Managing InequalityPolicing 21st Century America

By Jerry Kloby Ph. D. Professor of Sociology at the County College of MorrisAuthor of Inequality, Power, and Development (Prometheus/Random House). gkloby@ccm.edu

“If a soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty oneis not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.” – Victor Hugo

What is the role of the police in a modern democratic society? The standard answer is “to maintain order and keep people safe”. Has the recent uproar sparked by a number of appalling killings by police caused an erosion of the legitimacy of the police? Probably not as a whole, but very likely they have among sections of the American population. But what may be more important is that the dramatic deathsof Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray,and others, along with a number of civil rights investigations into police practices, underscore the fact that the police don’t uphold objective absolute standards and principles of the law and equal treatment, but instead they are engaged in a futile attempt at managing inequality.

Consider the Eric Garner case, the crime was a trivial one — selling loose cigarettes on the street. The 42 year-old Garner had been arrested several times before for similar petty offenses. This time hemay have been more fed up than usual and he resisted. He died as a result of a chokehold similar to what killed 29 year old Anthony Bias in NYC in 1994. This happened even though the chokehold had been banned by NYC police since 1993.1 The death was also very similar to the 1994 death of Ernest Sayon, who suffocated because of pressure on his back, chest and neck while he was handcuffed and on the ground.2 And, considering the rise in citizen complaints in New York City

1 http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/01/16/experiencing-the-chokehold-firsthand/ 2 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/nyregion/fatal-police-encounters-in-new-york-city.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

regarding the police using the chokehold, including a recent increase in the number of chokehold actions substantiated by by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, a death like Eric Garner’s may have only been a matter of time.3

The criminalization of street life has turned many young black males into fugitives on the run in the “wretched underside of neoliberal capitalist America,” as the ethnographic research of Alice Goffman documents.4 Zero tolerance policing, the broken windows theory, and disparate penalties for drug use and possession, have resulted in “mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness” of vastly disproportionate numbers of African-Americans. In the words of Michelle Alexander, it has created a new Jim Crow, a caste system thatrigidly denies many blacks access to the sorts of things that many Americans take for granted, including, for many, the right to vote.5 The new Jim Crow also leaves them segregated, over-policed, and more likely to be the victims of police violence.

According to data compiled by the FBI, more than 400 Americans are killed by police in a typical year, and from 1980 to 2012 there were at least 12,000 people killed by police. The figure is not an exact one since reporting the data is voluntary. ProPublica reports that thedata is terribly incomplete. “Vast numbers of the country's 17,000 police departments don't file fatal police shooting reports at all, and many have filed reports for some years but not others. Florida departments haven't filed reports since 1997 and New York City last reported in 2007.”6 Apparently, elites don’t care enough about the issue to make reporting mandatory.

Based on the available data, young black Americans are far more likelyto have a deadly encounter with the police. Propublica’s analysis of 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.Unfortunately, police departments often do not provide much detail about the circumstances of the shootings. However, both the large number of deaths and the racial disparity should be causes of concern,3 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/nyregion/substantiated-complaints-about-police-use-of-chokeholds-increase.html 4 Alice Goffman On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, University of Chicago Press, 2014. Quote is from Cornell West. 5 Michelle Alexander The New Jim Crow (revised edition). The New Press. 2011.6 http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white

especially when we consider how far from the norm the U.S. appears to be.

According to the Economist magazine, in all of 2013 British police fired their weapons a total of three times and there were no fatalities. In 2012 there was just one fatality. “Even after adjustingfor the smaller size of Britain’s population, British citizens are around 100 times less likely to be shot by a police officer than Americans.” By contrast,”between 2010 and 2014 the police force of onesmall American city, Albuquerque in New Mexico, shot and killed 23 civilians; seven times more than the number of Brits killed by all of England and Wales’s 43 forces during the same period.”7

The international comparisons raise many important questions: • Why aren’t states required to report these deaths to the FBI? • If lethal force isn’t deemed necessary in so many police/citizen encounters in England, why is it necessary here?

• Is the growing inequality in the U.S. playing a role in these conflicts?

