Addendum on Comey's Invocation of Bill Bratton

This was originally included in my piece on Comey's speech, but it was too long as it was. That said, it's still worth noting. -JPB

That Director Comey decided to invoke NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton to invoke his "seeing" each other metaphor is telling. In the wake of the Garner no-bill, the shooting death of Akai Gurley, and the #BlackLivesMatter protests, Commissioner Bratton proposed a heavily armed force meant to fight terrorism and manage crowd control during protest. Bratton said,

“[The new unit] is designed for dealing with events like our recent protests....[Those officers will] be equipped and trained in ways that our normal patrol officers are not. They’ll be equipped with all the extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns — unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.”

Apparently, Commissioner Bratton "sees" people exercising their First Amendment rights the same way he sees murderous terrorism. Additionally, he wants to make resisting arrest a felony.

Nota bene: Resisting arrest charges are so flimsy and widely abused, they are used by criminologists to measure police violence against citizens.

If Director Comey is relying on Commissioner Bratton for guidance to fix police relations with minority communities, the situation will get much worse before it gets better.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

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

Some Thoughts on Chait PC Piece

Twitter is predictably a-twitter with Jonathan Chait's latest in New York magazine on the scourge of political correctness.

It's an okay piece, as far as it goes. To generalize social media reaction: the Right is embracing it, the Left is annoyed. My reaction is: 4,700 words, really?

Chait conflates the censorious atmosphere and decisionmaking on many college campuses with the hyperbolic outrage that thrives in social media. He throws a lot of words trying to make them the same similar, but they're not.

Mute buttons, unfollows, blocks--these are all effective, defensive weapons at the disposal of any would-be commentator on social media. Yes, yes, the Left gets in a tizzy with trigger warnings (which are fine, generally, but can be taken well beyond their practical utility) and oversensitivity to comments about sexual, gender, ethnic or other differences. Sometimes they're justified, sometimes they just need to chill out. This is all true.

But say something about abortion rights or guns or God or whatever, and the Right does the same thing.

Self-righteous indignation about core values that others don't share is just how this whole social media thing works. It is at once the most democratic space and freest marketplace of ideas available. And it's extraordinarily messy.

Colleges that allow threats and intimidation of those who speak freely are curbing speech and they should be held accountable, but the general state of how colleges are run--from speech codes to rape investigations to how they invest their endowments--is a broader topic that I can't wade into here. Suffice it to say, caving to pressure to cancel a guest lecture is not a threat to free speech, broadly defined, and shouldn't be counted in the same category.

I assume some on the Right are embracing Chait's piece because they feel attacked and defensive about what they say and don't like being shouted down.

I could not care less.

The possibility of getting shouted-down is the one surviving, legitimate cost of coming into the public forum. So long as opponents are not banning books and using the government to silence or intimidate people--or tolerating violence or criminal harassment--it's their right. Indeed, the voting-with-your-feet/wallet is the entire premise of social interaction that libertarians say should guide the various decisions one makes in one's life. Don't like it? Turn it off!

There is a sense that self-selected social and traditional media consumption will make our (putatively) pluralistic society more fractured and segmented politically. Certainly, the decline of CNN and rises of more polarized media like MSNBC and Fox support this. I don't know if that's good or bad, or what the long term consequences of it will be on our political system--more gridlock and space between the major parties certainly seem likely--but this is what we all said we wanted: freedom (Right), democracy (Left), and the free exchange of ideas (libertarian).

No one said it was going to be pretty.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

UPDATE: A colleague suggested a fairer reading would say Chait was not so much feeling victimized here as he was calling for a discursive norm to reestablish itself on the political Left. I don't disagree with that, as I ascribed possible victimhood to some of the more pugnacious writers of the Right who have shared it approvingly, but I think my point holds. Lecturing the Internet on how we deal with each other is likely to have the same effect as talking at a wall.

The Internet is vast and there will always be shrill commentators on all sides. I don't find this quality particularly dangerous on the web, as social norms and associations will shift as practices either change or endure. I find Chait's piece mostly harmless, but the discursive equivalent of a longread about the crassness of blue jeans.

Justice Sotomayor on the Oklahoma Lethal Injection Protocol

Last night, the State of Oklahoma put a child killer to death by a questionable lethal injection protocol. I understand not mourning the loss.

Admittedly, as I've gotten older,  I have become anti-death penalty generally, but my policy preference does not trump the constitutionality of the practice. Clearly, some form of capital punishment is constitutional. However, that does not mean that all forms of capital punishment are permissible.

As a nation that is to be governed by laws, and until we ban capital punishment entirely, how the state carries out these increasingly problematic executions must be examined for constitutionality--specifically the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Sotomayor, joined by the three Democrat-appointed justices, makes a strong and well-reasoned constitutional argument why last night's execution should not have happened.

You can read it here, courtesy of the Marshall Project.

Contra the "Individual Responsibility Trumps Racism" Shibboleth

I'm not a Redditor. I think I'm a tad too old or, at least, too old fashioned to utilize the medium as it is intended. However, I wanted to share a comment on a Reddit thread about poverty, racism, and individual responsibility that I think hits all the right notes. (I know the author but the comment was flagged for me by a mutual friend.)

