identify strongly with the Tea Party. This means that approximately 78% of all conservatives are at least moderate.</p>
<p>But what do they say on race? </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinion/listening-to-ta-nehisi-coates-while-white.html?_r=0">his recent review</a> of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, <a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220290/between-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates/">Between the World and Me</a>, in The New York Times, Brooks essentially rejects the notion that the racial animus that results in violence remains a problem when he writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think you [Coates] distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s…a Harlem Children’s Zone for every KKK – and usually vastly more than one. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The effects of racism, in other words, at least these days, are mitigated by the opportunities this great country provides everyone. One way to read Brooks is that he is saying that race and racism are not as bad as Coates, and by extension, black folk, believe it is. </p>
<p>Similarly, John Boehner, speaker of the house and part of the conservative leadership, has downplayed racism – most recently <a href="http://www.politicususa.com/2015/07/12/spineless-coward-john-boehner-refuses-condemn-donald-trumps-racism.html">in his response</a> to Donald Trump’s inflammatory comments about Mexicans. </p>
<p>And while far too many moderate conservatives sit by, it is the reactionaries who commandeer the racial agenda with, for instance, <a href="https://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/tea-party-nationalism/tea-party-news-and-analysis/504-trayvon-tea-party-racism">their lionizing of George Zimmerman</a> and <a href="https://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/race-racism-and-white-nationalism/574-national-socialists-militia-klan-and-tea-parties-respond-to-murder-of-michael-brown">their dismissal</a> of protesters in Ferguson as “blacks out of control” and “aboriginals.” </p>
<p>We believe this nation is, as it was in the 1960s during the Birmingham Campaign, at a crossroads in race relations. </p>
<p>The reality on the ground is that blacks are dying at an <a href="https://theconversation.com/look-for-the-patterns-in-charleston-43593">alarming rate</a> at the hands of agents of the state (law enforcement) as well as individual white citizens like George Zimmerman and Dylann Roof. </p>
<p>Combating such injustice will require moderate conservatives to take a bold stand. </p>
<p>We agree with King: moderates must not shrink in the presence of vocal white reactionaries or hide behind lofty color-blind rhetoric. </p>
<p>As King affirmed over 50 years ago, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45480/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
One year on from Ferguson, the message of Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail could not be more relevant.
Christopher Sebastian Parker, Associate Professor, Political Science , University of Washington
Megan Ming Francis, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science , University of Washington
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/40917
2015-04-28T16:31:04Z
2015-04-28T16:31:04Z
Baltimore burning: death of African American in police custody lit old tinderbox
<p>It was only a matter of time before Baltimore erupted into racial violence. The city epitomises urban deprivation and under-development. In decline since World War II, when its population peaked at just under a million people, the city now has 600,000 residents, two-thirds of who are African Americans.</p>
<p>Unemployment is around 9%, but it is <a href="http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-04-09/news/bs-ed-box-ban-baltimore-20140409_1_baltimore-city-council-unemployment-rate-greater-baltimore-committee">twice that in the city’s black commmunity</a> and the city has a history of troubled race relations <a href="http://www.prrac.org/pdf/riots_and_rebirth.pdf">going back more than 100 years</a> to the development of segregated housing developments which effectively “ghettoised” Baltimore’s African-American communities in poorly serviced and cramped communities. </p>
<p>Now Baltimore is the focus of violence as protests at the death, in police custody, of a young African-American man <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/27/baltimore-police-protesters-violence-freddie-gray">Freddie Gray</a> who died on April 19 of spinal injuries after being arrested and found in posession of a knife.</p>
<p>Gray’s death is just the latest in a recent spate of high-profile incidents involving white police officers and young black men. While Gray’s death is not quite so clear-cut as that of Walter Scott, whose death was captured on video after he was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/12/walter-scott-shooting-officer-michael-slager-audio-recording">shot in the back</a> by Officer Michael Slager, it continues to raise questions about policing of black-majority communities in the United States. </p>
<p>Gray’s arrest was videoed, and he was evidently alive and well when put in the police van, but within a short time he had suffered such severe injuries that he died in hospital. He was arrested by white police officers.</p>
<p>Baltimore is far from the only American city to have a problem with racialised policing. Indeed most American cities have exactly this problem, where black neighbourhoods, usually the most economically depressed and disadvantaged, are perceived to be more closely and severely policed than affluent white areas. In many locations police forces are disproportionately white, even when the wider community is majority black or Hispanic. This reinforces the impression that police forces are there to control and contain the non-white communities.</p>
<p>In reality, Baltimore’s police force has more black officers than many comparable cities – though still a minority – and both the <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/240268-baltimore-police-commissioner-take-control-of-your-kids">city’s police commissioner</a> and <a href="http://mayor.baltimorecity.gov/">the mayor</a> are also black. One might imagine that the black community would look on these figures of black authority with pride and that it would help to reduce the tension between the police and the black community. In reality, for some at least, black officers are seen to be collaborators in the system of racial oppression, modern-day “Uncle Toms” who by repeating the mantra of calm, peaceful protest, are only perpetuating a social system that marginalises the most oppressed.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JCh8HhZ3Bww?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Violent resistance</h2>
<p>One question I always pose to students learning about the American Revolution is: “When is violent resistance justified?” Americans used a variety of tactics to resist British authority in the years before revolutionary war broke out, including economic boycotts and intimidation – but eventually they determined on armed resistance as the only way to achieve their goals. The same thought processes are going through the minds of rioters in Baltimore. </p>
<p>The deaths of young black men at the hands of the police are <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white">so common</a> that it seems to some that nothing is being done to prevent them. How many peaceful marches have there been? What has happened as a result? There are laws in place to prevent excessive force being used by the police but the chances of an officer being charged with any crime without overwhelming evidence are slim.</p>
<h2>Gun culture</h2>
<p>The pervasiveness of guns in American culture, staunchly defended by many politicians, does not help matters. Police do face armed criminals who are prepared to shoot at them, so they carry their own weapons and use them. The standard defence to any accusation of officers using inappropriate lethal force is that they “felt in fear of their life”. This argument is difficult to counter – officers should be able to do their job without risking their lives. </p>
<p>But the <a href="https://theconversation.com/militarised-policing-is-not-the-answer-to-fergusons-problems-30676">militarisation of police forces</a> has also proceeded apace with ex-army surplus equipment now routinely being deployed on the streets of American cities. This militarisation ramps up the stakes with criminals. Instead of being armed with handguns or shotguns, criminals use assault weapons or sub-machine guns, and face-off against police using armoured vehicles recently seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>American police may be trigger-happy, they killed more than 600 people last year – but they also have a deeper racial problem that will not be solved overnight. There is a deep-seated fear of what is perceived as the armed and violent black man, something that goes back to slavery times – and the white response has always been equally violent. </p>
<p>Slave men were horribly abused in order to show others that resistance was not to be tolerated. Once slavery ended, lynchings became the main method of exerting white control over black men. The guilt or innocence of each victim was not as important as the wider message sent to the black community. </p>
<p>The killing of unarmed young black men by white police officers continues this assertion racial control in America.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40917/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Lockley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Despite having a black police commissioner and mayor, Baltimore has become the latest focus of African-American anger at racist policing.
Tim Lockley, Reader in American history, University of Warwick
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/40041
2015-04-20T05:04:46Z
2015-04-20T05:04:46Z
Empathy on the street: How understanding between police and communities makes us safer
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78075/original/image-20150415-31660-ufi6v7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The meaning of empathy</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/en/pic.mhtml?id=183938684">Feng Yu/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>By now, no one is insulated from hearing about incidents of police shootings or violence against police officers. While fatal shootings are thankfully still rare events, this does not diminish the emotional impact of hearing about a violent death. </p>
<p>All of us want to see our law enforcement officers come home to their families and friends at the end of the day – and we want to see our citizens come home to theirs.</p>
<p>In the most recent incident, which was caught on camera, we see the tragic last moments of one man’s life as he <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/10/us/south-carolina-police-shooting/">flees</a> the police. Walter Scott of Charleston, South Carolina, ran from the police after a traffic stop. Presumably, Scott took off because he was wanted on a bench warrant for outstanding child support. As he was fleeing, a bystander caught Officer Michael Slager fire eight times - hitting and killing Scott. Walter Scott did not come home. </p>
<p>In the recent past, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice did not come home to their parents and Eric Garner did not return to his family. New York City police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, killed on duty, did not go home at the end of the day. Along with Walter Scott and the individuals in these other notable incidents, the FBI reports that almost <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/11/police-killings-hundreds/18818663/">100 African-Americans</a> and <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2013-statistics-on-law-enforcement-officers-killed-and-assaulted">30 officers</a> are killed each year (in recent years) during police-citizen encounters.</p>
<p>Right now, it might seem impossible to eliminate the us-versus-them mindset that permeates society, but optimistically, I do not think that we are at an impasse. </p>
<p>What we have to do is look at a trait that all humans already possess: empathy. </p>
<h2>Empathy: A basic human tool with great potential</h2>
<p>Empathy has evolved in humans and other mammals over <a href="http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/empathy/">time</a>. It allows us to understand the emotions of others and share in those emotions. Expressing empathy has many advantages: it increases cooperation (we like to help each other out when we feel that we are understood), reduces stress and it may even feel good. </p>
<p><a href="http://ijo.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/11/26/0306624X12465411.full.pdf">Recent research</a> has examined the role of empathy in police-community relations and reveals that when officers listened and expressed understanding during their interactions with citizens, they were more likely to be trusted, legitimized and deemed effective in protecting the community. </p>
<p>Citizens with whom police empathized were also more likely to believe that the outcome of their interaction was deserved and fair, even if they eventually received a ticket. This was especially true for those who were highly emotional during and after their encounter with the police.</p>
<p>A lack of empathy can also have many undesirable consequences. </p>
<p>Neuroscientist Tania Singer <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/full/nature04271.html">shows</a> that empathy is greatly reduced when someone believes that he or she has been treated unfairly (especially males). Subsequently, the individual is much less likely to cooperate with the person who has wronged them. This is easily translated to findings from police studies which show that when police are unempathetic during encounters, citizens believe that they were treated unfairly. </p>
<p>Over time, the belief that the police are unfair and untrustworthy leads citizens to begin to view the police as less legitimate, making cooperation less likely. What remains from these encounters is an us-versus-them mentality with police on one side and citizens on the other. It is hard to imagine a world where public safety is achieved this way.</p>
<h2>Walter Scott’s action warrants understanding</h2>
<p>It might be hard to imagine why someone would run from the police, as Walter Scott apparently did, or resist arrest or disobey an officer’s orders. An understanding of the history of police-community relations is required in order to comprehend recent incidents. Running from the police is not acceptable, but it is understandable.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78074/original/image-20150415-31660-13hfeyq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78074/original/image-20150415-31660-13hfeyq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78074/original/image-20150415-31660-13hfeyq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78074/original/image-20150415-31660-13hfeyq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78074/original/image-20150415-31660-13hfeyq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78074/original/image-20150415-31660-13hfeyq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78074/original/image-20150415-31660-13hfeyq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78074/original/image-20150415-31660-13hfeyq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Screen.
capture of video of shooting of Walter Scott</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shooting_of_Walter_Scott.jpeg">The Guardian</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight – something both white and black drivers have likely experienced, but this type of zero-tolerance policing is much more common in poor, minority communities. </p>
<p>The video of Eric Gardner being questioned by officers for selling loose cigarettes on Staten Island demonstrates that over-policing (perhaps with little empathizing) ignores a long history of abuse and neglect in poor minority communities. </p>
<p>One must put oneself in another person’s shoes to understand the fear and dread that is felt when being stopped by a police officer. It takes a little bit of empathizing to understand the challenge of replacing a taillight without money to do so or to pay the ticket that is sure to come.</p>
<p>We can criticize Walter Scott’s actions and even his failure to pay child support which led to his warrant. Or we can put ourselves in his shoes – or in those of someone like him – and try to understand what it’s like being in tough times and why we too might try to evade the police. </p>
<p>Alice Goffman, in her book <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo18039324.html">On the Run</a>: Fugitive Life in an American City writes that “The police and courts become dangerous to interact with” …leading citizens to “avoid dangerous places, people, and interactions entirely.” </p>
<p>This is all too common. Without understanding the context in which many people live, there is little hope we can emerge from these incidents as a stronger society.</p>
<h2>Taking simple steps to start</h2>
<p>Simple steps, such as listening and communicating, can help transform stressful situations into community-building exercises. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/content/role-empathy-crime-policing-and-justice">Police training</a> should take seriously the importance of empathy and incorporate it into their core curricula. Officers should be trained to recognize and respond appropriately to concerns expressed by citizens and communities. </p>
<p>Such a process should not replace traditional safety and enforcement training, but rather should be a focal point of additional <a href="http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2014/05/empathy-police-training">training</a>. </p>
<p>As David Fallon, a deputy chief of police in Somerville, MA, told a reporter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Officers need to have empathy today — that’s what society expects from officers and it’s what they deserve, and it’s what people need.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Civilians should also be encouraged to empathize with officers. Police jobs are potentially dangerous and officers face difficult decisions about the use of force. </p>
<p>It is through this mutual understanding that we can build a society together that is less dangerous, less violent and more equitable.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40041/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chad Posick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Empathy, a trait built into the human character, can be taught and practiced by both police and communities to improve relations.