• How much of a factor is racial tension or stereotyping? • Is there more crime occurring or is there more resistance to police because they are seen as an external and hostile force?

• What role has the militarization of the police contributed to aggravating tensions between the police and various communities? Since 911 they have often received homeland security funding that hasadded body armor, night vision glasses, armored personnel carriers, and other intimidating equipment, to their resources. (Between 2002 and 2011 the Department of Homeland Security disbursed $35 billion ingrants to state and local police.)8

• Is less tolerance and more manpower and equipment the key to reducingcrime and increasing safety for the majority? Or, do solutions lie ingreater regulation of gun ownership and use, background checks, regulations on ammunition and gun capacity do more to promote both the safety of the citizenry and the police? Or, is the key to reducedcrime and social conflict lie is structural changes that can reverse localized economic decline and the general increase in inequality?

7 http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/armed-police 8 http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-americas-police-have-become-too-militarised-cops-or-soldiers

I don’t want to dismiss the importance of understanding the details ofeach individual case and deciding culpability, but it is also important to step back and see the recurring and enduring patterns that feed the conflict. And there are several that stand out. First, the victims of police violence are overwhelmingly disproportionately African Americans, usually of lower income. Second, their offenses are “street crimes” or relatively minor offenses. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. Walter Scott ran from the police after beingstopped for a broken tail light. He ran because he though he was goingto be taken into custody for missing child support payments. Scott wasshot in the back and killed. These are just two examples of how these patterns manifest themselves. For the bigger picture some of the civilrights investigations spurred by instances like these are illuminating.

For example, in 2013, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey requested help from the U.S. Department of Justice after the news website philly.com revealed that even though Philadelphia’s crime rates had declined, police officers were firing guns at suspects more frequently. The Justice Department found that between 2007 and 2014, police officers opened fire at suspects more than 390 times, and that there were problems with Philadelphia’s lethal-force policy. The Justice Department’s team ultimately made 91 different recommendationsfor improving departmental practices. One was to greatly improve training to show “students not only when and how to use force, but when and how not to use force and to de-escalate, verbally and tactically, if appropriate.” The report also found that the department’s guidance on the use of deadly force was “fragmented” and confusing, particularly for newer officers who were trying to understand a complex system. The Justice Department also asked the Philadelphia police to greatly strengthen its own internal investigative process so as to more quickly discipline officers who act irresponsibly or break departmental rules. Officers involved in shootings are, typically, not interviewed until three months or more afterthe incident. The department’s actions have created what the report calls “an undercurrent of significant strife” between the community and its police.”9

9 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/deadly-force-in-philadelphia.html?src=xps

Likewise, the Justice Department’s findings in regard to Ferguson, MO,are striking. Federal investigators conducted a six-month long investigation that included hundreds of interviews, reviewed 35,000 pages of police records and analyzed race data compiled for every police stop. Among the findings were that blacks “accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests. In cases like jaywalking, which often hinge on police discretion, blacks accounted for 95 percent of all arrests.”

In summarizing the Justice Department’s report the NY Times wrote: “Those findings reinforce what the city’s black residents have been saying publicly since the shooting in August, that the criminal justice system in Ferguson works differently for blacks and whites. A black motorist who is pulled over is twice as likely to be searched asa white motorist, even though searches of white drivers are more likely to turn up drugs or other contraband, the report found.Minor, largely discretionary offenses such as disturbing the peace andjaywalking were brought almost exclusively against blacks. When whiteswere charged with these crimes, they were 68 percent more likely to have their cases dismissed.”10 (The full report is available at: http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.)

While racial bias has contributed to a deterioration of police/community relations in many locations, we should not overlook the impact of changes resulting from federal and state government budgetary considerations, which have often left local governments hardpressed to find revenue sources for city services. Ferguson, hardly alone in this practice, was issuing fines and summonses to large numbers of people, frequently for very minor offenses, routinely as a revenue stream for the city government. The city’s blacks residents, and low income residents, were bearing the financial burden of decadesof federal cutbacks in aid to cities.

