James Comey Can't Handle the Truth

Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey gave an impassioned speech about the “disconnect” between many minority communities in America and the police officers charged with keeping them safe. He listed four “hard truths” that the police and the public need to come to terms with in order to fix the current system.

The first “hard truth” was that “at many points in American history,” law enforcement has been used to oppress ethnic and other minorities through violence, intimidation, and brutality. Well, rather, Comey said, “law enforcement enforced the status quo…that was brutally unfair.”

This is less a hard truth than it is a watered-down history lesson. Convict-lease systems, in many respects, extended slavery well into the 20^th century by using vagrancy and other charges to incarcerate black men and sell them into dangerous industrial slavery. Police were used to enforce segregation and violently break up peaceful marches throughout the Civil Rights Era. And, throughout our history, blacks have been the victims of wanton police violence for any number of reasons from John Lewis to Rodney King to Michael Brown to Eric Garner and countless others in between. Since Emancipation, when they lost the protection as a master’s property, black people—particularly young black men—have had an antagonistic relationship with the police, effectively without interruption.

The second “hard truth” concerned the research that indicated “widespread…unconscious [racial] bias.” (I never thought I’d see the day when the head of the FBI quote a ribald Broadway puppet show to explain “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.”)

Again, there’s nothing very hard about this truth. We live in a society in which much of our population can remember Segregation, racial-political assassinations, and other forms of white racial terrorism. Racism isn’t just the uncle who tells nigger jokes after a couple beers. We live in a society that had racism built-in to its foundation—indeed, its founding documents—and killed more than half a million of its own citizens for the right to keep a portion of them in bondage in perpetuity. These same portion of people, mind you, have had the federal government recognize their full panoply of constitutionally guaranteed rights for just over 50 years.

Of course Americans still have racial hang-ups! That a man with such power and gravitas couches the utterly obvious with vulgar puppets and “unsettling research” speaks to the mind-numbing power of American denial.

Director Comey continues, attempting to soften the blow,

“But racial bias isn’t epidemic in those who join law enforcement any more than it is in academia or the arts. In fact, I believe law enforcement overwhelmingly attracts people who want to do good for living[.]”

I’ve had my share of bad professors, but I don’t remember any of them ever choking any of their students to death for writing exam answers on their forearm or shooting them to death for in-class sarcasm.

The monopoly on the use of force held by police officers makes them unlike everyone else in society. If all black Americans had to deal with were clutched purses and off-color jokes from art teachers, we wouldn’t be having this absurd excuse for a “national conversation.” The fear and loathing of young black men costs too many of them their lives at the hands of police officers. That is the hard truth.

The third hard truth actually would be useful, if Director Comey didn’t immediately undermine himself trying to explain it. “Something happens to people in law enforcement….After years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel.”

That police work often involves repeated encounters in minority neighborhoods using heavy handed tactics that can’t help but affect how that community views them. The community of Ferguson, Missouri—a mostly black suburb of St. Louis—had nearly 33,000 arrest warrants issued for non-violent offenses in 2013, many of which stem from traffic tickets and related court fees. The town population is 21,135. In the wake of recent protests, arrestees too poor to make bail found themselves in a Dickensian debtors prison, unable to pay for their release.

Let’s ask them about their cynicism.

Director Comey builds a straw-man to set up his fourth and final “hard truth”: officers aren’t racist because they don’t arrest enough “white robbers and drug dealers,” because if they were, it would be easy to fix. It’s because black people do drugs and don’t have jobs so they “become part of [an] officer’s life.” You see, repeated interaction with black people makes police officers cynical and if the black people just had jobs, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

As the Ferguson arrest warrants show, it doesn’t seem to matter whether black people are doing the things that would normally necessitate them becoming part of an officer’s life. Being black and poor puts them in communities that experience frequent and often less-than-cordial contact with police officers.

Director Comey, trying to appear magnanimous, said

“A tragedy of American life…is that young people in “those neighborhoods” too often inherit a legacy of crime and prison. And with that inheritance, they become part of a police officer’s life, and shape the way that officer—whether white or black—sees the world.”

This is circular logic at its most odious. Law enforcement, in its zeal to fight its war on drugs and crime, extracted scores of men from communities and put them into the criminal justice system. This deprived children of fathers and robbed the communities of economic resources. This,in turn, created the young black men that engender cynicism from today’s officers who “often can’t help” it.

While there is much to be said for back-end reforms that help former inmates return to society, the law enforcement executives who go around preaching about how to fix the men and communities they helped break in the first place tests the patience of anyone who recognizes the grotesque unfairness of our so-called justice system. It’s not all law enforcement’s fault, but they are reticent to acknowledge the role they have and continue to play in “those neighborhoods.”

Even in Director Comey’s singular moment of policy sanity, when he recognized that the voluntarily reported data from state and local law enforcement on use-of-force cases is so inadequate it’s virtually useless, he said such deficiencies create space for ““ideological thunderbolts”.…that spark arrest and distrust.”

There were no ideologues or demagogues at the scene of Michael Brown’s body as it lay in a Ferguson street for four hours in August. The protests and outrage were immediate and visceral because of the repeated, well-understood maltreatment the public received from the Ferguson police officers. Law enforcement’s reaction to those protests reaffirmed the animosity that was present well before the national media could find Ferguson on a map.

Director Comey’s pleas for officers to “see” the people they encounter belies his assertion that it’s not about racism in law enforcement:

“Those of us in law enforcement must redouble our efforts to resist bias and prejudice. We must better understand the people we serve and protect—by trying to know, deep in our gut, what it feels like to be a law-abiding young black man walking on the street and encountering law enforcement. We must understand how that young man may see us. We must resist the lazy shortcuts of cynicism and approach him with respect and decency.”  