Chad Posick, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Georgia Southern University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/38320
2015-03-03T19:19:42Z
2015-03-03T19:19:42Z
Surviving street prostitution: two new films on harrowing realities for women in America
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73615/original/image-20150303-31839-jehp53.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Brenda Myers-Powell (right) with one of the women that she is supporting</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMPXhevhw0U">YouTube</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fresh from its <a href="http://www.sundance.org/projects/dreamcatcher">success at Sundance</a>, where the British filmmaker Kim Longinotto picked up the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award, <a href="http://risefilms.com/productions/details/534/DREAMCATCHER">Dreamcatcher</a> has had its UK premiere at the <a href="http://visitgff.glasgowfilm.org/">Glasgow Film Festival</a>. </p>
<p>A devastating but ultimately hopeful film, Dreamcatcher has the extraordinary Brenda Myers-Powell at its heart. Myers-Powell runs the <a href="http://www.dreamcatcherfoundation.org">Dreamcatcher Foundation</a>, working with prostituted women and at-risk girls in Chicago. She offers them unconditional and non-judgemental support, drawing on her own experiences with drugs and prostitution. </p>
<p>Myers-Powell’s story is extraordinary, as is her lack of bitterness towards those who abused her. Indeed she now works with Homer, a former pimp, in the Dreamcatcher Foundation. Her one goal is to support women: Homer’s redemption is as important as her own in this context, as it enables others to understand the system from the inside.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PMPXhevhw0U?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Dreamcatcher’s message</h2>
<p>Longinotto’s unstaged observational style is in keeping with her subject. It is an intimate portrait in which the broader social and political context that shapes these women’s lives is left implicit. Even so, the film unavoidably connects with wider debates. For instance while Myers-Powell and the women she works with have been criminalised, Homer’s record is clean. </p>
<p>The film quietly but powerfully makes the case for the decriminalisation of women in prostitution. But it leaves no doubt that prostitution is an abusive system – a point made chillingly apparent in the opening minutes as Myers-Powell drives around night-time Chicago, stopping to talk to the women on the streets. </p>
<p>Two separate women reveal to her, in a depressingly matter-of-fact way, that they have recently lost friends to murder. These are poor black women with drug addictions, prostituting – or being prostituted – for survival. They are treated by society as utterly disposable: even their violent deaths are unremarkable. </p>
<h2>The Grim Sleeper</h2>
<p>This point about disposable women was even more starkly demonstrated in another film in the Glasgow Film Festival programme: Nick Broomfield’s <a href="http://nickbroomfield.com/Tales-of-the-Grim-Sleeper-1">Tales of the Grim Sleeper</a>. Broomfield’s film, which <a href="http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/15-documentaries-shortlisted-2015-oscar-best-documentary-race/">was shortlisted</a> for the Best Documentary Oscar, concerns alleged serial killer Lonnie Franklin. He was arrested in 2010 after DNA profiling matched him to ten dead black women in South Central Los Angeles. He is still awaiting trial for their murders. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MspO5rC6Vps?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The Grim Sleeper’s killing career spanned more than 25 years and probably claimed many more victims. As early as 1987, police linked eight murders through ballistics evidence, but these findings were not made public for another 20 years. </p>
<p>This is one of a number of signals in the film that racist police who were happy to neglect the city’s poor black neighbourhoods may have colluded with the killer in gratitude to him for “cleaning up the streets”. This has eerie echoes with many other murders of women in prostitution, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2089986.The_Street_Cleaner">such as</a> the case of the Yorkshire Ripper. </p>
<p>Like the women Myers-Powell works with, the Grim Sleeper’s victims were women on the margins. Their deaths were not a priority for the LAPD. Broomfield suggests they still aren’t. </p>
<h2>‘He was a good guy’</h2>
<p>When the police arrested Franklin, they recovered a series of Polaroids that he had taken of the women he had bought and used. The police released these haunting pictures to the public, hoping to identify the women as witnesses. Yet years later, with the assistance of his South Central guide, Pam Brooks, Broomfield manages to find and speak with a number who have never been interviewed by police.</p>
<p>The testimonies of such women who encountered Franklin are heartbreaking. Wisely held back until the end of the film, they describe what happened and the desperation of their lives. Broomfield works to restore their dignity: he listens to them, believes them and gives them a public platform – showing them to be articulate, compassionate and real. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mzCO7so8hQE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But Broomfield’s most extraordinary achievement is to capture the routine misogyny at the heart of Franklin’s social circle. Near the beginning of the film, three of his friends express their disbelief that there could have been a serial killer in their midst. </p>
<p>He was a good guy, we hear repeatedly. Yet they casually reveal that they knew their friend was picking up drug-addicted women almost nightly. They knew he was sexually abusing them and he shared the photographs with them. Indeed one friend who routinely picked up women with Franklin describes how we would torture them. That is the word he uses: torture. Yet he too professes disbelief that his friend might be a serial killer. </p>
<h2>Fifty shades of entitlement</h2>
<p>The two films’ showings coincide with the <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/education-research/film-industry-statistics-research/weekend-box-office-figures">UK box-office success</a> of <a href="http://theconversation.com/fifty-shades-of-grey-is-just-an-old-fashioned-romance-thats-the-problem-37440">Fifty Shades of Grey</a>. A number of critics <a href="https://theconversation.com/fifty-shades-of-grey-is-just-an-old-fashioned-romance-thats-the-problem-37440#comment_59319https://theconversation.com/fifty-shades-of-grey-is-just-an-old-fashioned-romance-thats-the-problem-37440#comment_59319">have suggested</a> that it is wealth and race that insulates Fifty Shades’ Christian Grey from charges of domestic abuse and other gender-based violence: that if Grey lived in a trailer park the “erotic fiction” would instead be an episode of US detective show <a href="http://www.cbs.com/shows/criminal_minds/">Criminal Minds</a>. </p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.eljamesauthor.com/books/">Fifty Shades books</a>, Grey tells the heroine in passing that (of course) he bought women in prostitution while learning how to become a dominant. He also keeps photographs of all the women he has sex with as an “insurance policy”. I kept thinking of this as Franklin’s friends spoke. </p>
<p>There are of course very important differences, not least the degrees of choice and agency experienced by the women involved. But the Christian Greys and Lonnie Franklins of the world exist on a continuum: what underpins both is an unremarkable sense of entitlement over women which those around them accept uncritically and so reinforce. </p>
<p>This isn’t <em>only</em> about gender – Grey in a trailer park would only warrant police investigation and media attention if his victims “mattered”. As Franklin’s case demonstrates, the lives of poor black women in the US do not. </p>
<p>Activists like Brenda Myers-Powell and Margaret Prescod of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murder – an organisation formed in the mid-1980s in response to the killings of which Franklin is now accused – are doing a lot to change this. And importantly, these two documentaries give voice to black women activists as well as survivors and grieving family members.</p>
<p>But at the same time it is about gender, which is why I have been uneasy with the way in which much commentary around Broomfield’s film has used <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ferguson-police-for-years-carried-out-racial-discrimination-justice-department-report-says-10080580.html">Ferguson</a> and police killings of black men <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/videos/nick-broomfield-tales-of-the-grim-sleeper-ferguson-20141219">as its hook</a>. This ignores the reality of these women’s lives and of the gendered alliance between killer and cops which allowed the Grim Sleeper to keep killing for so long. </p>
<h2>Final analysis</h2>
<p>This reality is also the context for Myers-Powell’s work. In a harrowing scene in a school where she works with at-risk young women, one after another talks about being raped, and about not being believed while their rapists’ actions were excused. </p>
<p>In discussion after the Glasgow screening, Longinotto revealed that although Myers-Powell had been working with these girls for a considerable period of time, this was the first time any of them revealed their own histories of sexual violence to her. </p>
<p>They responded to Longinotto’s camera because it gave them the opportunity to tell their stories publicly and be believed after years of being silenced and ignored. The result is both desperately sad but also hopeful, as Myers-Powell repeats, “I believe you. It’s not your fault.” </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZtHzWFra4qw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The real achievement of both films is giving voice to these incredible women, and insisting that their experiences count and be counted. If these films achieved the viewing figures of Fifty Shades, I would be a lot more optimistic about the possibility of change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38320/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karen Boyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
New films by Kim Longinotto and Nick Broomfield reveal the shocking disposability of women in the sex trade in the US - and their struggle to be heard
Karen Boyle, Chair in Feminist Media Studies, University of Stirling
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/37235
2015-02-05T17:33:49Z
2015-02-05T17:33:49Z
It’s dangerous to draw parallels between Selma and today
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71205/original/image-20150205-28594-13fqems.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An outstanding performance from David Oyelowo.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Atsushi Nishijima © 2014 Paramount Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In an early scene in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020072/">Selma</a>, a sunlit stairwell is the backdrop for several floral-clad girls chatting happily about the hair styles of Coretta Scott King. This gorgeous vision then explodes before our eyes, and with it comes the realisation that this is September 15, 1963, and we’re at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. </p>
<p>This is the moment when four young girls were murdered by a white supremacist terror campaign bent on halting the progress of the civil rights movement. For anyone who feared that the involvement of Oprah Winfrey in this film might mean an overdose of nostalgia, this explosion forecasts something quite different.</p>
<p>Ava DuVernay’s Selma marks the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the legislation that put an end to the racist barriers that stopped black citizens from voting in the south. In turn this paved the way for some measures of black political power. Events in Selma made this happen.</p>
<h2>Then and now</h2>
<p>In the age of president Barack Obama, it’s hardly surprising that DuVernay’s cast were keen to pay their respects to the fact that, as Obama himself so often put it during his 2008 election campaign, they were “standing on the shoulders” of civil rights “giants”. As David Oyelowo, who offers a breathtaking performance as Martin Luther King, <a href="http://www.kushfilms.com/selma-find-out-more-about-the-production/">asks</a>: “How can we serve this incredible community who put their lives on the line for the privileges we now enjoy?” Yet the film does not fall into the trap of sanctifying the movement and its leaders. Neither does it suggest that these privileges are a done deal.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71211/original/image-20150205-28573-g35ped.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71211/original/image-20150205-28573-g35ped.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71211/original/image-20150205-28573-g35ped.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71211/original/image-20150205-28573-g35ped.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71211/original/image-20150205-28573-g35ped.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71211/original/image-20150205-28573-g35ped.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71211/original/image-20150205-28573-g35ped.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Atsushi Nishijima © 2014 Paramount Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Oyelowo’s King, though often inspiring and inspired, is also often visibly crushed by the burden of leadership. Doubts and indecision reveal a man as much tortured by issues of tactics as he was grounded by his much more well-known philosophy of non-violence.</p>
<p>Selma doesn’t spare us King’s personal flaws either: his infidelities as a husband are subtly elicited by a wife whose intelligence and composure often seem to more than match his own. Indeed, the film weaves a dense set of relationships around the figure of King to highlight the fact that behind the highly visible male leaders of the movement – often unhelpfully deified by civil rights memory – were vast numbers of ordinary heroes, many of whom were women.</p>
<p>King’s relationship with president Lyndon Johnson is one of the most remarkable aspects of this film. Selma decisively debunks the view, <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/civilrights/?_r=0">most notably articulated by Hillary Clinton in 2008</a>, that it took a president to get the civil rights legislation passed. DuVernay’s film shows that, like Lincoln 100 years before him, Johnson was a reluctant agent of change, forced to respond to his times.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71208/original/image-20150205-28605-4wjrha.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71208/original/image-20150205-28605-4wjrha.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71208/original/image-20150205-28605-4wjrha.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71208/original/image-20150205-28605-4wjrha.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71208/original/image-20150205-28605-4wjrha.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71208/original/image-20150205-28605-4wjrha.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71208/original/image-20150205-28605-4wjrha.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Atsushi Nishijima © 2014 Paramount Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tom Wilkinson’s convincing portrait of the president registers a deep frustration with King’s determination and impatience: as he finally tells Alabama governor George Wallace (Tim Roth) “just let the niggers vote”. This scene is immediately followed by his televised speech to Congress which announced the Voting Rights Act: “There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is only an American problem … We shall overcome.”</p>
<h2>Selma or Ferguson?</h2>
<p>All this echoes with the profoundly contradictory position Obama finds himself in 50 years later. Obama’s tendency to conflate his signature “Yes We Can” with the “We Shall Overcome” of the 1960s civil rights movement in the early days of his election campaign encouraged a comparison to King; but his subsequent entry into the White House places him closer to the legacy of Johnson. Obama also presides over unpopular wars abroad while facing his own version of civil unrest at home. <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/12/24/selma_a_riveting_timely_civil_rights_drama_brings_martin_luther_kings_struggle_back_to_life/">Many have noted</a> that this film, appearing in the wake of recent events in Ferguson, is extraordinarily timely. The song “Glory”, which accompanies the closing credits of Selma, makes these parallels between Selma and Ferguson explicit.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HUZOKvYcx_o?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>This gesture to the present hardly rings false: the film’s depiction of police on horseback violently dispersing demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge recalls images of state-sponsored terrorism from slavery to the present. And yet there is a danger in drawing this comparison. Ferguson is not Selma, and the latter should not be established as the model for the former.</p>