Likewise, conditions in Ferguson, MO, are a combination of a long history of discrimination by private parties that created segregated neighborhoods by refusing to sell or rent homes to blacks, and throughthe use of restrictive covenants in deeds, and “steering” practiced byreal estate interests. But, as Richard Rothstein has shown so well,

10 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-finds-pattern-of-police-bias-and-excessive-force-in-ferguson.html

they were also created by government policy.11 That is to say, public policy – actions taken on behalf of we the people. On the local level, municipalities enacted exclusionary zoning policies that often segregated residents by race or class, and these were given a stamp ofapproval on the national level by a 1926 U.S. Supreme Court decision. The federal government also initiated the practice of redlining, whichmade many low-income and minority people ineligible for home mortgages, and established a practice that private lenders were quick to follow. Making matters worse, the Federal Housing Administration made housing discrimination an institutionalized practice. It declaredthat “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racialgroups.”

In 1974, a federal Court of Appeals found that “segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was … in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.”12

The pattern in Ferguson is replicated elsewhere. In December, 2014, the U.S. Justice Department completed a two-year civil right investigation into the Cleveland Police Department that found a pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force” that resulted in dangerous and reckless behavior by police officers. According to the New York Times, the abuses “included excessive use of force by thepolice involving not just firearms, but also less-than-lethal weapons like Tasers, chemical spray and fists, which were sometimes used for retaliation. The report also said the police had used excessive force against mentally ill people and employed tactics that escalated potentially nonviolent encounters into dangerous confrontations.”13 Precisely the types of actions that have angered black residents and touched off protests in many parts of the country. And though we may associate many of these problems with the nation’s big cities, it is often in the surrounding suburbs where the efforts to manage the problems of inequality is at its fiercest.

11 “The Making of Ferguson” an Economic Policy Institute Report by Richard Rothstein, October 15, 2014. 12 Rothstein.13 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/us/justice-dept-inquiry-finds-abuses-by-cleveland-police.html

Sometimes there are “bad” cops and sometimes the screening process is inadequate. Such was the case in Cleveland, Ohio, where 12 year-old Tamir Rice was shot a killed by an office who had just arrived on the scene and made little or no effort to ascertain the situation. The officer, Tim Lehmann, had quit a suburban police force after his supervisors determined two years ago that he had had a “dangerous lossof composure” during firearms training and was emotionally unprepared to cope with stresses of the job, records show. The Cleveland police acknowledged that they had never reviewed the previous police personnel file of the 26 year-old officer during background checks before his hiring.14 In some cases, it was clear that the city’s policing problems stemmed from ““systemic deficiencies, including insufficient accountability, inadequate training and equipment, ineffective policies and inadequate engagement with the community.”

But the Tamir Rice shooting was not the catalyst for the Justice Department’s investigation. that event occurred more than two year earlier following the 2012 killing of two black people who were apparently unarmed. “That shooting happened after the police apparently mistook backfire from a speeding car for gunfire and began a 20-mile chase that eventually grew to include 62 patrol cars. It ended when officers fired 137 rounds at close range at the car after it pulled into a middle-school parking lot, killing both occupants.”15

As I said before, the details of each case matter. In every situation we need to determine if appropriate force was used. But we also need to examine the large picture of the role of police in society. How well do different policing strategies work? Is there a racial and/or class bias to the law and how it is enforced? But, again, the problem is not limited to policing. Broader patterns of discrimination, segregation, and inequality, need to be understood and addressed. In April, 2015, riots erupted in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the police. Gray suffered a spinal cord injury after being taken into custody and while his death might have been theproximate cause of the uprising, it is only a moment in a long wave ofsegregation, exploitation, neglect, and abuse. Blacks and others in Baltimore have been victimized by many of the same forces affecting Ferguson, Cleveland, and many other parts of the U.S. Discrimination

14 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/us/justice-dept-inquiry-finds-abuses-by-cleveland-police.html 15 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/us/justice-dept-inquiry-finds-abuses-by-cleveland-police.html

in housing and mortgage lending, ostensibly outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act, were widely practiced in recent years. Subprime loans that resulted in high foreclosure rates (and the loss of wealth)were pushed on customers in Baltimore who could have qualified for prime loans. A successful lawsuit against Wells Fargo claimed that trap loans “tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosures and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.”16 Oneloan officer stated in an affidavit filed in 2009 that “employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.” Data released by the city showed that more than half the properties subject to foreclosure on a Wells Fargo loan made in 2005-08 stood vacant in 2009. Seventy one percent of those properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.

