For African Americans, Why So Little Police Accountability for So Long?
Several parts of today’s newsletter are directly excerpted from my book, It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field: Overcoming 8 Racial Myths to Even the Field.
Although the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 initiated a temporary “racial reckoning” in America, opening the eyes of many White people to the not infrequent lawlessness and callousness of police, two murders earlier in that decade brought it home in full to me: the police murder in cold blood of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and a year later, the reckless police killing of Freddie Gray, thirty-five miles from where I live, in Baltimore.
The police officer who murdered Michael Brown was acquitted twice of any crime. Baltimore prosecutors charged six police officers in the murder of Freddie Gray, but at the end of their trial, all were found not guilty. Very rarely do police get convicted. When a Minneapolis jury convicted Officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd, it was an extraordinarily rare occasion.
Police officers kill more than one thousand U.S. residents every year. They kill Black people at a rate 2.5 to 3 times higher than White people.[1]
Worse, police fatally shoot unarmed African Americans at a rate 3 times higher than White people.[2] Every year, there are dozens (if not more) of controversial police shootings of Black men and women, many of which do not appear to be justifiable.
Yet, as in Ferguson and Baltimore, it borders on insurmountable to charge, try, and convict police for the murder of a citizen. Across the country, juries rendered a scant forty-two convictions over fourteen years of officers charged with homicide or manslaughter, many of which were convictions for lesser offenses. “[A]ccording to data from Philip M. Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University, who collects one of the most reliable data sets on police prosecutions, only a handful of police officers are charged with murder or manslaughter every year.”[3]
As I will explore later in this newsletter, the Obama Administration issued consent decrees in his second term for police departments in Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Chicago. Some forward progress was made, but the Trump Administration, which believed the decrees hindered departments’ ability to perform their police duties, significantly reduced federal involvement in reform efforts.
In fact, on the whole, the experience nationwide to reform city or county police departments has rarely led to significant change in ways that would positively impact the lives and safety of African Americans, especially those who live in primarily segregated, urban neighborhoods.
A Personal Story
I have a personal story relevant to this topic. In April of 2012, when my then three-year-old son, Isaiah, attended a local daycare in my town of Bowie, I got to casually know a Black father of a two-year-old who also attended the center. I’d bump into Patrick at least once a week, and we’d spend four or five minutes in a lively conversation about our sons, our work, local events, national politics, and the like. He had an engaging personality, was easy and fun to talk with, and was well-liked by staff and parents.
One day, I walked into the center to pick Isaiah up and overheard an emotional conversation with the front desk staff that Patrick had died in police custody. His story hardly received any press. All that I could piece together from discussions I heard at the center and two stories I could find in the press (one in a local weekly newspaper, the other in the only Black newspaper for the D.C. region) was this:
The police had pulled him over for a minor traffic violation. Somehow, the conversation between Patrick and the cop escalated. What should have been a simple ticket-writing incident turned into the cop arresting him, Patrick resisting the arrest, and the cop placing Patrick in the back of the police car with a tight spit hood over his head. When he arrived at the local police precinct, he was unresponsive. By the time the cop drove him to the hospital, Patrick had died. After that, I could find nothing else from local officials or the center’s staff. About six months later, we moved Isaiah into a preschool Montessori program, and I never heard anything about Patrick’s case again.
This type of event occurs far too often across the country. And it has for decades. Until the age of the web and social media video sharing, any such incidents went wholly unnoticed beyond immediate family and friends.
Is Policing Reform Even Possible? Let’s Ask Minneapolis
Genuine police reform is hard to come by.
Minneapolis, the site of George Floyd’s murder, is an excellent example.
The city has undergone numerous reform efforts since the early 1960s. Rarely has it changed the ongoing tension between the African American community and a predominantly White police force. An early attempt in the 1960s increased the number of police officers, added a narcotics unit, and created a pre-SWAT team. It also put police officers inside schools despite Black youth’s poor rapport with the police force.