<p>Though this is not the explicit message of the film, Winfrey herself has not been able to resist the temptation to suggest as much. While promoting Selma, she expressed a mixture of admiration and frustration with the Ferguson protests:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What I’m looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say, ‘This is what we want. This is what has to change, and these are the steps that we need to take to make these changes, and this is what we’re willing to do to get it’.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71206/original/image-20150205-28605-1cz327c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71206/original/image-20150205-28605-1cz327c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71206/original/image-20150205-28605-1cz327c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71206/original/image-20150205-28605-1cz327c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71206/original/image-20150205-28605-1cz327c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71206/original/image-20150205-28605-1cz327c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71206/original/image-20150205-28605-1cz327c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Atsushi Nishijima © 2014 Paramount Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This condescending remark reveals the problem with drawing parallels between then and now. Figures like Oprah Winfrey and Jesse Jackson who have tried to reimagine Ferguson in the shape of older civil rights struggles overlook the fact that the young grassroots activists in Ferguson and across the United States are responding to a fundamentally different political situation.</p>
<p>The vicious, outspoken racism dramatised in Selma is largely absent from a society that has elected a black president and imagines itself to be “colour blind”. The systemic racism that stalks the contemporary US speaks through racialised inequalities and a federal government that is retreating from the business of state welfare as it ramps up its penal functions. Deep and widespread poverty and disinvestment that particularly afflicts black communities will not be solved by legislation like the Voting Rights Act. These problems require a new kind of politics.</p>
<p>Selma is deeply compelling but not entirely satisfying: this, one feels, is one of many patches in a much longer story yet to be told. The figure of Martin Luther King has hardly exhausted his cinematic possibilities. But the film has sent out a powerful message from the past: not a nostalgic yearning for particular models of civil rights leadership, but a call to reject the stranglehold the US government has on King’s legacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37235/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Hartnell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In an early scene in Selma, a sunlit stairwell is the backdrop for several floral-clad girls chatting happily about the hair styles of Coretta Scott King. This gorgeous vision then explodes before our…
Anna Hartnell, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/35237
2014-12-12T11:32:41Z
2014-12-12T11:32:41Z
With identity crisis in police, more Fergusons inevitable
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66779/original/image-20141209-32140-6yo2d4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Does this look like community policing? </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Police_sharpshooter_at_Ferguson_protests.jpg/1024px-Police_sharpshooter_at_Ferguson_protests.jpg">Flikr/Jamelle Bouie </a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Recent social unrest across the country protesting the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the police chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York has reopened wounds and revealed deeply rooted tensions between citizens and police, especially in ethnic minority communities. </p>
<p>These incidents of real or perceived police misconduct followed by social unrest and riots are not new. In the 1960s there were the <a href="http://crdl.usg.edu/events/watts_riots/?Welcome">Watts Riots</a>. In the early 1990s there were five days of rioting in reaction to the videotaped <a href="http://www.southcentralhistory.com/la-riots.php">Rodney King beating</a>. </p>
<p>An examination of the history of policing shows that this cyclical pattern can be explained by fundamental changes in policing over the past century. </p>
<h2>The first century: the political era of policing</h2>
<p>In fact, the relationship between police and citizens in the US was not always contentious: it was quite the opposite. </p>
<p>Prior to the mid 19th century in cities like New York and Boston, a rag tag group of loosely formed community members, known as “<a href="http://www.nleomf.org/museum/news/newsletters/online-insider/2012/April-2012/early-days-american-law-enforcement-april-2012.html">night watchmen</a>,” patrolled the streets. These men were very different from the police officers we see today. They were men who had other occupations and volunteered their services – often at night. </p>
<p>With no training or weapons, these watchmen’s primary role was to keep the peace. This mandate was perfectly fine with early Americans, who were wary of a standing army. Moreover, since the watchmen were from the community and relied on community members for backup, they ended up simply enforcing community norms regardless of them being legal or illegal.</p>
<p>By the early 20th century, the night watchman model had been replaced by an independent 24-hour organization that looked to prevent crime - not just react to incidents. But the subsequent intertwining of police and politics, such as the (established in 1845) New York Police Department’s association with <a href="http://mcnyblog.org/2013/11/05/power-corruption-and-tammany-hall-sketches-of-lesser-known-new-york-city-mayors-1869-1913/">Tammany Hall</a>, was being criticized for corruption. This ushered in an era of professionalism by police. </p>
<h2>Professionalization and a change in attitude towards civilians</h2>
<p>A handful of police reformers, who included Berkeley Police Chief <a href="http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/police/history/history.html">August Vollmer</a>, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, and an early President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_H._Sylvester">Richard Sylvester</a>, spearheaded the changes designed to establish standards similar to those in prestigious and respected professions like medicine. </p>
<p>According to these police reformers, the new officer was to be highly trained, uniformed, armed, and most importantly, incorruptible. By design, the new officer was guided by bureaucratic policy and procedures. Instead of relying on community members for backup during the night watchman model, the professional officer, aided by the implementation of patrol vehicles, call boxes, and eventually two-way radios, were to rely on each other during emergencies. Their performance was to be based on crime-control measures, such as the arrest rates found in the FBI’s ubiquitous <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr">Uniform Crime Reports</a> that date from the 1930s.</p>
<p>These structural changes had an immediate impact on how police viewed citizens. To the reactive crime fighter who responded to calls for service from patrol cars, citizens were no longer generally considered friends and neighbors but potential liars and criminals who are often out to get the police in trouble. This perspective was documented in particularly vivid fashion by MIT professor John Van Maanen’s 1978 <a href="http://jthomasniu.org/class/377a/Readings/vanmaanen-1978.pdf">article</a> about the meaning of the “asshole” among police officers: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I guess what our job really boils down to is not letting the assholes take over the city. Now I’m not talking about your regular crooks. They’re bound to end up in the joint anyway…What I’m talking about are those shitheads out to prove they can push everybody around…They’re the ones that make it tough on the decent people out there. You take the majority of what we do and it’s nothing more than asshole control.” A veteran patrolman </p>
</blockquote>
<p>An “us versus them” mentality began to develop, where police saw themselves as the moral order that is under constant attack by politicians, criminals, and ungrateful citizens. </p>
<p>Given the ever present potential for danger in their work, police officers drew closer to each other and developed an informal code of conduct that includes the so-called “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/nyregion/new-york-police-officers-face-retaliation-for-reporting-corruption.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">blue wall of silence</a>,” whereby police misconduct is tacitly accepted. It is never acceptable to snitch. For example, when a female <a href="http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/gone-viral/os-trooper-sues-police-agencies-harassment-20140213-post.html">Florida State Trooper</a> pulled over and arrested a Miami Police Officer (fully uniformed in a police car) for driving approximately 120 mph (193 kmh), she was harassed and threatened by over 100 other officers around the country. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SW1ZDIXiuS4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The beating Rodney King on primetime TV news.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Manifestations of this group mentality and its attendant cover-ups have been documented and revealed through a number of high-profile cases. The 1991 Rodney King case is perhaps the best example. Official reports and recorded audio recordings implicated the involved officers as covering up for each other. One radio transmission from one officer stated, “Oops…I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time”; an admission not indicated in any initial report (See Christopher Commission Report). </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.parc.info/client_files/special%20reports/1%20-%20chistopher%20commision.pdf">Christopher Commission Report</a> that came in the wake of the case cited the police subculture as a major contributing factor to a pattern of brutality and cover ups and also included racial bias, sexism, and homophobia. An examination of Mobile Display Terminals (MDT) data by the Christopher Commission showed patterns of open racism, such as “Sounds like monkey slapping time” (See Christopher Commission Report). </p>
<h2>The call for community policing</h2>
<p>All these factors are part of the urban African-American experience.They have contributed to deep-rooted mistrust of the police. No surprise then that calls for <a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Photocopy/134975NCJRS.pdf">reforming the police</a> have been focused on restoring community-police trust and relations. What’s happened over the past few decades have – ironically – focused on reestablishing some version of the early night watchmen model. </p>
<p>Virtually all police departments today claim that they are implementing some form of community policing, an approach based on community-police partnerships that includes open information sharing, community-directed issues, and other proactive collaborations focused on disorder, fear of crime, and crime prevention. More officers in large departments today are placed on walking and bicycle patrols. According to the <a href="http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/lpd07.pdf">Bureau of Justice Statistics</a>, over 95% of departments in large populations utilized some form of walking or bike patrol in 2007. </p>
<p>Look at almost any police recruitment brochure in the past few decades and you will see women and minority officers, a move that better reflects increasingly diverse communities. <a href="http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=71">In 2007</a> one in eight officers were women compared with 1 in 13 in 1987 and one in four officers were from racial minorities compared to one in six in 1987. Despite these efforts, incidents like the ones in Ferguson and New York remind us that this is not enough. </p>
<h2>A 21st century identity crisis</h2>
<p>Police today have an identity crisis. Despite efforts in community policing and the hiring of a more representative force, the future of policing is one that is based on information gathering. Instead of working with the public to collect and share information, much of the time police are gathering information <em>about</em> the public.</p>
<p>In order to better manage risk and minimize the danger, the police must gather, process, and interpret as much information as possible. One could say that they are like soldiers gathering intelligence about the enemy. </p>
<p>Take this scenario: An officer stops a vehicle based on an automated license plate scanning. Before he or she gets out of his patrol car, the driver’s full history with law enforcement and personal information appears on the car’s computer screen. The officer then approaches the driver based on this information while dash-mounted cameras, body cameras and so on collect more information for future use. </p>
<p>Moreover, police have sought to access information from smartphones and other private data sources. For example, it was recently exposed that <a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/10/virginia-police-secretively-stockpiling-private-phone-records/">Virginia Police</a> have been secretly collecting phone data. In contrast, Apple and Google drew criticism from law enforcement around the country when their latest software updates essentially made it technically impossible to extract user data by law enforcement. </p>
<p>Today’s and tomorrow’s officers have advantages over suspects with the latest crime control technology, often adapted from the military. Officers responding to dangerous situations are dressed in military tactical gear carrying military-grade weapons while riding in military vehicles with helicopters and drones circling overhead, as was evident from the massive response to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 (minus the drones). </p>
<p>In Texas, one sheriff’s office <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/03/12/want-to-see-the-aerial-drone-police-could-soon-deploy-in-your-town/">purchased </a>the controversial ‘Shadowhawk’ drone, which can perform surveillance but can also be armed with impact rounds, chemical munitions, and tasers. </p>
<p>These tactics and images makes one wonder who the typical policeman of tomorrow will be: the minority officer sensitive to the needs of the community (for the sake of restoring community trust) or the oppressive fully-armed standing army (for the sake of officer safety)? Until the police resolve this bipolar identity, future Fergusons are, I would argue, inevitable.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35237/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Johnny Nhan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Recent social unrest across the country protesting the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the police chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York has reopened wounds and revealed deeply…
Johnny Nhan, Associate Professor, Criminal Justice , Texas Christian University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/35058
2014-12-04T19:51:30Z
2014-12-04T19:51:30Z
Eric Garner, the ‘American problem’ and a chance to unite
<p>Police violence has dominated American headlines over the past year. The seemingly unaccounted-for police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson brought renewed attention and public protests to this issue; now, the decision <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/03/eric-garner-grand-jury-declines-indict-nypd-chokehold-death">not to charge</a> officer Daniel Pantaleo for the death of Eric Garner, even after he was caught on video illegally restraining him with a chokehold, has only added to these rising concerns over apparently unaccountable use of force by police officers across the country, particularly against African-Americans.</p>
<p>In the months since Garner’s death, authorities had feared unrest on the same scale as in Ferguson, or even worse. These worries were especially acute in light of <a href="http://time.com/3615660/chokehold-eric-garner-daniel-pantaleo-nypd/">video footage</a> showing the officer putting the victim in an illicit chokehold while he repeatedly gasped: “I can’t breathe.” </p>
<p>This evidence was even more damning given the <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/08/01/337177619/nyc-man-s-chokehold-death-was-a-homicide-medical-examiner-says">coroner’s report</a> that the death was a homicide caused “by the compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police”.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, this violence has been largely linked to the persistence of racism in the US. The American news cycle has been tightly focused on the country’s racial divisions, the threat of race riots and the stark disparity in the way the white majority and the African-American minority are treated. </p>
<p>But tragic and racially charged though these incidents have been, they are also a golden opportunity to unite Americans behind the cause of fundamental social change – a cause that encompasses racism, but goes further too. And while no such movement is yet in the offing, the seeds of one are already starting to sprout.</p>
<h2>Black lives matter</h2>
<p>The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, quickly responded to Pantaleo’s non-indictment with <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/12/03/cop-cleared-in-eric-garner-chokehold-death/">appeals for non-violent protests</a>, declaring: “New York City owns a proud and powerful tradition of expressing ourselves through non-violent protest. We trust that those unhappy with today’s grand jury decision will make their views known in the same peaceful, constructive way.”</p>
<p>While the moderating impulse is understandable, sentiments such as these do little more than focus attention on the “threat” of “violent” blacks rather than the actual aggression and violence of the white police officers responsible for Garner’s death. </p>