“Lazy shortcuts of cynicism” is a euphemism for “ignoring the constitutional rights of young black men.” This isn’t a small problem rectified by a gut check imagining how a black boy might see a police officer.  Abuse ignores the limits placed on officers by the Constitution’s equal protection clause and the Bill of Rights. Being young, black, and male is not enough to satisfy “reasonable suspicion” and police officers have an affirmative duty to respect that. Director Comey’s “ideological thunderbolt” boogeymen aside, such unconstitutional behavior is a widespread problem in law enforcement with or without Al Sharpton’s presence. Black and minority communities know this all too well.

As far as Director Comey’s direction that the public “give [police] the space and respect to do their work,” I would ask the director to give the police the same admonition. People should be free from interference from the police unless they are committing a crime against person or property. As the recent NYPD slowdown showed, it is possible to keep the peace even in a large city without issuing thousands of criminal summonses.

It is impossible to fix the chasm of distrust between the police and minorities so long as police continue to abuse blacks and other minorities in the communities in which they live. This is the one and only hard truth the police and the government need to face. The rest is just distraction.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Police Policy and Police Violence

My first installment in a series on police policy and its relationship to police violence is live over at Rare.us. Frankly, so much of the critiques in the wake of Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland focuses on niche issues, like the drug war, instead of how we allow our police agencies to be run in our name.

When used as a method to question someone in relation to a separate crime, whether in a car or on the street, this behavior is known as a pretextual stop. Simplifying a bit, one law (e.g., running a stop sign) is used as pretext to investigate further (e.g., looking for evidence of drug crimes) because the officer otherwise lacks reasonable suspicion or probable cause to stop a person or vehicle. Thus, if a police officer makes up his mind to stop you, even the slightest violation of a law or out of the ordinary conduct (like looking nervous when a police officer is watching you) can give him an excuse to stop you. 

Put another way, he’s certainly going to stop you.
[...]
One disturbing aspect in so many of these recent, high-profile homicide cases is the quickness with which violence became the method of control against Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others. That the recent cases have all involved black males is no surprise to many observers and protesters. Even skeptical black conservative Jason L. Riley tells a story about how he was grabbed from his vehicle by police at gunpoint because he "fit the description" of a suspect.. “Fitting the description” is, in practice, often just a police euphemism for being a black male.​

It's a tad long, but it lays the fundamental groundwork for understanding what is actually going on during police encounters all over the United States. I also explain how some departments knowingly tolerate police violence:

Fifteen years ago, criminology professor and police researcher Jerome H. Skolnick wrote an article on police brutality in the American Prospect. He noted that, “Police executives sometimes review the ‘resisting arrest’ cases of police officers to determine whether a cop inclines toward administering vigilante justice.”  

The thinking goes, if a suspect is in custody with visible bruises or other injuries, those injuries—if caused by the arresting officer(s)—are typically justified by claims of resistance.  

WNYC News recently reviewed over 50,000 NYPD cases in which resisting arrest was among the charges. WNYC found that five percent of NYPD officers accounted for 40 percent of all resisting arrest charges since 2009, and 15 percent of officers accounted for half of all resistance charges.    

The next installment will discuss systemic susceptibility for police perjury. Read the whole thing here.

Ferguson Grand Jury Announcement Today

It has been a long time since I've been this nervous about a community's well-being, let alone one I'm hundreds of miles away from. All news reports indicate that the grand jury decision in the case of Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown will be announced today.

It seems the entire media is bracing for a riot. I'm hoping that whatever violent elements exist will be largely contained by the righteously angry but largely peaceful demonstration in the case of no indictment--as has generally been the case since the demonstrations began.

Most people, on all sides, assume that there will be no indictment.

Even if everything (including the discredited broken eye-socket story) that Wilson's supporters said about the altercation with Michael Brown was true, the result has revealed the deep and unforgivable fissures between the local police and the community.

Much ado is made about the racial makeup of the Ferguson police force, and that certainly adds to the problems,  but this is really about a police force that enjoys no respect or benefit of the doubt from its community. As I've written recently, that blame falls entirely on the police departments, not the communities they are charged with protecting.

The release of the shoplifting tape, uninvestigated grand jury leaks, police-union backed "anonymous" fundraising campaigns, outright lies, and other Wilson friendly information fed to the media compound this distrust--and that's before you even get to the aggressive, unprofessional, and explicitly hostile way the police agencies have handled the demonstrations since the shooting.

Personally, I'm looking forward to going over the testimony and evidence the prosecutor presented to the jury. I'm very curious as to the actual police account of what happened--something we still have not had to date--and why, presumably, Wilson had his gun out to fight over in the first place, if indeed there was a struggle over said gun as supporters suggest. (That Brown reached inside an SUV and went for a holstered weapon could not pass the smell test.)

My layman's guess is that whatever transpired between Brown and Wilson, Wilson too quickly reached for his weapon. This is something that cost an innocent's life in New York last week, and I'm sure it happens more often than is widely reported.

Police who draw their guns as anything but a last resort demonstrate a fear and scorn of the people they are charged with protecting. Such animosity likely spills over into other, less violent encounters with police. A community that faces that animosity regularly will feel it and naturally resent it.

Regardless of the grand jury's decision, police across America should take this as a teaching moment. It is imperative that any police force has the respect and trust of the people its policing. Otherwise, when things go wrong--and they will--a bad situation may become exponentially worse. 

My thoughts are with the people of Ferguson today. Let us all hope for some measure of justice and, above all, peace.

bellum medicamenti delenda est