After a 1967 uprising in reaction to police racism, White leaders proposed a whole new set of initiatives with little tangible change to policing. City leaders created a unit to conduct internal investigations alongside a civilian commission to investigate resident complaints. Still, neither effort made any headway to reduce police brutality and misconduct, nor were police held accountable for any wrongdoing. Numerous community policing efforts were attempted from 1970 on; all failed.
A state investigation a few years later into eleven incidents of police brutality in 1975 found that recruitment and hiring processes were “deeply racist.” Yet, not much changed. In 2017, the city’s police chief from a quarter century before (the 1980s) wrote an article titled “America’s Police Are Still Out of Control,[4] in which he claimed that as chief, he had had only minimal effect on the department’s culture during his tenure.
He and an officer on the force for twenty-five years indicated that the “blue code of silence” significantly impedes reform because the culture is one in which “officers never report each other’s misconduct and the officers involved went unpunished.”[5]
In the early 1990s, the city commissioned a new Civilian Review Authority in response to brutal arrests of Black youth and the deaths of Black senior citizens in a SWAT raid (among others). This authority also made little to no impact on police reform or improving police-community relations. Police brutality in the first half of the 1990s included incidents in the African American community, the Native American community, an incident with an East African man, and a third-degree sexual assault of a woman resident.
In 2003, after a police bullet gravely injured an eleven-year-old, the community requested federal intervention. The U.S. Department of Justice brokered a “landmark agreement between community members and the police, creating the Police Community Relations Council (PCRC) to improve police-community rapport. Beyond the creation of this council, the agreement required that the police chief implement more than 100 departmental reforms. The PCRC was gradually undermined by city officials and forced to disband against their will in 2008. At the time of the PCRC’s dissolution, more than 40 of the promised reforms remained incomplete.”[6]
Minneapolis’s public officials have attempted additional “reform” efforts since 2008. Still, these also resulted in minimal change or impact even after the widely publicized murders of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile in 2017.
Then, the murder of George Floyd. And yet another civil rights investigation into the department followed this time by the U.S. Justice Department, which released their report in 2023. What did the report find? Once again: Excessive use of force. Discrimination against Blacks. Ignoring the documentation of race when stopping residents. Shooting at residents (especially African Americans) unnecessarily. Using neck restraints even after the practice was outlawed in 2020.[7]
It's the same old, tired, ugly story.
Even though those efforts have once again stalled, this long string of failed reform efforts over sixty years helps explain why the community has called for a fundamental rethinking of the police.
Is Minneapolis Unusual?
Minneapolis is not an isolated example. In a 2020 Washington Post op-ed, authors Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg argue that reform efforts in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray police killing in Baltimore failed because of police obstruction and resistance. The obstruction occurred despite the department having to operate under the federal consent decree.
Woods and Soderberg write that “[m]embers of the department undermined every new policy in an open revolt. Some cops decided that if the city didn’t have their back, they’d stop working hard and allow chaos to reign, showing how important they were. Others, particularly plainclothes officers, took the opposite approach: They doubled down on harassing citizens, violating their constitutional rights and even fabricating probable cause to maintain ‘law and order.’ And some cops seized on the moment to rob and steal, creating more disorder.”[8]
Yet, the examples extend well beyond Minneapolis and Baltimore, from urban to suburban to rural in every part of the country.
Police departments within dozens of jurisdictions have been under a consent decree at one time or another since our federal 1994 Crime Bill (23 are active now), which allowed the Department of Justice to conduct investigations into pervasive misconduct (driven in part by the investigation of the L.A. Police Department after the beating of Rodney King). Jurisdictions include Seattle, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, East Haven, CT, Maricopa County, AZ, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and Meridian, MS. Review a 2017 map from The Washington Post below for additional jurisdictions.[9]
Let me be clear: I believe there are honest cops in Minneapolis and Baltimore—and in every other major city—who do upstanding work.
Yet, the systems of policing they work within regularly produce problematic results, in part due to biased, discriminatory, and racist perceptions of Black people and Black neighborhoods by police. Those systems also don’t encourage or incentivize breaking through the blue wall of silence when things go wrong, which they do too frequently for Black people.