<p>But de Blasio also managed to advance things a little, bluntly and honestly <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/03/368249828/reports-nyc-grand-jury-does-not-indict-officer-in-chokehold-case?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=202603">acknowledging</a> that “centuries of racism that have brought us to this day”. That spoke to the deeper anger driving these protests, reflected in the protesters’ rallying cry: “Black lives matter”.</p>
<p>At the heart of these words and the protests they addressed was a desire to unite the country in condemning the status quo. The emphasis was on “healing” a divided nation, while also recognising the serious need for reform at all levels of the state. As the US president, Barack Obama, <a href="http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/the-death-of-eric-garner-the-grand-jury-decision/?_r=0">said in response</a>: “We are not going to let up until we see a strengthening of the trust and a strengthening of the accountability that exists between our communities and our law enforcement.”</p>
<p>But crucial to the success of those efforts will be realising that this is not just a racial problem – it is a problem with authority in the US in general.</p>
<h2>Fight the system</h2>
<p>Undeniably, African Americans are <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/?AID=10709313&PID=4003003&SID=1qmlggfjl3g52">disproportionately affected</a> by police violence – but it also affects people of all races. Within months of Michael Brown’s death at the hands of the Ferguson police, there were two less publicised cases of excessive police violence against white suspects in the surrounding area: Joseph Jennings, who <a href="http://www.kctv5.com/story/26355241/ottawa-police-involved-in-shooting">was shot 16 times</a> outside a Kansas hardware store, and 17-year-old Bryce Masters, who <a href="http://fox4kc.com/2014/09/17/search-warrants-shed-light-on-taser-incident-that-hospitalized-bryce-masters/">ended up in a coma</a> after a police officer tasered him when he refused to roll down his window after being stopped.</p>
<p>Obama echoed this need to both recognise the racial dynamic driving much of this violence while also the importance of treating it as a national not just “black” or “minority” crisis. He <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/11/25/obama-ferguson-protests-immigration-speech/70111056/">maintained</a>: “The problem is not just a Ferguson problem. It’s an American problem.”</p>
<p>In order to address the problem, we have to confront its deeper causes, ones that certainly involve but are by no means limited to the country’s ongoing structural racism. Rising inequality and poverty, especially in the wake of the financial crisis, have <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arzu-kaya-uranli/the-problem-is-not-just-a_b_6233104.html?utm_hp_ref=police-brutality">done much to contribute to police brutality</a>. These economic factors have been exacerbated by the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746">growing domination of US politics by elites</a>.</p>
<p>Framing police violence as principally a “black problem” reinforces the underlying notion that African-Americans are somehow separate from other Americans and that authoritarian crackdowns on them are reactive, not active. This plays into an established tactic of <a href="http://peoplestribune.org/pt-news/2014/11/poverty-police-violence-spare-none/">strategically highlighting racial divisions</a> within the country to distract attention from other issues such as class polarisation and oligarchy. </p>
<p>Ultimately, this is a way to freeze out solidarity across race, geography and even class, leaving Americans with an identity politics of distrust and conflict.</p>
<p>This strategy is part of the culture of fear that has driven much of the US government’s policy for decades. From the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, chronic and growing issues of unemployment, economic insecurity and declining social welfare are channelled into anger and action against existential “enemies” – most of whom are non-white, or in some way portrayed as less than “American”.</p>
<p>These policy “wars” have been mounted in the service of a growing authoritarianism in contemporary America. The militarisation of the police force, for instance, reflects the government’s need to neutralise urban areas marked by often extreme poverty and violence. Instead of an attack on the <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/155801/city-ruins">economic and social causes of ghettoisation and urban blight</a>, we’ve seen a move away from “<a href="http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/Publications/e030917193-CP-Defined.pdf">community policing</a>” toward what has been called: “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/izak-pratt/the-united-police-states-of-america_b_6226452.html?utm_hp_ref=police-brutality">The United Police States of America</a>”.</p>
<p>To overcome this strategy, then, it must be tackled as more than just a programme of racism. What must be emphasised is the authoritarianism and deeper shared disenfranchisement that motivates the state violence we see today – a tendency that certainly includes structural racism, but which is by no means limited to it.</p>
<p>In the words Obama used when responding to the Eric Garner case, it must be framed as an “American problem”.</p>
<h2>Unite against authoritarianism</h2>
<p>The foundations for such a movement are well established and span the political spectrum. On the right, anti-authoritarian feelings have spurred the Tea Party movement to unprecedented, if chaotic, success. While Tea Partiers are primarily up in arms about public intervention in the private sector, their politics speak to an underlying fear of unaccountable state power and mass political marginalisation. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, on the left, the Occupy movement has been railing against the growing influence of corporations and their political handmaidens since 2011; an <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/10/04/occupy-wall-street-is-a-populist-movement-the-t/182601">anti-elite politics</a> that appeals to many of the same Americans outraged at the surveillance policies of the NSA. The authoritarianism of the police response to the Occupy protests drew unforgiving attention to just how defensive US police forces can become when power is confronted.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6AdDLhPwpp4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Unpunished incidents of police violence should be a catalyst for uniting Americans in a common cause against authoritarianism. In the US, the odds are stacked against most of the general public in favour of a privileged minority – and police forces are seen to ultimately serve to protect this unfair system more than they safeguard citizens.</p>
<p>What is needed is a vision of constructive change, one focused not simply on individual justice but on collective national progress. That means going beyond simply blaming law enforcement officials and instead indicting the system as a whole. </p>
<p>The fight against police violence should unite Americans, not divide them. Before the country can heal, it first needs to come together to cure itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35058/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Bloom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Police violence has dominated American headlines over the past year. The seemingly unaccounted-for police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson brought renewed attention and public protests…
Peter Bloom, Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Department of People and Organisation, The Open University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/34695
2014-11-27T00:22:39Z
2014-11-27T00:22:39Z
Only in America: why Australia is right not to have grand juries
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65594/original/image-20141126-4250-nvhmh4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A grand jury decision not to indict a police officer over the shooting death of Michael Brown has sparked protests and questions over the system's efficacy.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Michael Reynolds</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The idea of the grand jury is already familiar to many Australians through American television legal drama. But its profile just skyrocketed with a grand jury deciding <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/25/michael-brown-family-grand-jury-process-broken-violence">not to indict</a> policeman Darren Wilson over the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. </p>
<p>But just how “grand” is the grand jury? And why doesn’t the system exist in Australia?</p>
<h2>History of grand juries</h2>
<p>A grand jury is composed of between 16 and 23 citizens who have the evidence against a criminal defendant presented to them by a prosecutor. The role of the grand jury is to decide whether to “indict” the defendant, which means decide if they should face trial or not. The grand jury can compel witnesses to appear, or require documents or physical evidence to be produced.</p>
<p>If a grand jury decides to indict, the defendant goes to trial before a “petit” or trial jury of 12 people, in the same way as they do in Australia. </p>
<p>While English in origin, the grand jury now exists only in the US. Even there only about half of the jurisdictions still use them. Grand juries arose during the time that criminal prosecutions were brought by private individuals and were intended to ensure that accusers did not have malicious motives.</p>
<p>As public bodies gradually took over prosecutions in the 19th-century, the role of the grand jury was either formally abolished or simply not used in most jurisdictions. The grand jury system was <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3185314">implemented in some Australian colonies</a>, but has been used extremely sparingly.</p>
<h2>Criticisms of the grand jury system</h2>
<p>It fits well with the American sense of democracy to have citizens, rather than a public prosecutor, make the decision on whether a defendant should stand trial. </p>
<p>However, the American Bar Association and other groups have been calling for the abolition or <a href="http://grandjuryresistance.org/">reform of the grand jury system</a> long before the outrage at the Wilson case.</p>
<p>The main concerns about the process are that it is run by the prosecutor, no judge is involved, jurors are not screened for bias or suitability, the defendant is not present or represented, the prosecutors and grand jurors are prohibited from revealing what occurred, and transcripts of the proceedings are not made available. </p>
<p>The prosecutors or their superiors may also be seeking re-election on the basis of their “tough on crime” record, which can compromise the impartiality of the proceedings.</p>
<h2>How it is done in Australia</h2>
<p>In Australia, the decision on whether a defendant should stand trial for a serious offence is made by legal professionals, not private citizens. </p>
<p>While victims have the right to be heard on whether certain matters proceed, their opinion is only one of many factors that prosecutors take into account. Other members of the community are not involved at all in the decision to indict or not. </p>
<p>The decision on whether a trial should proceed in Australia is generally made in two parts. Prosecutors in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions assess the evidence and decide whether there is a “reasonable prospect of conviction” of the defendant. If they determine that there is, various forms of preliminary or committal hearings are heard in Magistrates Courts across the country. </p>
<p>Magistrates then play a role in determining whether the defendant has a case to answer and should face trial or not. This process is generally heard in open court and often reported in the media.</p>
<h2>Should Australia have grand juries?</h2>
<p>The differences in pre-trial processes between the US and Australia raise the question of whether grand jury decisions on whether to indict a defendant better reflect community standards than the Australian system.</p>
<p>In practice, the grand jury system does little to reduce the power of the prosecutor in determining who faces trial for serious offences. Under that system, the prosecutor is king. The presentation of the evidence is secret, one-sided and not subject to oversight in court. </p>
<p>The grand jury <a href="http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju67333.000/hju67333_0.htm#91">has been called</a> the “lapdog”, “rubberstamp” and “total captive” of the prosecutor. A favourite phrase around US criminal courts is that a competent prosecutor can get a grand jury to <a href="http://www.athensnews.com/ohio/article-29817-can-you-actually-indict-a-ham-sandwich.html">“indict a ham sandwich”</a>.</p>
<p>Bureau of Justice statistics back up these views. At the federal level, grand juries <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/24/the-single-chart-that-shows-that-grand-juries-indict-99-99-percent-of-the-time/">indict 99.9%</a> of cases presented to them by the prosecutor.</p>
<p>The grand jury system does not provide the rigorous and open system of checks and balances that is needed to ensure that correct decisions are made on whether to prosecute individuals.</p>
<p>The Australian system of prosecutors and magistrates, independently assessing evidence outside the political environment, is the best safeguard of a fair criminal justice system.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34695/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kellie Toole does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The idea of the grand jury is already familiar to many Australians through American television legal drama. But its profile just skyrocketed with a grand jury deciding not to indict policeman Darren Wilson…
Kellie Toole, Lecturer in Law, University of Adelaide
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/34715
2014-11-26T12:23:48Z
2014-11-26T12:23:48Z
Obama knows Ferguson will never have peace without racial justice
<p>On November 24, a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri <a href="https://theconversation.com/ferguson-has-reinforced-racial-fear-and-lethal-stereotypes-34674">declined to indict white police officer Darren Wilson</a> for fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager in August 2014. Although the outcome was hardly a surprise, it nonetheless appalled and outraged a community that had been waiting, watching and participating in this drama for months. </p>
<p>Pleas for calm from the family of the deceased Michael Brown chimed with a similar message from president Obama: both have been ignored. Ferguson has seen its worst night of rioting yet, with an <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/25/oakland-ferguson-protests_n_6216880.html">outbreak reported in Oakland, California</a>. Protests have also spread across the US.</p>
<p>The grand jury met 25 times, and heard from 60 witnesses before deciding that there was not the “probable cause” necessary to say that Wilson had committed a crime. One Ferguson resident said on hearing the verdict that surely “it couldn’t be this unjust.”</p>
<p>But even if this decision was just, it is merely the latest brief paragraph in America’s deeply fraught racial narrative.</p>
<p>In his televised speech to the nation after the grand jury ruling was announced, Obama spoke of the progress made within his lifetime – in particular, the hope and once-unimaginable change offered by the civil rights movement. But he also reminded his audience that the often violent relationship between law enforcement and minorities, and the urgent need for criminal justice reform, are issues not just for Ferguson, but for the whole of America.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O2BBAfWucaE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>For anyone looking for a metric of progress in the past generation, and a measure of Obama’s response to the crisis, a good starting point would be the address made by president George HW Bush in response to the 1992 LA race riots. </p>
<h2>History repeating</h2>
<p>In April that year, a Los Angeles jury returned a not guilty verdict on four policemen who were accused of beating an unarmed black man named Rodney King. The verdict was met with outrage, as the beating had been caught on camera. African Americans saw the verdict as a prime example of unequal justice for urban blacks and suburban whites; rioting erupted in South Central LA.</p>
<p>The rioting was so intense that Bush sent in the army to restore order. When the dust settled, there were <a href="http://spreadsheets.latimes.com/la-riots-deaths/">47 fatalities</a>, 2,100 injured, 9,000 arrests, 5,000 buildings damaged and US$500m in insurance costs. </p>
<p>In his televised address, <a href="http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1992-05-06/news/9205060933_1_cure-poverty-civil-rights-king-verdict">Bush said</a> the riots were “not about civil rights” but about “the brutality of the mob, pure and simple.” A textbook patrician conservative, Bush took refuge in moral condemnation of the rioters as looters and criminals, rather than making any effort to reflect on the root causes of such events.</p>
<p>The tone and content of <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michael-brown-shooting-barack-obama-appeals-for-calm-as-violence-flares-over-ferguson-grand-jury-decision-9881012.html">Obama’s address</a> after the verdict was measured and constructive, and a far more emotionally intelligent response to the protests and riots than his predecessor a generation earlier. </p>
