Black and Blue Lives: Reconstructing 21st Century America

Gary Hoelzer

Edited July 2020

(First drafted in 2016)

Recently (2016) I was asked by several Christian leaders to address for their congregation the ongoing racially charged issue of the police use of force and the civil unrest that often ensues after violent encounters. They were looking for answers, trying to understand Ferguson, Ballwin, Dallas, Baton Rouge, Charlotte, and the others that will have occurred since this article was written. My sobering prediction…the violence will continue. There will be more shootings, more unrest, more riots.

No manner of protests, no dialogue between Black Lives and Blue Lives, no Presidential task force on policing, will change the fact that the shooting of young black men by police officers (whether white or black) will continue to occur until significant issues are addressed in the United States. Not that there is not merit in dialogue or the examination of police practices, but those are not the cures for wounds that go very deep and have festered for several centuries.

In December 2014, President Obama signed an executive order creating the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. But what is needed today is not another task force on policing, but rather the wholistic Reconstruction of 21st century America. For until we as a society and a nation address issues that have been left unresolved since the end of Reconstruction in 1877 we have little hope that things are going to change for the better.

It’s Hard to be a Police Officer Today

A few years ago I was teaching a course for the Missouri Police Chiefs Association for chiefs and commanders from all over the State. I went around the room and asked each officer to think back to their pre-employment oral board and share with the group how they answered the question, “Why do you want to be a police officer?” The predominant answer -- “I want to help people.” Two years ago a young man stood in my office looking for advice on his upcoming oral interview board. I asked him the inevitable question he would be asked, “Why do you want to be a police officer?” He hesitated so I pressed him, “Why do you want to be a police officer?” His answer: “I want to help people, but they have probably heard that a thousand times.” I explained to him that yes, they probably had. But if he had any other answer he may not be a good candidate to be a police officer…because policing in America is all about “helping people.” 

I was a guest instructor at Maryville University in west St. Louis County and I went around the room and asked the young criminal justice students what motivated them to pursue a career in policing. One young lady said it was because her dad and grandfather were police officers and she wanted to follow in their steps. I made a mental note that she wouldn’t last longer than a year, because she was following their “calling” and not her “calling.” I turned to another young student and he explained that he had been a pre-med student and his ambition had been to become a medical doctor. But then his best friend was shot and murdered. He switched his major to criminal justice because he wanted to do everything within his power to prevent others from experiencing the heartache that he went through with the loss of his friend. “Justice” --that is why police officers do what they do.

The Holman Bible Dictionary touches on the very essence of justice:

Justice presupposes God’s intention for people to be in community. When people had become poor and weak with respect to the rest of the community, they were to be strengthened so that they could continue to be effective members of the community—living with them and beside them (Leviticus 25:36-46). Thus biblical justice restores people in community (969).

Restoring people to community so they can live without fear and enjoy all of the benefits of community life…that is justice. It is why police patrol our streets, so residents can go about their business without fear that burglars or robbers will steal their valuables…or their lives. It is why police officers train for active shooters…so people can receive an education, worship, and go to movie theaters…without fear that their experience will be assaulted by a crazed gunman. It is a calling worth living for, and a calling worth dying for and far too many have paid that ultimate price…for justice.

In my 38 years of public service, I can say that it is harder today to be a police officer than at any time in the prior three decades. The only way for a police officer to win a gunfight in the court of public and media opinion is to lose it. Those officers who do survive a harrowing fire fight then endure the firestorm of public outcry, demonstrations, even rioting in the community they swore to serve and protect at great personal risk.

I attended a statewide conference for city managers several months ago [2016] and on the last day of the conference there was a round table that was intended to address the crucial issues facing the cities of our state. The number one critical issue voiced by city managers: the hiring and retention of police officers. Many people undertook the calling of justice knowing the price that policing often demands; but most did so with the understanding that they would have the backing and support of the community. That is no longer the case in many urban communities. Who would want to do this job? I met with a discouraged, young police officer recently. He just wanted to patrol in a community that when he drove down the street people would wave instead of raising their middle finger in anger and disgust. It’s hard to be a police officer today.