Racial Profiling Persists, Even for Misdemeanors and Petty Crimes
As I wrote in last week’s newsletter, stop-and-frisk is as common in Black neighborhoods as Starbucks in wealthy White neighborhoods.
Stop-and-frisk is core to racial profiling. Yet, racial profiling extends well beyond this single practice. And it leads to massive racial disparities just about everywhere you look.
It’s especially evident in the arrest and prosecution of misdemeanors and petty crimes. For example, in Jacksonville, Florida, Black residents are three times more likely to be charged for pedestrian violations (e.g., jaywalking) than White residents. The city’s police handed out the highest number of citations in predominantly Black neighborhoods. They issued them at a rate six times higher in low-income communities than in higher-income ones.[10]
Similarly, a report by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (LCCR) found that Black residents were sixteen times more likely to be jailed than White residents in the Bay Area because they could not pay petty fines for their moving violations.[11]
Multiple studies on traffic stops in Iowa came to similar conclusions—Black people are far more likely to be stopped, ticketed, searched, and arrested than White people.[12]
In multiple cities in New Jersey, the ACLU found that Blacks were three to ten times more likely to be arrested for misdemeanors and petty crimes than Whites.[13]
In 2013, a federal court mandated wide-ranging reforms for the New York Police Department after they found that the department’s use of stop-and-frisk violated the Constitution. A 2024 follow-up report found that “[a]t every level, the … department had failed to punish officers who have violated the rights of people stopped on the street … a failure that reaches all the way to the top of the force.”
Ferguson, Missouri, may serve as the poster child for racial profiling, especially regarding misdemeanors, although its record is nowhere near unique.
After police murdered Michael Brown in 2014, Missouri’s governor called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate not just Brown’s murder but accusations of rampant discrimination and racial bias in its police department and court system. In early 2015, the DOJ issued a scathing report that allowed White Americans to see how perversely many of our police and justice systems operate in cities and towns across America.
Here is some of what they found:
In Ferguson, we see the police (disproportionately White in a Black-majority town) stopping and searching Black residents in disproportionate numbers. Remember, people like George Floyd and Eric Garner, among many others, lost their lives to police because of minor offenses—for Floyd, using a $20 counterfeit bill, and for Garner, selling untaxed cigarettes. According to Professor Alexandra Natapoff of the University of California, Irvine, misdemeanors account for 80 percent of all arrests across the nation. She says charging people with what she calls “chump change offenses” is how we “sweep people of color, and African Americans in particular, into our criminal system . . . through over-policing black neighborhoods, racial profiling and practices like stop-and-frisk.”[14]
Making the matter more fraught, at the time of Brown’s murder in Ferguson, this majority-Black town had a White mayor, a city council with a single Black member, and a school board with none.
How can we explain this candidly, other than this is the day-to-day, local system of White officialdom with dominion over Black people—not dissimilar to hundreds, even thousands, of such systems in jurisdictions across the land? No white sheets, burning crosses, or horseback posse. Yet, a system of White supremacy, nevertheless. Many Black residents in Ferguson view the police as an occupying force, a view no different than many in the Black community have of police throughout the nation.
I will explore Ferguson’s racist history in full in subsequent newsletters.
Yet, briefly, know this—a report from the Ferguson Commission (commissioned after Brown’s murder) found the following: “the local police and court had “essentially applied excessive law enforcement tactics for the purpose of generating revenue off the backs of the town’s mostly black and impoverished residents.”[15]
Further, they found that justice regimes like this in Ferguson are widespread in the towns and municipalities throughout St. Louis County.
Ferguson, and other municipalities like it, prey primarily on people who have the least ability to pay—those already living near or below the federal poverty line. In Ferguson, 25 percent of residents live below the line, and another 19 percent live below double the poverty line. The majority are African American.
The pattern of arresting Black citizens in disproportionate numbers is typical not just in the county but across Missouri, as you now might suspect.