<p>But the first African American president has an impossible line to walk with regard to matters of race. Anyone who has read his memoir, Dreams from my Father, knows he has personally felt the challenges of being a non-white citizen. And yet, during his 2008 campaign, he was often described as a <a href="http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1581666,00.html">“post-racial” candidate</a>, and was under enormous pressure to conform to that image. Recall how he was obliged to swiftly distance himself from his erstwhile mentor, the left-wing Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who had once dared to preach the words “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix-AMYos0Js">God Damn America!</a>” – which he did with a remarkably eloquent and temperate address, “<a href="http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords/">A More Perfect Union</a>”.</p>
<p>Throughout Obama’s six years in office, conservative opponents and pundits have been waiting to pounce the moment the president might sound like that most fearsome entity in America: the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/obama-and-the-angry-black-man-factor">Angry Black Man</a>. And, to the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/?single_page=true">frustration</a> of so many black citizens, he never has – despite <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/09/the_new_racism_michael_brown_and_trayvon_martin_deny_it_exists_and_smear.html">myriad incidents</a> that could well have fired his rage. </p>
<h2>True justice</h2>
<p>In America, the deaths of young black men at the hands of white police officers occur with chilling regularity. But Obama simply cannot be heard to condone civil unrest – even if, in the words of Martin Luther King, “<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/ferguson-commission-member-riots-language-unheard-27160387">riots are the language of the unheard</a>.”</p>
<p>And yet, as he enters the final quarter of his presidency, the “lame duck” period where he is liberated from the constraints of re-election, his eye will surely stray towards the thorny issue of legacy, particularly in relation to racial justice.</p>
<p>The tenure of the former attorney general, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/25/eric-holder-legacy-race-attorney-general-justice-crisis">Eric Holder</a>, provided a robustly positive record for the administration on this front. In addition, material benefits are already starting to help poorer communities: <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/raise-the-wage">raised minimum wages</a> for federal contracts and the <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/african-americans-will-benefit-greatly-obamacare-1553770">implementation of Obamacare</a>, however uneven, are major steps forward.</p>
<p>Still, as far as real racial justice goes, it’s the US’s criminal justice system that urgently needs attention and reform. The imprisonment rate for black Americans is <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/18/chart-of-the-week-the-black-white-gap-in-incarceration-rates/">still radically higher</a> than for white Americans, and the damage that this does is immense. </p>
<p>Clearly, the pragmatism and the moderation required for Obama’s political survival have so far taken priority, and he has had to hide the full force of his anger about the injustices so many of his fellow Americans suffer on a daily basis simply because of their race. Now he has the freedom of being a lame duck, the post-Ferguson chaos might push him to change his tone. </p>
<p>In the meantime, the lofty rhetoric of the original Obama campaign seem like a half-forgotten dream. As Obama himself knows all too well, the US has never been a post-racial country.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34715/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clodagh Harrington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
On November 24, a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri declined to indict white police officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager in August 2014. Although the outcome was hardly a…
Clodagh Harrington, Senior Lecturer in Politics, De Montfort University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/34694
2014-11-26T03:55:12Z
2014-11-26T03:55:12Z
Timing of the Ferguson case may have made the riots worse
<p>The announcement Monday evening in the US that there would be no charges against a policeman over the shooting of a teenager is puzzling and already the target of <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/11/25/3596884/ferguson-legal-experts/">critique</a>.</p>
<p>It’s not just the decision itself <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30197686">that’s being questioned</a>, but the <a href="http://time.com/3604873/ferguson-grand-jury-announcement-delay/">timing</a> of the announcement. Why in the evening, at 9pm local time? And did the darkness play any role in the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30203526">rioting</a> in <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/ferguson">Ferguson</a>, Missouri, that followed the announcement?</p>
<h2>Racial tensions</h2>
<p>Racially-charged violent protests stretched through the months following the August 2014 shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson. In fact, at times a <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28824435">curfew</a> was put in place – protests were tolerated during the day, but banned at night.</p>
<p>So why the decision for an evening announcement on the grand jury ruling not to indict the police officer over Michael Brown’s death?</p>
<p>Well before the jury’s decision, a plan was apparently in place to give law enforcement <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/11/21/ferguson-brown-police.html">48 hours notice</a> – presumably to prepare. Peaceful protest group <a href="http://www.dontshootstl.org/#!about/aboutPage">Don’t Shoot Coalition</a> had <a href="http://media.wix.com/ugd/9c5255_471f8dae56a045e3994a26dda29c6609.pdf">requested</a> similar advance notice so that they could organise non-violent events.</p>
<p>Any such plans appear to have been abandoned. The jury made their decision midday local time. So, why announce it at 9pm?</p>
<p>The rationale, <a href="http://us.cnn.com/2014/11/25/opinion/toobin-ferguson-grand-jury/index.html">so it seems</a>, was to allow time for children to get home, for businesses to close and to alert the media to the announcement.</p>
<p>It is unclear why the 48-hour delay wasn’t adhered to – which would have resulted in the decision being announced in the light of day.</p>
<h2>The social psychology of darkness</h2>
<p>It’s no surprise, yet still deeply sad, that the nighttime announcement of the controversial decision led to violent behaviour. Social psychologists have long known how darkness can serve as a situational cue that quite literally can bring out the worst in us.</p>
<p>Under the cloak of darkness, individuals tend to see themselves less as themselves – that is, <a href="http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Deindividuation">deindividuated</a>. This deindividuated anonymity, in turn, has a host of consequences, including <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224545.1977.9713298#.VHUKXoePNCl">counter-normative</a> and <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224545.1976.9711936#.VHUKYYePNCm">antisocial</a> behaviour.</p>
<p>Direct evidence exists regarding how darkness <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100301122344.htm">increases dishonesty</a>. In a laboratory experiment, participants were given a chance to cheat in order to win money for themselves. Participants cheated more when they were in a dimly lit than a brightly lit room.</p>
<p>Darkness also boosts aggressive behaviour. In a study modelled after the classic <a href="http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html">Milgram experiments</a> on obedience, individuals were more likely to send presumably <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1976.tb01318.x/abstract">painful shocks</a> to a victim in a dark compared to a brightly lit room.</p>
<p>It’s not a far stretch to see how the increased anonymity of darkness facilitated the violent, disinhibited behaviour of the protesters in Ferguson.</p>
<h2>Negative stereotypes</h2>
<p>Work by social and evolutionary psychologist Mark Schaller suggests that darkness serves as a signal – specifically, a signal of threat. When threatened, we subsequently <a href="http://www.oscarybarra.com/Main_Site/Publications_files/Stephan,%20Ybarra,%20_RiosMorrisonInPressHandbookCh.pdf">come to rely</a> more heavily on negative stereotypes about other groups.</p>
<p>Across <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10463280340000036#.VHUKaIePNCk">two studies</a>, Schaller and his colleagues measured participants’ “belief in a dangerous world” – the degree to which individuals are inclined to see the world as a dangerous place. They then put those participants in dimly lit or brightly lit rooms and measured negative stereotyping of African Americans.</p>
<p>For participants who typically saw the world as a dangerous place, the dimly lit room exacerbated negative stereotypes of African Americans: that they are dangerous and aggressive. There was no such effect for individuals low in belief in a dangerous world.</p>
<p>Similar <a href="http://psp.sagepub.com/content/29/5/637.abstract">effects</a> were observed among Canadian students’ ratings of Iraqis. Dimly lit rooms increased danger-related stereotyping among individuals high in the belief that the world is a dangerous place – suggesting that this is a broad intergroup effect.</p>
<p>In light of such findings, the darkness of the Ferguson protests likely served to aggravate negative stereotypes between groups – and especially negative stereotypes of African American and other minority protesters.</p>
<p>Given the racially-charged nature of the original shooting and the ensuing social unrest, such increased stereotyping certainly wouldn’t have helped the situation.</p>
<h2>Hindsight in the light</h2>
<p>In the case of the announcement of this grand jury decision – an announcement that was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/06/ferguson-protest-leaders-48-hours-notice">anticipated</a> to prompt a negative reaction in the community – it’s regrettable that it wasn’t made during the daytime. </p>
<p>I don’t mean to suggest that protests would have been avoided or that the protests aren’t driven by valid feelings of injustice. But it’s clear that the nighttime announcement may have exacerbated a situation that was already teetering on the brink of social turmoil.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34694/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa A Williams receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DP130102110, DP130104468, LP140100034).</span></em></p>
The announcement Monday evening in the US that there would be no charges against a policeman over the shooting of a teenager is puzzling and already the target of critique. It’s not just the decision itself…
Lisa A Williams, Lecturer, School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/34655
2014-11-25T17:31:06Z
2014-11-25T17:31:06Z
Ferguson is not a special case
<p>Last week on ABC’s This Week, President Obama <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-theres-no-way-to-say-race-relations-are-worse/article/2556562">said</a>, “My own experience tells me race relations continue to improve,” and “There’s no way to say race relations are worse than 20, 50 years ago.” </p>
<p>It’s impossible to ignore this assessment spoken by the leader of the free world, who just happens to identify as African American. It’s an attention grabber, especially because his assessment came just days in advance of a grand jury decision to not indict a white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri.</p>
<p>Anxiety has been sky high there since the shooting three months ago and civil unrest shows the depth of pain and misunderstanding, and police action shows the depth of fear. </p>
<p>The nation’s attention is now focused on the St. Louis suburb and its handling of the situation. It should come as no surprise that some may not see as much improvement in race relations as does President Obama. There were <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/us/latest-news-ferguson-protests-defense-department-university-of-virginia.html?_r=0">violent protests</a> in Ferguson after the grand jury’s verdict: a dozen buildings were badly damaged; cars were set on fire; 29 people were arrested. In fact, many blacks disagree completely with Obama’s assessment. As do some whites. How could this be true?</p>
<h2>A legacy of disparities</h2>
<p>A serious read of history demonstrates that black lives have been treated as less valuable than white lives, and that well-meaning whites have, on the whole, failed to appreciate the origins of racial-ethnic disparities in health, wealth, education, and incarceration – or to see them as a problem. Many believe in justice, but feel perfectly comfortable when and where racial-ethnic inequality is the norm. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, belief in justice does not necessarily engender frustration with the status quo or empathy for the marginalized. Regardless, the present moment presents an opportunity to address three social facts that guarantee it won’t be long before the nation’s attention focuses on another divided community or telling videotape/audiotape or insensitive Tweet or heart-wrenching statistic or incredible news story that yet again reveals the permanence of racism. </p>
<h2>Numbers never lie</h2>
<p>The first social fact, to paraphrase the ESPN show, is that numbers never lie. The black-white disparity in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/10/us/infant-mortality-rate-drops-but-racial-disparity-grows.html">infant mortality</a> has grown since 1950. Whereas 72.9% of whites are homeowners, only 43.5% of blacks are. Blacks constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million people <a href="http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet">incarcerated.</a> According to Pew, white median household wealth is $91,405; black median household wealth is $6,446 – <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/21/news/economy/black-white-inequality/">the gap</a> has tripled over the past 25 years.</p>
<p>Since 2007, the black median income has <a href="http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/09/18/census-report-black-income-dropped-astounding-15-8-percent-since-2007-recession/">declined</a> 15.8%. In contrast, Hispanics’ median income declined 11.8%, Asians’ 7.7% and whites’ 6.3%. </p>
<p>Rather than focusing on race relations – or the degree to which individuals of different races appear to be civil and friendly toward each other, and to a lesser extent, the degree to which black and white lives remain segregated – it seems more sensible to talk about parity. On that score, there is evidence of an unfinished civil rights agenda.</p>
<h2>Institutional inequality</h2>
<p>The second social fact is that improvement in race relations is not about asking apologetically: “can’t we all just get along?” There are powerful structural forces that organize our nation and its institutions such that white lives are considered more valuable than black lives. There is institutional inequality that happens without the ill-will of any one individual. The question becomes a matter of apportioning the race problem to past inequality (that we prefer to forget) versus the contemporary actions of schools, real estate agents, hospitals, banks, elected officials, corporations, the prison industrial complex, etc. whose rules of operation seem to further entrench existing disparities. Consider, for example, the police. The shooting of unarmed men (mostly black) by allegedly well-trained policemen (mostly white) has become a depressingly frequent occurrence. Indeed, in an October 2014 <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white?utm_source=et&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletter**">study</a>, the investigative journalism organization, Pro Publica, discovered that “young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater.” </p>
<h2>Required listening</h2>
<p>The third social fact is that tear gas should not be the preferred response to tears of frustration, angst, and disappointment shed by blacks and other marginalized groups. </p>
<p>In situations like Ferguson, people on both sides of the issue need to reflect carefully on and express openly their divergent views of why Brown was shot. Repression of either side of the story is counter-productive. But truly hearing both sides of the story requires empathy. Racism thrives in part because whites suffer from what I would call social <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23245426">alexithymia</a> – they literally cannot imagine the lives of blacks and the burdens of social dislocations and criticism heaped upon the black community. The mere mention of racism or racial inequality, it seems, causes many whites to go deaf – whereas civil unrest seems to restore their hearing. </p>
<h2>The symbolism of Ferguson</h2>
<p>Ferguson is not a special case. It’s just evidence that race cleaves our nation, tensions simmer just below the surface, and far too many people who believe in justice are comfortable watching its miscarriage. </p>
<p>That does not mean that the white officer who shot Brown dead should have been indicted – apparently the evidence did not support such. But it does mean that everyone should be outraged because blacks are not yet full citizens of this nation. We need indignation. We need to take a stand. </p>