It’s Hard to be a Black Person Today: Our Ugly History: We Must Face it…and Own It

The Mayflower Compact, written offshore by Pilgrims in 1620, came one year after the first slaves reached our continent. For the next 240 plus years slavery was the curse of our founding. French statesman and historian Alexis deTocqueville  toured the United States in the early 19th century to observe “Democracy in America.” Among his observations was the impact of slavery:

Whatever may be the efforts of the Americans of the South to maintain slavery, they will not always succeed. Slavery, now confined to a single tract of the civilized earth, attacked by Christianity as unjust and by political economy as prejudicial, and now contrasted with democratic liberty and the intelligence of our age, cannot survive. By the act of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue” (deTocqueville  1835).

deTocqueville  was more than a statesman, he was a prophet…great calamities may be expected to ensue and “ensue” they have! Less than a year after the end of the Civil War and with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, white citizens and police officers murdered 45 blacks in Memphis; and in the riots of New Orleans, they murdered blacks and white Republicans. The same year the “slave codes” gave way to the “Black Codes,” passed by southern legislatures to ensure the oppression of the black man continued. These Codes prohibited blacks from learning how to read or write, from entering into employment that competed with whites, established curfews and dictated where a black could live and walk. The plantation slave labor gave way to a new title, the inmate working penal farms all across the South. Not much changed besides the terminology.

Jim Crow laws kept us separated; or as the Supreme Court stated in Brown vs. Education, “separate and unequal.” With the industrial revolution of the early 20th century, many southern blacks began to move north. But they were limited to where they could live and where they could work. Over 90 percent of the housing aid provided by the federal government was to whites. After World War II, the federal government subsidized housing in the suburbs for returning soldiers…if you were a white soldier. Forty percent of residential properties in the inner cities were changed to commercial properties, so the remaining blacks were moved to more dense housing; and eventually, to the housing projects that sprang up across the country. Housing -- separate and unequal.

With discrimination in employment, the black family could not escape these conditions. Consider white Americans, whose families helped to found and populate the colonies and the United States…several centuries of inherited wealth passed from one generation to the next. For the black family, who could not own property either due to discrimination or economic ability, there was no inheritance to pass on. In 2020 the wealth of the white family still exceeds the total wealth of the black family by $100,000.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, thus making discrimination in employment illegal. Even prior to its passage, the U.S had begun to see a black middle class emerge, albeit at the lower end of the middle class spectrum. By the mid-60’s nearly half of black families were considered “middle class.”

But there was another piece of federal legislation passed in the mid-60’s known as “The Great Society.” Among other things, this legislation was intended to end poverty and racism as we know it, instituting the largest welfare program in our nation’s history. What it did was increase the rate of men not looking for employment, with dependence upon government assistance reaching 48 percent of black households.

But perhaps the most disturbing impact of Great Society legislation was the devastating impact on the black, two-parent family. Until the 1960’s, the black family had withstood everything our society could throw at them…slavery, discrimination, segregation. But it could not withstand government assistance to women with children…only given to women and children without a father in the home. In the ensuing years the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks skyrocketed to over 70% nationwide, and higher in our urban centers. As black pastor Voddie Baucham has stated,

The underlying malady that gives rise to all the rest of these epidemics is immorality and fatherlessness. We know that fatherlessness is the number one indicator of future violence, dropout rates, out-of-wedlock births, and future incarceration. And in the black community, more than 70 percent of all children are born out of wedlock! Fatherlessness is the bane of the black community.[1]

In their book, A General Theory of Crime, criminologists Gottfredson and Hirschi “…hypothesized that a child’s level of self-control, which is heavily influenced by child-rearing practices, stabilizes by the time he reaches the age of eight. Thus, they identified parenting as the most decisive factor in determining the likelihood that a person will commit crimes. Children reared in settings of neglect or abuse, for example, will be more likely to commit criminal acts, while children raised in supervised homes, where punishment is a consequence of bad behaviour, will be more likely to withstand temptations toward criminal conduct.”[2]

The “fatherlessness” of a large percentage of our urban children has led to a large underclass and what black Harvard professor Elijah Anderson calls, a subculture governed by the code of the street. This “code” is comprised of counter-culture values of drugs, sex and violence, which are the products of this failed social policy. Anderson identified what he labeled as the “street family,” household units that adopt the “code.” Individuals in these social groups are the primary purveyors of violence in our inner neighborhoods.

Anderson also identified a phenomenon known as “code switching.” The decent family, in contrast to the street family, adheres for the most part to traditional values. However, children growing up in a neighborhood characterized by the code of the street often find themselves in a state of conflict between two worlds with two very different value systems: the traditional values of their family and the violent code of the street. A young man known by his family as a “good boy” while at home can adhere to the code of the street when away from home -- a violent predator preying on the weak. “Code switching” must be considered when you hear a grieving family describing their son, nephew or grandchild as a “good boy,” yet on the street he may have been a violent criminal.