The Missouri Attorney General’s office reported that since 2000, “African Americans have consistently been targets of racial profiling by law enforcement officers. In 2013, Black Missourians were 66 percent more likely to be stopped by police, though they were not more likely than whites to possess contraband. White Missourians were more likely to be found with contraband (34 percent) than were their black counterparts (22 percent).”[16] (emphasis added)
If the tables were reversed, would White people stand for this once it was found out? Yet, the tables never get reversed because White people still hold the reins of power and authority at the local level in most places.
What do those rates look like in your state?
The United States spends at least $100 billion annually on policing (some estimates indicate it may be as high as $115 billion) and another $80 billion on jails, prisons, and other parts of our incarceration system. Combined, that is nearly $200 billion yearly, a staggering amount. These monies pay to house more than two million Americans in jail or prison at any one time, not to mention more than ten million individuals jailed or imprisoned over a given year. And this does not include the millions on probation or parole.[17] [18]
These investments far exceed what we invest to prevent poverty or boost impoverished neighborhoods.[19] Most large cities invest 20–45 percent of their discretionary funds in policing.[20] Such large expenditures quickly crowd out other priorities like housing, social services, recreation, and health. Since 2015, twenty of the nation’s largest police departments have been forced to pay $2 billion for police brutality and misconduct.[21]
Two billion. Another measure of the enormous scale of injustice and harm here.
Increasing Police Accountability & Reducing Legal Protections for Police: The Need is Greater than Ever
In one of the final chapters of my book, I emphasize the need for far greater police accountability in our jurisdictions, accountability that can prevent the hiring of previously fired officers, make public all records of misconduct, provide immediate access to all video evidence for victims’ families, and end qualified immunity for police.[22]
In particular, legal protections for police must be scaled back in communities throughout the U.S. to allow victims of police misconduct the ability to hold police accountable for those actions. These measures would also restore public trust in police forces that suffer significant setbacks to their public reputation every time rightful misconduct cases get dismissed.
However, formidable local (and national) police unions reinforce the intransigence to changing these laws and thus make anything more than incremental progress on accountability difficult.
Our policing challenge in America is not, as some have dishonestly framed it, one of “bad apples” in an otherwise properly functioning policing system.
Not only are Black people three and a half times more likely than White people to be killed by police, but Black teens are twenty-one times more likely to be killed than White teens by police.
The explanation for such dire disparities can in no way be rotten apples; the problem is much more systemic. The main consequence, even for the so-called bad apples, is to put police officers on temporary administrative duty, submit them to modest retraining, and allow them back on the street in weeks or months.
Although the battle for greater accountability in our policing systems has federal and state dimensions, in the most fundamental and impactful ways, the struggle for genuine reform must be won at the local level. That is, with more than twelve thousand police departments and three thousand-plus sheriff departments across the country.
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Footnotes
[1] Jenkins, et al., “1,098 people have been shot and killed by police in the past 12 months,” The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/.?
[2] “Fatal police shootings of unarmed Black people in US more than 3 times as high as in Whites,” BMJ Newsroom, https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/fatal-police-shootings-of-unarmed-black-people-in-us-more-than-3-times-as-high-as-in-whites/.?
[3] Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, Nathaniel Rakich and Likhitha Butchireddygari, “Why It’s So Rare for Police Officers to Face Legal Consequences,” FiveThirtyEight, June 4, 2020, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-still-so-rare-for-police-officers-to-face-legal-consequences-for-misconduct/.?
[4] See Tony Bouza, “America’s Police Are Still Out of Control,” Southside Pride (Minneapolis), August 21, 2017, and Anthony V. Bouza, Police Unbound: Corruption, Abuse, and Heroism by the Boys in Blue, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001), Ebook location 157.
[5] Michael Quinn, Walking with the Devil: The Police Code of Silence- the Promise of Peer Intervention, (S.l.: Quinn & Associates, 2017), Ebook locations 64–67.