<p>Otherwise we are, in effect, accepting the permanence of racism: no longer the white-sheet-wearing KKK member, Archie Bunker type, but instead the type that allows polite neglect of racial and socioeconomic inequality, and permits sanguine assessments of progress discordant with the experiences of everyday people who feel abandoned and invisible and worthless.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34655/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tony N. Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Last week on ABC’s This Week, President Obama said, “My own experience tells me race relations continue to improve,” and “There’s no way to say race relations are worse than 20, 50 years ago.” It’s impossible…
Tony N. Brown, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Sociology, Vanderbilt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/34674
2014-11-25T13:22:43Z
2014-11-25T13:22:43Z
Ferguson has reinforced racial fear and lethal stereotypes
<p>The decision <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/grand-jury-reaches-decision-in-case-of-ferguson-officer/2014/11/24/de48e7e4-71d7-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html">not to charge police officer Darren Wilson</a> with the unlawful shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown has reignited protests across the US. The judgment was met by violent outrage <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/25/violent-civil-unrest-ferguson-grand-jury-decision">on the streets of Ferguson</a>.</p>
<p>After months of deliberation, a grand jury ruled that there was “insufficient evidence” to convict Wilson of acting illegally. At the heart of the controversy is whether this incident was motivated by racism or the officer’s “reasonable fear” for his life. American law enforcement officials are permitted to use deadly force when their safety is perceived to be in mortal danger. Opponents charge, however, that this shooting had little to do with fear and everything to do with the unjust racial profiling by police.</p>
<p>These are not mutually exclusive. The public stereotyping of black American males still justifies the use of lethal force against them by <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/09/11/3477520/whats-changed-and-what-hasnt-in-policing-the-police/">authorities at increasingly alarming levels</a>. And as long as racial fear can be used to justify that force, killings like that of Brown will continue.</p>
<h2>Scare stories</h2>
<p>Racial fearmongering has long been used to legitimise violence against African-Americans. Before the civil war, black slaves were commonly depicted as <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rVcdyCYwnosC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA71&dq=%22The+African+is+incapable+of+self-care%22+calhoun&source=bl&ots=R_cdRp5V9d&sig=dtaJwTBuZfRWfa5OK7aqdX-iRKA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=DnB0VMSPJdfiarf5gIgD&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22The%20African%20is%20incapable%20of%20self-care%22%20calhoun&f=false">savages</a> who needed to be tamed by the white race. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries in particular, an image of blacks as <a href="http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel.htm">sex-crazed threats to white moral decency</a> was used to justify their lynching and the rise of white supremacist terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.</p>
<p>In today’s America, racial fear is most obviously manifest in the widely held stereotype of African-American males as dangerous criminals. The image of the “violent thug” terrorising the inner city and increasingly the suburbs remains a strong. </p>
<p>It is this fearful representation that has helped to legitimise the government’s war on drugs that has disproportionately targeted black communities and led to the incarceration of African-Americans at a staggeringly disproportionate rate.</p>
<p>It is not surprising, then, that police officers would “instinctually” have a heightened fear for their safety when confronted by a black suspect. This is not just their individual racism coming into play. Instead it is the result of years of social conditioning to see blacks as “dangerous”. In the words of <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/14/ferguson-media-iftheygunnedmedown.html">one expert</a>: “The fact of the matter is that whiteness presumes innocence and blackness presumes guilt, and you have to prove yourself otherwise.”</p>
<h2>Lethal force</h2>
<p>This purportedly “reasonable” fear of African-Americans makes them especially vulnerable to aggressive and often lethal policing tactics. These tactics are needed, police argue, to effectively deal with “thugs” whose lifestyle is supposedly defined by the use and celebration of violence. Otherwise innocuous fashion choices – hoodies and low-slung jeans – become coded as warnings that people should fear for their safety.</p>
<p>The infamous 2012 <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-fast-facts/">shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman</a> is a case in point. </p>
<p>Not surprisingly, <a href="http://www.local10.com/news/trayvon-martins-parents-react-to-expected-ferguson-grand-jury-verdict/29909918">the parents of Trayvon Martin</a> have supported the Ferguson movement, saying publicly that the officer “should be held accountable” and even visiting the Brown family and protestors in Missouri.</p>
<h2>Smear campaign</h2>
<p>In the case of Ferguson, much has been made of the fact that the <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119070/michael-browns-death-leads-scrutiny-ferguson-white-police">vast majority of the town’s police force is white</a>, while the vast majority of its citizens are black. It’s also been <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimdalrympleii/blacks-overwhelmingly-get-stopped-by-the-police-in-ferguson">reported</a> that more than 90% of all arrests in Ferguson are of black people – despite evidence that they are less likely to be carrying contraband, for instance, than white citizens.</p>
<p>Tellingly, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the Ferguson police made an ill-planned attempt to depict Brown, who had just graduated from high school and was headed to college, as a “typically” dangerous black youth. They <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/ferguson-police-release-surveillance-video-related-to-michael-brown-shooting/">released a video</a> showing him appearing to steal an item from a local shop where he briefly fought with the store owner. </p>
<p>The police <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/8/15/6006343/local-police-didnt-inform-the-highway-patrol-about-todays-news-release">were widely criticised</a> for taking the time-honoured approach of demonising their black male victim as “dangerous” to imply he somehow “deserved” his violent end. And yet, the strategy has not only persisted; it’s been extended to the protesters now taking to the streets of Ferguson. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/8/11/5988925/mike-brown-killing-shooting-case-ferguson-police-riots-st-louis">What started out as peaceful demonstrations</a> in August 2014 soon turned violent when riot police armed with military-grade weapons began attacking the protesters.</p>
<p>According to an <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/10/24/ferguson-police-committed-numerous-human-rights-abuses-amnesty-international-says/">Amnesty report</a>, police met protesters “using armored vehicles which are more commonly seen in a conflict zone rather than the streets of a suburban town in the United States”. </p>
<p>This echoed video footage of police taunting the crowd. <a href="http://www.colorlines.com/archives/2014/08/police_officer_calls_ferguson_protestors_animals.html">One CNN video</a> showed an officer saying to the protesters: “Bring it you fucking animals! Bring it!”</p>
<p>Some sections of mainstream US media, however, have largely blamed the protesters for the violence, depicting them as an angry black mob creating <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/violence-breaks-out-near-site-of-vigil-for-teen-killed/article_f9d627dc-e3c8-5bde-b2ab-7f0a3d36a083.html?mobile_touch=true">“chaos”</a> who the authorities were acting appropriately in aggressively putting them down. </p>
<p>Equally, the Ferguson protesters made much of another example of the racial double-standard: a violent riot among mostly white individuals intoxicated after a “pumpkin fest” in New Hampshire, which was <a href="http://www.politicususa.com/2014/10/19/coverage-pumpkin-fest-riot-compared-ferguson-protests-shows-medias-overt-racism.html">widely depicted as merely being “rowdy” and chaotic</a> despite the fact that police used tear gas to shut it down.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"524295194791784448"}"></div></p>
<p>Now, instead of talking to the media, the Ferguson protesters are <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/12/us/missouri-teen-shooting-social-media/">increasingly relying on social media outlets</a> to get their message out and present themselves as constructively fighting for justice. As one woman who went to the protests to observe what it was like for herself first hand, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/ferguson-protesters-media_n_6057438.html">put it</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They (the media) totally took advantage of stereotypes about race and making any black person that shared emotion seem violent. They painted all these protests to be violent mobs of people terrorising, and that’s absolutely not the experience I had.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In response to the police’s racial stereotyping, a national twitter campaign has begun, with the hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23IfTheyGunnedMeDown&src=tyah">#IfTheyGunnedMeDown</a>. </p>
<p>Black men in particular have used the feed as a forum to post everyday pictures of themselves next to ones that could be misused to portray them as “thugs” (for instance holding a fake gun at a costume party). </p>
<blockquote><p><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IfTheyGunnedMeDown?src=hash">#IfTheyGunnedMeDown</a> what picture would they use <a href="http://t.co/rrBoOusvkC">pic.twitter.com/rrBoOusvkC</a></p>— RALPH LAUREN (@RLSELFMADEBOSS) <a href="https://twitter.com/RLSELFMADEBOSS/status/537150326772862976">November 25, 2014</a></blockquote>
<p>After the jury’s decision on November 24, the <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/no-indictment-chaos-fills-ferguson-streets-083434303.html">first concern</a> of the authorities was to make sure the protesters didn’t engage in widespread violence. This masks the broader message being promoted by those in the movement, one they expressed <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/24/ferguson-protesters-open-letter_n_6215990.html">in an open letter</a> in the aftermath of the ruling:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This fight for the dignity of our people, for the importance of our lives, for the protection of our children is one that did not begin Michael’s murder and will not end with this announcement. The “system” you have told us to rely on has kept us on the margins of society … housed us in her worst homes, educated our children in her worst schools, locked up our men at disproportionate rates and shamed our women for receiving the support they need to be our mothers</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To end this cycle of violence and preserve the dignity of black lives, we have to end the stereotype of the “dangerous” and “violent” black threat. Until then, as Ferguson has so tragically shown, American racism will continue to make the fear and killing of blacks seem “reasonable”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34674/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Bloom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The decision not to charge police officer Darren Wilson with the unlawful shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown has reignited protests across the US. The judgment was met by violent outrage on the streets…
Peter Bloom, Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Department of People and Organisation, The Open University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/32251
2014-10-22T09:30:27Z
2014-10-22T09:30:27Z
Police militarization is a legacy of cold war paranoia
<p>In August 2014, the police who faced protesters in Ferguson, Missouri looked more like soldiers than officers of the peace. Citizens squared off with a camouflage-clad police force <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/14/the-pentagon-gave-nearly-half-a-billion-dollars-of-military-gear-to-local-law-enforcement-last-year/">armed</a> with tear gas and grenade launchers, armored tactical vehicles and rifles with long-range scopes. Since then, government officials and the media have blamed police militarization on a <a href="http://www.dispositionservices.dla.mil/leso/Pages/default.aspx">US Department of Defense program</a>, begun in 1997, that provides police with free surplus military gear. But the roots of militarized policing are much older. </p>
<p>To find the origins of modern militarized policing, we have to look back to the Cold War. Starting in the 1950s, the defense department spent millions of dollars on <a href="http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=AD0633520">studies</a> that tried to explain how communists gained followers around the world. </p>
<p>Researchers working at military-funded think tanks such as RAND and the Special Operations Research Office examined how insurgents in Latin America and Southeast Asia lured people into trying to overthrow US-backed governments. This research was guided by the belief that communist activities abroad threatened national security at home. The military’s researchers wrote dozens of reports that explained <a href="http://www.cgsc.edu/carl/docrepository/dapam550_104insurgencies.pdf">how underground communist movements worked</a>. Their recommendation: the US government should create training programs for police overseas. Suggested topics for <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Modernizing-Repression-Training-Building-American/dp/1558499172">instruction</a> included surveillance methods, riot control techniques, and paramilitary tactics.</p>
<p>Then in the late 1960s, the military’s researchers made a profitable discovery: the US Department of Justice and local police departments would pay them to <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/warfare-welfare">bring their research home</a>. Researchers applied their knowledge about foreign communists in an attempt to help police deal with protesters on US soil. Military experts advised police on how to contain civil rights demonstrations calling for political and economic equality and how to control demonstrations against the Vietnam War. </p>
<p>By bringing home tools and ideas created to control foreign political movements, the military’s researchers treated dissenting Americans the same way they treated the nation’s enemies abroad. The language they used in their reports showed their assumptions. One Department of Justice-funded <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Social_Conflict_and_Collective_Violence.html?id=_ijJmgEACAAJ">study</a> called student activists “revolutionaries, known trouble makers, and other anti-social elements.” </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60554/original/926fw6cm-1412179937.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60554/original/926fw6cm-1412179937.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60554/original/926fw6cm-1412179937.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60554/original/926fw6cm-1412179937.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60554/original/926fw6cm-1412179937.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60554/original/926fw6cm-1412179937.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60554/original/926fw6cm-1412179937.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pentagon research justified use of tear gas by local law enforcement, like these police in Selma, Alabama in 1965.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This research treated dissent as disloyalty. It treated protest as a threat to national security and stability, and assumed that protests, if left uncontrolled, might destabilize the government. So that demonstrations did not escalate into revolution, researchers told law enforcement to <a href="https://archive.org/details/phasesofcivildis00rose">use tear gas</a> when protesters gathered. This was already common practice in many localities, but the military’s experts gave police a scholarly justification for these kinds of heavy-handed actions. </p>
<p>Minority communities often bore the brunt of these practices. The idea that civil rights activists were similar to the nation’s foreign enemies was hardly a leap for the Pentagon’s experts. <a href="https://archive.org/stream/phasesofcivildis00rose#page/16/mode/2up/search/campaigns">They warned</a> repeatedly that “underground black organizations” — which is how they described civil rights organizations — might be planning “widespread campaigns of violence.” Their ultimate fear was race war. </p>
<p>American law enforcement listened all too well to these voices from the Pentagon. The <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/16/martin-luther-king-jr-a-communist-why-he-s-been-whitewashed.html">FBI monitored Martin Luther King Jr</a> for more than a decade in a fruitless search for communist connections. And the CIA ran <a href="http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_9_CHAOS.pdf">Operation CHAOS</a>, an intelligence program that tried to discredit prominent American civil rights and anti-war activists by searching for communist puppet-masters abroad. </p>