An excerpt:

If you were to design a situation where I maximized my true utility of choices to leave poverty, I often made bad ones. But I was given two gifts without any effort: I have a high, high, high capability for analytic intelligence and my mother was a wonderfully stable human being. 

But lots of people didn't have those: people that worked harder, people that were kinder, people that made better choices. The gravity of the situation pulled them back, given all those attributes. I will always remember a coworker of mine a McDonalds: nice girl, kind, harder working than I ever was in school. She studied every day at after-school tutorials for two years to pass a Science TAKS test - she never did. I showed up hungover, I got perfect score. 

I have earned many things in life - my analytic intelligence was not one of those.

It's best taken in its entirety so please, go read it here.

The excerpt above reminds me of another one, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, that is one of my favorites:

But the game *is* rigged. Let me tell you how I came here. I write for a major magazine and this is a privilege. I would say that it is earned, except that many people earn many things which they never receive. So I shall say that it was earned and I was lucky.(via The Atlantic)

Yes, individual responsibility is important for people to escape unfortunate circumstances. But that doesn't mean that those who failed to get out lacked it, nor that those who did were living up to the noble ideal that fits your public policy worldview.

Mia Love and others of the economic right would have you believe that the structurally protected racial inequalities that have been baked into the American system since jump are best defeated by hard work and determination in lieu of systemic analysis and reform.

Such is a recipe for a different kind of American exceptionalism--that the exceptional and lucky people who succeed in spite of the myriad obstacles placed before them are the aspirational normal. Further, the continued unfairness that makes life harder for millions of marginalized Americans should be dismissed and ignored because Jim Crow is dead therefore everything is fair (enough) now.

I don't know if this nonsense comes from resentment, naivete, or general ignorance, but it's nonsense nevertheless.

Entrenched poverty comes from a lot of sources: the effect of broader society and preexisting public policy being two prominent among them. That neither of these typically appear in right-of-center solutions to ongoing socio-economic problems (save antipathy to demonized social welfare programs) is a big reason why the right's base is primarily old, white, and increasingly out of touch. The GOP's short-term electoral success masks a shrinking social relevance and resonance that is a demographic nightmare in the longer term.

Since the days of slavery, there have been exceptions to the crushing social and economic power of the dominant American order. That didn't make any of those societies just or "good enough." That circumstances have improved over those years is not evidence that American society is fixed or has recovered from hundreds of years of prejudice, racism, and inequality.

Individual responsibility is a necessary but not nearly sufficient condition for widespread social betterment. The arguments about socio-economic progress cannot continue to be simply about individual responsibility OR institutional racism, because such arguments are valid only in a world divorced from current American reality.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

PS--in case you didn't click through before, read all of the Reddit post here.

On the NYPD Tragedy and Its Aftermath

As most people, I am horrified and saddened by the murder of the two police officers in Brooklyn yesterday. My heart goes out to the family, friends, and colleagues of  officers Wenjian Lui and Raphael Ramos.

But the reaction by some self-styled allies of the NYPD are nothing short of inexcusable. This sentiment may be best illustrated by former New York governor George Pataki:

Like Eric Holder, I have immediate family that served honorably and proudly in law enforcement. To assert that people like Holder (and me) who criticize police practices and want police to be better than they are should be held responsible for the acts of a murderous lunatic is reckless and unforgivably insulting.

Need the preening, self-important politicians be reminded: the United States is a country where free speech is an essential tool by which the government for, by, and of the people is held accountable. To say that those who criticize the police are responsible for the random violence inflicted upon some officers by an evidently suicidal man is to express a sentiment that is not only baseless and malicious, but fundamentally un-American in implication.

Beyond the preening politicians, there have been those who would like to characterize criticism as a 'war on cops.' Admittedly, there are those people who have become so fed up with how they and their loved ones have been treated by police officers that criticism comes from a place of anger and frustration. But the police are ultimately responsible for how they treat the public and thus have considerable control over how they are perceived by that public. It is pure fantasy to believe that the outrage that has fueled the dozens of nationwide protests against police brutality has been manufactured against an otherwise beloved police force that in every case has great relationships with the communities they serve.

Furthermore, the war on cops rhetoric coming from some police sources only reinforce the point made by many critics of the police that too many officers hold an "us versus them" mentality when dealing with the public. If the police believe they are working among an enemy population, their treatment of the public will undoubtedly reflect that mindset.

There is no greater threat to police-public relations than a police force that holds open hostility towards the people it is charged with serving. This jeopardizes public safety not only from police-public violence, but endangers communities by undermining the legitimacy of law enforcement itself.

The NYPD and its members have every right to mourn and be outraged by the actions of a lone gunman yesterday. My most sincere sympathies go out to them for their losses. However, that does not give them or anyone else carte blanche to abuse the citizens with whom they come into contact, nor does it require those of us concerned with improving police practices that enable that abuse to remain silent because they have dangerous jobs.

The police are not our enemies, nor are the people the enemy of the police. At a time when the vast majority of reformers are expressing sympathy for the police and the sacrifices they make, self-appointed friends of the police like Gov. Pataki would serve everyone much better by not stoking police fear and resentment. To do otherwise makes everyone--police, protesters, and the general public--less safe.

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.