[6] “Enough is Enough! 150 Years of the Minneapolis Police,” MPD150, 2017, pp. 6–8.
[7] Mark Berman, “7 key findings from the Justice Dept. report on the Minneapolis police,” The Washington Post, June 16, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/16/minneapolis-police-doj-report-findings/
[8] Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg, “Baltimore tried reforming the police. They fought every change,” The Washington Post, June 18, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/baltimore-police-reforms-crime/2020/06/18/7d60e91e-b041-11ea-8758-bfd1d045525a_story.html. NOTE: Bayard and Woods are authors of the book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, about the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), which terrorized the city of Baltimore for half a decade before being arrested in 2017 by the FBI.
[9] Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Eric Lichtblau, “Sweeping Federal Review Could Affect Consent Decrees Nationwide,” The New York Times, April 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/us/justice-department-jeff-sessions-baltimore-police.html.
[10] Topher Sanders, Kate Rabinowitz, and Benjamin Conarck, “Walking While Black,” ProPublica, November 16, 2017, https://features.propublica.org/walking-while-black/jacksonville-pedestrian-violations-racial-profiling/.
[11] Stephen Bingham, Sarah Calhoun, et al., “Paying More for Being Poor: Bias and Disparity in California’s Traffic Court System,” Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, 2017, https://lccrsf.org/wp-content/uploads/LCCR-Report-Paying-More-for-Being-Poor-May-2017-5.4.17.pdf.
[12] “Let’s Stop Racist ‘Pretextual’ Traffic Stops,” ACLU-Iowa, November 30, 2017, https://www.aclu-ia.org/en/news/lets-stop-racist-pretextual-traffic-stops.
[13] “Selective Policing: Racially Disparate Enforcement Of Low-Level Offenses In New Jersey,” ACLU-New Jersey, December 21, 2015, https://www.aclu-nj.org/en/publications/selective-policing-racially-disparate-enforcement-low-level-offenses-new-jersey.
[14] The Crime Report, “Misdemeanors Blamed for Much Criminal-Justice Racism,” Crime and Justice News, June 15, 2020, https://thecrimereport.org/2020/06/15/misdemeanors-blamed-for-much-criminal-justice-racism/.?
[15] Christopher Zoukis, “Ferguson, Missouri Under Fire for Revenue-based Criminal Justice System,” Prison Legal News, December 8, 2016, https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2016/dec/8/ferguson-missouri-under-fire-revenue-based-criminal-justice-system/.
[16] Clarence Lang, “On Ferguson, Missouri: History, Protest, and “Respectability,” LAWCHA, August 17, 2014, https://www.lawcha.org/2014/08/17/ferguson-missouri-history-protest-respectability/.?
[17] Niall McCarthy, “How Much Do U.S. Cities Spend Every Year on Policing?” Forbes, August 7, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/08/07/how-much-do-u-s-cities-spend-every-year-on-policing-infographic/?sh=4ecdc17ae7b7.?
[18] “Our Policy Plan,” Grassroots Law Project, https://www.grassrootslaw.org/plan.?
[19] Christopher Ingraham, “U.S. spends twice as much on law and order as it does on cash welfare, data show,” The Washington Post, June 4, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/04/us-spends-twice-much-law-order-it-does-social-welfare-data-show/.?
[20] “Congress Must Divest the Billion Dollar Police Budget and Invest in Public Education,” Popular Democracy, June 10, 2020, https://populardemocracy.org/news-and-publications/congress-must-divest-billion-dollar-police-budget-and-invest-public-education.
[21] Scott Calvert and Dan Frosch, “Police Rethink Policies as Cities Pay Millions to Settle Misconduct Claims,” The Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/police-rethink-policies-as-cities-pay-millions-to-settle-misconduct-claims-11603368002.
[22] Grassroots Law Project.
Founder of Caldwell Group, Inc. | Organizational Growth Consultant | Have been serving as a volunteer missionary for 38 years.
9 小时前Interesting
Point well made. It's as if it's in front of our eyes and we chose to ignore it.