<p>Neither operation found what it was looking for, but suspicion of protest movements lives on.</p>
<p>Assumptions about protest continue to play out in the United States. From the 1999 <a href="http://www.seattle.gov/cityarchives/exhibits-and-education/digital-document-libraries/world-trade-organization-protests-in-seattle">Seattle</a> World Trade Organization <a href="https://aclu-wa.org/sites/default/files/attachments/WTO%20Report%20Web.pdf">protests</a>, to the <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-19/new-york-city-police-arrested-252-in-yesterday-s-protests.html">Occupy</a> <a href="http://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/suppressingprotest.pdf">Movement</a>, to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/27/jon-belmar-ferguson-protests_n_5726122.html">Ferguson</a>, police have continued to confront peaceful protests with strong shows of force. My research suggests they do not do this simply because they have the equipment. They do it because, since the 1960s, <a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=12435">police have often seen</a> domestic social movements as threats to national security and domestic stability.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100454730">my research</a>, militarization is a mindset. It is a tendency to see the world through the lens of national security, a tendency to exaggerate existing threats. In policing, this can manifest itself as a belief that physical security and calm are more important than civil liberties and that dissent can be dangerous to national security. This same mindset encourages police to treat protesting populations – and in particular minority populations – as if they might undermine the government.</p>
<p>All of which leads to the question: which is more dangerous to democracy – the small-scale violence that might occasionally accompany protest, or a militarized police force?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32251/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joy Rohde does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In August 2014, the police who faced protesters in Ferguson, Missouri looked more like soldiers than officers of the peace. Citizens squared off with a camouflage-clad police force armed with tear gas…
Joy Rohde, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, University of Michigan
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/30835
2014-08-22T17:06:37Z
2014-08-22T17:06:37Z
Ferguson does carry echoes of the 60s – but they’re coming from the right
<p>While the violence that has erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, over the past few weeks appears to be subsiding, the discussion over the problems faced by those protesting in the area <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ferguson">has not</a>. For a historian of the 1960s, it is surprising and even alarming to see how much of this conversation has taken place before.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/in-ferguson-photographs-as-powerful-agents/">images emerging from Ferguson</a> of heavily armed white police forces confronting African-American protesters, has drawn many <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/14/ferguson-civil-rights-photos-comparison_n_5678852.html">comparisons</a> between the unrest in Missouri and the civil rights era. But commentators such as journalist Jon Friedman have argued that this comparison <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-the-media-cheapen-ferguson-and-the-civil-rights-movement-2014-08-21?siteid=rss&rss=1">“reeks of ignorance and exploitation”</a>.</p>
<p>Ferguson is certainly not Selma, Birmingham, Watts, or Newark. But even those who are uncomfortable with the comparison have to admit, there are striking similarities. Ironically, it is often in the rhetoric of these same conservative commentators that the ghost of America’s racial past is most visible. </p>
<h2>The outsider rhetoric</h2>
<p>James Knowles, the mayor of Ferguson, is a particularly clear example. Claiming in one <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/ferguson-mayor-james-knowles-race-110147.html">television interview</a> that the violence in his jurisdiction was emerging from ‘a very small number of protestors who have come from outside of our community’, Knowles has consistently denied that the unrest in Ferguson had any local support. </p>
<p>In doing so, Knowles follows a familiar path of white officialdom. Those in authority have long preferred to blame violence on a militant and un-American minority rather than admit that large groups of their constituents might hold legitimate grievances. Indeed, the mayor’s comments are eerily similar to those made by Southern segregationists in the 1960s. </p>
<p>Mayor Allen Thompson of Jackson, Mississippi, for example, blamed <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04E0D9133CE63ABC4C52DFB3668388679EDE">“outside agitators”</a> for stirring up trouble and refused to change racist policies that he claimed enjoyed <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04E0D9133CE63ABC4C52DFB3668388679EDE">“tremendous underground support from Negroes”</a> in the city. </p>
<p>Even if it were true that the unrest in Ferguson has been brought in from outside the town – and it is not – Knowles’ response is akin to standing in the eye of a tornado and declaring that everything will be fine once this “outside” wind leaves town.</p>
<p>Wherever the protesters were coming from, they are calling for a redress of genuine grievances. As Martin Luther King Jr. <a href="http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">wrote in 1963</a>: “Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”</p>
<h2>Denial</h2>
<p>This is about more than attributing blame for violence, though. An outsider rhetoric was pushed from some quarters during the 1964 Harlem riots and then, as now, it served to undermine the grievances being fought. As <a href="http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/lez-edmond-41">Lez Edmond</a> reported in his <a href="http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1964oct-00018?View=Search&SearchView=PDFHits&pages=24">coverage of the 1964 unrest</a>: to employ outside agitator rhetoric “is to imply that the [local] black community is neither capable nor has the desire to do anything like this”.</p>
<p>Knowles did just that in his now-infamous interview, claiming that “there is not a racial divide in the city of Ferguson” and that his view on the matter represented the perspective of all residents. </p>
<p>When hearing his words, some will be reminded of Governor Edmund Brown, who claimed in 1965, just after some of the largest race riots in American history, that <a href="http://collections.mun.ca/PDFs/radical/WhyWattsExploded.pdf">“California is a state where there is no racial discrimination”</a>. </p>
<p>Although many in the media continue to address how the grievances of Ferguson residents are linked to widespread discrimination against America’s minorities, denial is a constant feature of conservative discussion.</p>
<p>Take Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative publication National Review, for example. <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386012/against-ferguson-mob-rich-lowry">Reflecting on the incident</a> that sparked the tension in Ferguson, Lowry dismisses the idea that the actions of police officer Darren Wilson were symptomatic of institutionalised police brutality. “Even if Officer Wilson executed Michael Brown in cold blood,” he writes, “he would be one murderously bad cop, not an indictment of the entire American system of justice.”</p>
<p>A similar line was taken by Fox news presenter Bill O’Reilly, who felt the need to come back from holiday to inform his audience how furious he was about the way Brown’s death was being reported. Explaining the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/oreilly/2014/08/21/bill-oreilly-truth-about-ferguson">“Truth of Ferguson”</a>, O'Reilly condemned the “charlatans”, “agitators”, and “race hustlers” in the liberal media for presenting only one side of the story.</p>
<p>O’Reilly’s “truth” included characterising calls for Officer Wilson to be arrested as “lynch-mob justice” and denying that 400 fatal police shootings in 2012 represented anything more than “police efficiency”.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Matt Wills, Missouri Republican Party executive director, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/08/18/Missouri-GOP-Michael-Brown-Voting-Registration-Booths-Disgusting">told the conservative Breitbart News</a> that “injecting race into this conversation and into this tragedy, not only is not helpful, but it doesn’t help a continued conversation of justice and peace”.</p>
<p>To deny that the actions of Officer Wilson are part of a wider problem in American law enforcement is misguided, to deny that race plays a part in the outrage after another unarmed black teenager is killed by white law enforcement officers is simply irresponsible. While O’Reilly and others are right to champion a fair and equal presumption of innocence, it is telling when the example he uses to demonstrate the flaws in America’s justice system is the trial of OJ Simpson.</p>
<h2>A long time coming</h2>
<p>Little, <a href="http://new.scenenewspaper.com/2014/07/we-shall-overcome-the-media/">it seems</a>, has changed since the Kerner Commission concluded in 1968 after the 1967 riots that: “slights and indignities are part of the Negro’s daily life, and many of them come from what he now calls "the white press” – a press that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America".</p>
<p><a href="http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/pubs/CalPolls/502.pdf">Polls</a> after riots in Los Angeles in 1965 showed that while black people blamed the unrest on unemployment and poor living conditions, whites tended to blame lawlessness and outside agitators.</p>
<p>In the absence of honest and frank discussion in the intervening five decades this gap remains, with 80% of African Americans in <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2014/08/18/stark-racial-divisions-in-reactions-to-ferguson-police-shooting/">one Pew Research survey</a> feeling that Ferguson raised “important issues about race” compared with just 37% of whites and only 22% of Republicans.</p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly, 47% of the whites surveyed, and 61% of the Republicans, thought that race was “getting more attention than it deserves” in Ferguson coverage compared to just 18% of African Americans.</p>
<p>This disparity is unlikely to change for the better while conservative talking heads keep denying the existence of institutionalised forms of racism in the US. Perhaps conservatives should stop criticising liberals for making lazy comparisons to the civil rights era and instead ask why such comparisons are so easy in the first place. The answer has a lot to do with how the right talks, or doesn’t talk, about race. To quote Bill O’Reilly: “only the truth will overcome the chaos”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/30835/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Walmsley receives funding from the School of History at the University of Leeds.</span></em></p>
While the violence that has erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, over the past few weeks appears to be subsiding, the discussion over the problems faced by those protesting in the area has not. For a historian…
Mark Walmsley, PhD Student in History, University of Leeds
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/30676
2014-08-19T17:13:25Z
2014-08-19T17:13:25Z
Militarised policing is not the answer to Ferguson’s problems
<p>The town of Ferguson, Missouri has now seen ten days of almost nightly disorder following the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by the police. The decision to bring in the National Guard has not quelled the disorder and in fact may be aggravating the situation.</p>
<p>Society often has a tendency to fear crowds and to presume they need to be tackled by force but it is in fact this force that can make a tense situation spill over into violence. In many cases it is the cause of a problem, not the solution. </p>
<h2>Taking on the crowd</h2>
<p>During the night of August 18, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/19/ferguson-police-national-guard-michael-brown-missouri-crisis">31 protesters were arrested</a> in Ferguson and Amnesty International observers were told to leave the scene.</p>
<p>The police deployed in the evenings in Ferguson are heavily armed with a range of sophisticated weapons. They have tear gas, sonic devices, baton rounds, and stun grenades, all of which make them look more like soldiers than civilian policeman.</p>
<p>These devices are indiscriminate crowd control weapons designed for dispersal and do not differentiate between protesters. Everyone is in the firing line. It’s an approach that has long been questioned by <a href="http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1vpaw/HMCICSubmissionCrowd/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F478739%2FHMCIC-Submission--Crowd-Psychology---Public-Order-Policing">researchers</a> of crowd behaviour. Many have argued that treating crowds forcefully and indiscriminately often escalates disorder rather than calming it. If a crowd thinks it is being treated unfairly, it will react against this treatment which can in turn cause more forceful police responses, resulting in an escalating cycle of disorder. </p>
<h2>Describing the crowd</h2>
<p>The language used to describe the protests in Ferguson also reflects our pervasive <a href="https://theconversation.com/londons-new-water-cannon-will-be-a-disaster-for-trust-in-policing-27887">mistrust of crowds</a>.</p>
<p>Ferguson Police Captain Ron Johnson provided a prime example of this problem when he said at a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-28848695">press conference</a> that “a small number of violent agitators … hide in the crowd and then attempt to create chaos”. I have seen no CCTV footage to support this assertion and I would take issue with the premise behind it anyway. He implies that a a minority of people with malicious intent are responsible for inciting the peaceful majority to behave violently. This assumes that crowd members are easily influenced by others to do things that they would not otherwise do. If crowds were this easily influenced by others, why don’t they listen to police warnings to disperse?</p>
<p>The idea that crowds are gullible and uncritical of any social influence is largely a myth. If violence does occur it rarely happens because a violent minority has whipped up the the crowd. It is more likely because the police have treated the crowd in an indiscriminate way. This psychologically unites crowd members to act together against what are perceived as illegitimate attacks against them.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/sites/clients.theworkshop.co.uk/files/Roger%20Ball%20and%20John%20Drury.pdf">study</a> of the figures presented by the media and politicians to illustrate “irrational” criminality during the 2011 riots in the UK tells a similar story. The statistics used to describe these events were often selective or misrepresented and the conclusions drawn were not supported by detailed examination of what actually happened.</p>
<p>Locals from Ferguson also seem to reject this narrative of criminality and there have been much more positive accounts of recent events in the town told by those actually involved in them. The BBC has reported how some people on the ground perceive an almost festival-like atmosphere in Ferguson and described a sense of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-28841350">“love and support”</a> in the crowd. Others describe locals protecting local businesses from looters. A <a href="https://twitter.com/VictorLicata1/status/501559719429820416/photo/1">photo circulating on Twitter</a> even appears to show rival gang members, wearing different coloured bandanas, standing together to protect a shop.</p>
<h2>Misunderstanding the crowd</h2>
<p>This also shows that protestors are placing limits on the crowd’s behaviour in Ferguson. This undermines another common myth of crowd disorder – that once riots begin, anything goes and “mob rule” takes over. Evidence from the London riots suggests that the crowds behaved in complex ways. People who had been fighting police would stop to protect shops from looters and despite hostilities with police, the crowds would rarely attack fire crews or paramedics.</p>
<p>The disorder in Ferguson can’t be explained away by blaming a minority of bad-intentioned individuals. And responding to legitimate protests with increasingly militarised policing and force will only serve to further alienate the people of Ferguson.</p>
<p>Responding to these events with such overwhelming force is a move based on a fundamental distrust of crowd behaviour. The US police are probably among the most heavily armed in the world but that has not stopped urban disorder from happening. Something is clearly badly wrong when US citizens in 2014 are openly talking about their own police as an occupation force. We have to look at the broader social context when events like this happen and escalate. Long term solutions will not be found by turning police forces into the paramilitary outfits we are currently seeing on the streets of St Louis.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/30676/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Cocking does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The town of Ferguson, Missouri has now seen ten days of almost nightly disorder following the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by the police. The decision to bring in the National Guard has not…
Chris Cocking, Researcher into crowd behaviour, University of Brighton
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/30568