Consider the uncomfortable facts. Blacks commit murder at 8 times the rate of whites; and over 90 percent of their victims are black.  The arrest rate for robbery (the forcible taking of property from another) is 8 ? times higher for blacks than for whites. It is an epidemic among a social group of our citizens that have been disadvantaged for centuries with no end in sight.

Such individuals will inevitably clash with the police, oftentimes violently, sometimes deadly. Statistics indicate that the primary indicator of the police use of force is not the race of the officer or the race of the suspect. The primary indicator of the rate of police use of force is directly correlated to the crime rate of the area being policed…the higher the crime rate, the higher the incidents of police use of force. It is a na?ve America that whitewashes the violence of some urban neighborhoods. Those are the neighborhoods that need the police the most and the neighborhoods where the clashes between offender and police will occur. To levy wholesale charges of systemic racism against police departments or the movements to defund the police are results of political pandering or the total failure to understand the violence that occurs on a daily basis in pockets of our urban areas, which is typically black on black crime. Where was the outcry with recent headlines in Chicago regarding inner city violence: 14 dead and over 100 wounded!

Finishing Reconstruction in 21st Century America

At the end of the Civil War there was legislation known as the Reconstruction Acts, integrating blacks into greater society and reintegrating the South into the United States. After many political struggles and clashes, in 1877 Congress declared reconstruction over…slavery had ended and reconstruction was no longer necessary. What ensued were the Black Codes, Jim Crow and the Great Society.

We as white America can no longer hide behind the statement, “I didn’t do that…I didn’t enslave, I didn’t discriminate, I didn’t... The issue is not what we “didn’t do.” The issue is what “will we do” on behalf of our fellow Americans who are suffering and have suffered long enough. It is now time for Reconstruction to be completed and I offer three major participants that must be involved in the Reconstruction Act of 2017 [2020].

Police Leadership

Our officers need community support but they also need the support and leadership of police executives. As stated at the outset, President Obama initiated The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Respected officials from the policing community, along with other community leaders, identified seven pillars that should be addressed in every agency that fields police officers. And many agencies have already instituted those pillars that provide a good foundation to build upon.

But reform is sometimes resisted. Post Ferguson, the State of Missouri passed legislation and the Governor signed into law what would have established policing standards for agencies throughout the State. Opponents challenged the law and a court struck down the police department standards as an unfunded mandate. The St. Louis County Council passed a police standards bill for all municipal police departments in St. Louis County, the county where Ferguson is located. Opponents, led by police chiefs and municipalities, once again challenged the authority of the County to regulate municipal police departments and a judge struck down the County ordinance.

The St. Louis Area Police Chiefs Association, along with the St. Louis Area City Management Association, spent considerable effort to establish professional standards for police departments. After a very thoughtful, collaborative process the membership of both organizations passed and adopted those standards. Failure to attain certification would result in removing the police organization from membership from the Chiefs Association. While an important step for St. Louis law enforcement, the system lacks the teeth of the failed County legislation that contained a process to disband police departments who failed to comply with minimum standards.  

For brevity, I will offer the following points for other areas of concentration:

·        Proactively seek greater community involvement in ongoing crime problems -- the police and community stakeholders working together to co-produce safer neighborhoods

·        Targeted offender approach as the preferred strategy to address violent crime…a narrow focus on known individuals involved in criminal activity rather than the broad net of some hot spot strategies

·        Robust wellness programs for officers in need of emotional and mental health support resulting from working in a dangerous and violent environment

·        Rigorous use of personnel processes to create a culture of internal procedural justice, removing officers who will not comply with professional standards while proactively affirming those officers who professionally serve and protect despite intense pressure.

State Legislation

Bold reform would also involve legislation to finally replace the failed traffic stop collection requirement. Currently every year Missouri police departments are required to collect traffic stop data and submit it to the Attorney General. The failed formula unfairly labels police departments as racial profilers because it compares the racial data to the local jurisdiction, rather than the community at-large who actually use those roadways. As policing expert Samuel Walker, professor at the University of Nebraska has stated, it’s all about searching for the right denominator. A police department that patrols a highway or interstate used by an entire region or metro area will be compared to their own municipality even though 95 percent of stops may be people outside of that jurisdiction. It is a failed system continually perpetuated by politicians and used for pandering to the myth that every police department racially profiles.

But there is a better way that is endorsed by Walker…replace it with a system that identifies bad police officers, few as they may be. The Missouri Police Officers Standards and Training Commission (POST) licenses police officers in the state and already has a disciplinary and removal system. The current system is initiated typically at the police department level and is only as good as the skilled, objective internal investigation conducted. Police investigating the police.

The state legislature should fund POST to create a statewide hotline to report police abuse and hire trained investigators who would then objectively determine the validity of the complaints. Through an administrative system of due process, the licenses of offending, abusive officers could be suspended or revoked.

Community Based

Reconstruction must also come from community and civic leaders, not from government mandates. I attended a debriefing by an area police chief after a tornado had ripped through his city and caused major damage and disruption in the 1990’s. One of the lessons learned in that natural disaster was the importance of community. He made the point that it is the police that respond to the chaos, but it is the community who must rebuild. I believe that is true in the cultural crisis we are in today. The police play an important role, but a limited role in the reforms that are truly needed in our country. The police are not the problem, nor can they solve the deep rooted social and moral issues of our day. It is the community that must rebuild.

There are many community minded leaders who are more than willing to step up to a need or a challenge. We must tap into the generosity of corporate America while rejecting governmental attempts to redistribute wealth…the Great Society boondoggle has already proven that does not work. There are many examples of corporate generosity in our communities. In the St. Louis area, the organization known as Payback, Inc. seeks restorative justice for young offenders, seeking to provide restitution to their victims while teaching them the lessons and fruits that come from hard work.

The Concordance Academy of Leadership is another privately-led re-entry program for adults that has reduced recidivism to prison by 40-percent. Danny Ludeman, a retired CEO of a financial institution, engaged researchers from Washington University’s Brown School to develop the strategies that could effectively transform offenders into productive citizens. Those supporting and leading this program are a who's who of St. Louis corporate, civic and faith-based leaders. Better Family Life is another organization that has been "boots on the ground" for years and has been doing a tremendous job attempting to stem the tide of violence and guiding people out of that dangerous lifestyle.

With the strong community involvement of corporate America, similar programs could be directed towards young people who have not offended, yet who need expanded opportunities to succeed. More could be done with a coordinated, concerted effort by leaders of our churches, corporations and civic organizations. We can begin to bridge the economic gap, not by government mandate, but by the best of America’s heart and soul.

And a final word to the community: fervently support the rule of law and due process, not mob rule. Ironically, our nation is beginning to reflect the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution rather than the genius and power of the United States that de Tocqueville observed.

If you have continued reading thank you for your patience with me. I will end where I began. During the unrest in Ferguson and subsequent ambush incidents of the police in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Ballwin, two pastors sat in my office and asked what they should tell their congregation that was reeling from the violence, and what constructive actions could they take to bring healing in the community. My response: preach the Gospel. It alone has the power to transform hearts, unite people of all races and ethnicities, and bring lasting peace. So, I address a fourth group: religious leaders.

de Tocqueville was searching for the key to "the greatness and genius of America," but his search was fruitless until he "went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness, [and then he understood] the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." If the Clergy Coalition truly wants to have a positive impact upon society, they will lay down their protest signs and pick up their Bibles and preach the Gospel of peace, righteousness and self-control. And while you live out the Gospel of Jesus, give a cup of cold water to those on both sides of the protest lines.  

Conclusion

Divisiveness has always been part of the United States, probably stemming from its love of individualism and from our inherent fallen nature. It is not a modern phenomenon. It was divisiveness and hatred that derailed Reconstruction in the 19th century and we are well-aware of the growing divisiveness in the past decade.  It seems that we only come together as a people when we face our greatest challenges, like the aftermath of 9/11. Now is not the time to continue the blame-game and yell at each other over barriers and protest lines. Like that troubling period in 2001, now is the time to lay aside our differences and unite once again and reconstruct a hurting America upon the sure foundation laid by our beloved Founders.

[1] Retrieved on October 12, 2016 from https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/thoughts-on-ferguson.

[2] Encyclopedia Brittanica, retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Travis-Hirschi#ref940772 on 7/5/2020).

About the author: Gary Hoelzer had a 38-year career in public service as a police officer, police chief and city administrator. He earned a Master of Science in criminal justice from the University of Central Missouri and has been an adjunct professor for 14 years on various criminal justice topics, including race and crime and multicultural police management.