2014-08-18T20:22:41Z
2014-08-18T20:22:41Z
Urban combat: Ferguson and the militarisation of police
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/56656/original/jq26m24d-1408328173.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The blurring of the line between the military and the police, especially in the US, is now on the political agenda following recent events in Ferguson, Missouri.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Roberto Rodriguez</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Anyone watching the footage coming out of <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/world/ferguson-protests-lay-bare-the-militarisation-of-us-police-20140815-104das.html">Ferguson, Missouri</a> in recent days would be forgiven for thinking they had tuned into a scene from a combat zone, rather than suburban America. </p>
<p>There has been a public outcry over the heavily militarised response of local law enforcement to protests following the police shooting of a young black man, Michael Brown. But is this just a one off, or are police becoming more militarised in their responses to mass public protest? </p>
<h2>The nature of policing</h2>
<p>Policing is an occupation different from any other. It is one of the few civilian occupations where you are able to possess a firearm and other lethal weapons and are authorised to use deadly force in certain justifiable situations.</p>
<p>Police are paramilitary in that they rely on rank structure for command and control; their members wear the same uniform; they have access to substantial weaponry and are all working towards a common purpose. Police services have a strong organisational culture and to some degree are isolated from mainstream society, often socialising within the policing subculture.</p>
<p>American criminologist Peter Kraska describes <a href="http://cjmasters.eku.edu/sites/cjmasters.eku.edu/files/21stmilitarization.pdf">police militarisation</a> as the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and model themselves around, the doctrines of militarism and the military model. He highlights four particular areas where police provide tangible evidence of this: material, organisational, cultural and operational indicators. </p>
<h2>The US and decentralised policing</h2>
<p>Part of the problem in the US is that many police services are small municipal departments that lack both resources and professionalism. This is a by-product of having a highly decentralised law enforcement environment. The <a href="http://www.fergusoncity.com/93/Bureau-of-Administration">Ferguson Police Department</a>, for instance, consists of 72 personnel including 54 commissioned officers and 18 civilian support staff. </p>
<p>The UK recognised this problem and has recently undertaken steps to centralise policing services. In Australia there are highly centralised large policing services in each state. Centralisation provides the operational benefits of homogeneous command and control, capacity for resources and increased professionalisation.</p>
<p>One of the <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/8/14/6002291/ferguson-police-st-louis-county-in-charge-jay-nixon-tear-gas-officer-fired">criticisms in Ferguson</a> is that at one stage there were four different police services present at the protest – the Ferguson police, the St Louis County police (where Ferguson is located), police from the City of St Louis and police from the Missouri Highway Patrol.</p>
<h2>The rise of the ‘warrior cop’</h2>
<p>The blurring of the line between the military and the police, especially in the US, is now on the political agenda. Walter Olson, of libertarian American thinktank the Cato Institute, <a href="http://www.cato.org/blog/police-militarization-ferguson-nationwide">criticised</a> the rising militarisation of law enforcement as illustrated in Ferguson:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Olson was not alone in his criticism of the heavy-handed response of law enforcement in Ferguson. Republican senator Rand Paul used the Ferguson case to <a href="http://time.com/3111474/rand-paul-ferguson-police/">argue</a> for a reversal of the current US trend of supplying military hardware for law enforcement purposes.</p>
<p>Author Radley Balko has catalogued <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323848804578608040780519904">the rise of the warrior cop</a> and the increasing convergence of military and policing operational doctrines. He illustrates how SWAT teams (heavily armed special weapons teams) have proliferated from the mid-1970s in the US: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The country’s first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>SWAT teams deployed in <a href="http://cjmasters.eku.edu/sites/cjmasters.eku.edu/files/21stmilitarization.pdf">police raids</a> in the US increased from 3000 per year in the 1980s to approximately 45,000 by 2007.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/56665/original/8m4zby76-1408330186.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/56665/original/8m4zby76-1408330186.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56665/original/8m4zby76-1408330186.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56665/original/8m4zby76-1408330186.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56665/original/8m4zby76-1408330186.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56665/original/8m4zby76-1408330186.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56665/original/8m4zby76-1408330186.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Police in Ferguson have used tear gas to quell protesters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Robert Cohen</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>All Australian police services have a SWAT team-equivalent, but their deployment is more judicious. For instance, the Victorian Special Operations Group (SOG) requires the permission of an Assistant Commissioner to deploy. The Queensland <a href="http://www.police.qld.gov.au/Resources/Internet/services/OperationalPolicies/opm/Chapter2.pdf">Special Emergency and Response Team</a> can only be deployed to pre-planned operations that are high-risk situations by a deputy commissioner or delegate.</p>
<p>In 2011, the Victorian SOG <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/forget-forgiveness-from-these-sons-of-god-20121019-27wlt.html">completed 349 operations</a>. They dealt with four sieges, affected tactical entry into ten buildings, conducted 54 high-risk arrests and target intercepts and 36 contain-and-call operations. None resulted in fatalities. </p>
<p>In some cases in Australia, the use of these specialist groups has actually declined. In 2013, the New South Wales ombudsman <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/concerns-rise-over-safety-as-more-police-play-hero-cop-20130412-2hqr7.html">raised concerns</a> that the call-out of the State Protection Group had actually fallen by 50% over the previous six years.</p>
<h2>Military hardware for police purposes</h2>
<p>Military assets and technology have also been brought within the policing sphere. In Queensland, police are <a href="http://www.itnews.com.au/News/375818,qld-police-drone-operations-take-off.aspx">currently using drones</a> to provide “situational awareness”. The Queensland Police Service (QPS) has flagged the <a href="http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/queensland-police-to-use-surveillance-drones-to-combat-crime-ahead-of-g20-conference/story-e6freoof-1226598572670">use of military-style drones</a> used in Afghanistan for deployment during the G20 summit. </p>
<p>Many Australian police services use other military hardware. Western Australian Police, for example, use the <a href="http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/bearcat-joins-wa-anti-terror-fighting-force/story-fnhocxo3-1226635973176?nk=298572e02c7d9a9e33017328a79a034f">Bearcat armoured vehicle</a>.</p>
<p>Queensland police also recently purchased Remington R4s, a <a href="http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/cops-want-this-rifle-to-even-the-odds-against-crime/story-e6freoof-1226528052728">military assault rifle</a>, for use by general duty officers.</p>
<h2>Engagement and accountability</h2>
<p>The images from Ferguson are cause for concern. Armed snipers are scoping the protesters. And yet, a line of officers in riot gear also stand in plain view in front of the protesters.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/56668/original/qmkpnnxs-1408331318.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/56668/original/qmkpnnxs-1408331318.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/56668/original/qmkpnnxs-1408331318.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56668/original/qmkpnnxs-1408331318.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56668/original/qmkpnnxs-1408331318.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56668/original/qmkpnnxs-1408331318.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56668/original/qmkpnnxs-1408331318.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56668/original/qmkpnnxs-1408331318.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Victoria Police was criticised for its response to Occupy Melbourne protests.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Julian Smith</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These images are contradictory. If there was any threat of an armed person in the crowd, officers would not be standing in plain view. Conversely, if there was no intelligence as to armed persons in the crowd, then there is no justification for armed snipers to be poised.</p>
<p>In Australia, the reaction of various police services to Occupy protests was vividly different. Victoria Police <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/protesters-arrested-as-chaos-descends-on-cbd-20111021-1mb07.html">used extreme force</a> to remove protesters with subsequent complaints against police. Yet when faced with similar Occupy protests in <a href="http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/perth-protest-march-ends-peacefully-20111028-1mnu9.html">Western Australia</a>, police used a more <a href="http://indymedia.org.au/2011/10/29/interview-with-an-occupy-perth-organiser">successful community engagement</a> approach.</p>
<p>The use of force by any police service needs to be accountable. Some police services are taking progressive steps by utilising technology – such as body cameras – that will actually increase public confidence in police actions. </p>
<p>One <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-police-body-cameras-cuts-violence-complaints-rialto">Californian police service</a> has attributed a 60% decrease in use of force and an 88% reduction in complaints to the implementation of body cameras. The police service involved was similar in size to Ferguson Police Department, but the lessons learnt could not be more different.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/30568/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Terry Goldsworthy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Anyone watching the footage coming out of Ferguson, Missouri in recent days would be forgiven for thinking they had tuned into a scene from a combat zone, rather than suburban America. There has been a…
Terry Goldsworthy, Assistant Professor, Criminology, Bond University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/30501
2014-08-14T00:22:30Z
2014-08-14T00:22:30Z
Michael Brown, Ferguson and the nature of unrest
<blockquote>
<p>The death of Michael Brown is heartbreaking, and Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family and his community at this very difficult time … I know the events of the past few days have prompted strong passions, but as details unfold, I urge everyone in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the country to remember this young man through reflection and understanding. We should comfort each other and talk with one another in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. </p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>– <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/08/12/statement-obama-calls-michael-browns-death-heartbreaking/">Statement</a> by US president Barack Obama on the passing of Michael Brown, August 12, 2014.</em></p>
<p>Many Americans share president Barack Obama’s sentiment regarding the death of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/12/ferguson-missouri-shooting-michael-brown-civil-rights-police-brutality">18-year-old Michael Brown</a> in Ferguson, Missouri. This is clearly indicated in the deeply felt hurt experienced by so many and the massive swell of moral support people of all backgrounds offered to the young man’s parents in recent days. </p>
<p>But to suggest that all, or even most, Americans feel the same would be severely misleading. <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/08/13/bill_o%E2%80%99reillys_ferguson_disgrace_host_spews_sick_lecture_to_michael_browns_family/">Some</a> citizens, drawing on media-fed imagery and timeworn stereotypes of young black men, have gone so far as to suggest that the unarmed teenager’s tragic death at the hands of a Ferguson police officer was self-inflicted, of his own doing, deserved and the result of his defiance of state authority. </p>
<p>A young man with a promising future notwithstanding, too many in the United States view the disputed events that led to Brown’s death as the reasonable, albeit unfortunate, consequence of his errant behaviour.</p>
<p>These views are not necessarily based on ignorance or even racial animus. However, it must be made clear, these features remain entrenched themes of contemporary American culture and life. The devaluing of Brown’s life is informed by a form of marginalisation that refers to the condition of those whom the broader society chronically excludes from economic networks and networks of care – or what American legal scholar Richard Delgado describes as being <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=eW3ct3cCbigC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=richard+delgado+beyond+love&source=bl&ots=sXd3WJZglI&sig=6ogB2LY6LbbBD_BwuqZpr3-q-UM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mu7rU5GYFYri8AWO7IKwAw&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=richard%20delgado%20beyond%20love&f=false">“beyond love”</a>. </p>
<p>Missouri in general and the St Louis metropolitan area in particular has a long history of this kind of exclusion. A New York Times editorial on Brown’s death, for instance, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/opinion/racial-history-behind-the-ferguson-protests.html?_r=0">describes</a> “the history of racial segregation, economic inequality and overbearing law enforcement that produced so much of the tension now evident on the streets” of Ferguson, a suburban town of 21,000 people. The editorial goes on to note that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>until the late 1940s, blacks weren’t allowed to live in most suburban St Louis County towns.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Property over life</h2>
<p>In addition, a core American cultural value that gives <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/property-rights-versus-human-rights-challenging-the-super-wealthy/28945">priority to property rights over human rights</a> informs such indifference towards the lives of especially young black men and women. This is evident in the almost immediate media shift from the focus on what some regard as the state-sanctioned murder of Brown, whose lifeless body was left exposed, lying on the open boulevard for over four hours, to an <a href="http://www.ksdk.com/picture-gallery/news/crime/2014/08/11/photos-ferguson-riot-damage/13885193/">over-emphasis</a> on the loss of property in Ferguson in the aftermath of his death. </p>
<p>In this instance, the importance of property is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com.au/police-militarization-ferguson-2014-8">evident</a> in the roll-out of body-armoured police, the deployment of tanks and police cars to barricade citizens, and the wanton firing of tear gas and rubber bullets into peaceful crowds. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"499755746691919872"}"></div></p>
<p>In effect, these domestic military manoeuvres in an overwhelmingly black neighbourhood were in no way intended to protect the lives of its residents but rather its property.</p>
<p>Even Obama’s words betray this sentiment. His reference to “strong passions” and emphases on “reflection and understanding” and on talk “that heals, not in ways that wound” is in tacit reference to the days of unrest that followed Brown’s death. But these wounds and so-called violence in response to Brown’s death were directed at the economic institutions and patterns of oppression and racial violence that figure so prominently in the marginalisation of many of Ferguson’s residents. </p>
<p>The violence that the authorities would be prudent to attend to are the very structural forces that oppress the youth who have responded en masse to the senseless death of one of their own. For sure, there are many older adults, sincere, concerned and operating in good faith, who have joined them. </p>
<p>The waning generations too must partner with their daughters and sons in transforming the conditions under which America continues to bury its young. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/30501/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Garrett Albert Duncan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The death of Michael Brown is heartbreaking, and Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family and his community at this very difficult time … I know the events of the past few days have prompted…
Garrett Albert Duncan, Associate Professor of Education and of African & African-American Studies in Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.