Economic opportunity for black residents of Baltimore is also well documented (but not remedied). Research published by Johns Hopkins University in June of 2014, which followed 800 Baltimore children for nearly 30 years, found that birth status played a major role in the chances of economic success. Almost none of the children from low-income families had a college degree by age 28. But the penalty for lack of educational achievement was much greater for blacks than whites. “Among those who did not attend college, white menfrom low-income backgrounds found the best-paying jobs. Although they had the lowest rate of college attendance and completion, white men from low-income backgrounds found high-paying jobs in what remained ofBaltimore's industrial economy.” The study also found indirect evidence that the stigma of being a lawbreaker is much greater for blacks than for whites. “Better-off white men had the highest self-reported rates of drug use, binge drinking, and chronic smoking, followed in each instance by white men of disadvantaged families; in addition, all these men reported high levels of arrest.” But the stigma of these arrests did not result in such a severe penalty for whites on the job market as it did for blacks.17 Indications are that escaping poverty is especially difficult in segregated Baltimore. According to the New York Times, those who grew up in recent decades in

16 Michael Powell, “Bank Accused of Pushing Mortgage Deals on Blacks” New York Times June 7, 2009. 17 Jill Rosen, “Study: Children’s Life Trajectories Largely Determined by Families They Are Born Into” June 2, 2014. http://hub.jhu.edu/2014/06/02/karl-alexander-long-shadow-research# See also: Juana Summers “Rich Kid, Poor Kid: For 30 Years, Baltimore Study Tracked Who Gets Ahead” National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/07/335285098/rich-kid-poor-kid-for-30-years-baltimore-study-tracked-who-gets-ahead

Baltimore earn 28 percent less at age 26 than otherwise similar kids who grew up in an average county in the United States.18

In is against this backdrop of a deep historical pattern of segregation that the Baltimore police do their work. Clearly they are incapable of solving these structural problems and the strain results in an explosion of frustration, anger, and violence. The excessive useof force by the police was fairly well documented at the time of Freddie Gray’s death. In September, 2014, the Baltimore Sun reported that the city paid $5.7 million to victims of brutality between 2011 and 2014. And "over the past four years, more than 100 people have woncourt judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality andcivil rights violations."19

Historically, laws were put in place to exclude people from the privileges held by a few. In the U.S. slavery was legal for nearly thewhole first century after the nation was founded. It is important to remember what this means: the ownership of one person by another was sanctioned by America’s political and legal institutions. Part of the right of ownership was to be able to work the slave as one saw fit andto whip and punish in other ways in order to gain productivity and cooperation.

After slavery ended, discrimination and mistreatment did not go away. The legal authority of state and local governments was used to establish de facto segregation in all realms of life. Blacks were denied access to the vote through poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation tactics, and by inadequate or faulty voting facilities. States passed felony disenfranchisement laws often with the deliberategoal of preventing blacks from voting even after the Voting Rights Actof 1964. Hundreds of cities and towns established sundown laws, that prohibited blacks from owning or renting homes within city limits, or,in some cases, even being in the town after dark. Other minorities faced similar exclusionary tactics. Homeowners wrote restrictive covenants into their deeds, which they hoped would prevent their property from ever being owned or occupied by a black family.

18 New York Times, “How Racism Doomed Baltimore,” May 9, 2015. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opinion/sunday/how-racism-doomed-baltimore.html 19 Mark Puente, “Undue Force,” The Baltimore Sun, September 28, 2014. http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/

These forms of discrimination and exclusion were all legal in their day. And they were reinforced by the threat of violence. Public lynchings killed thousands of blacks and sent a chilling message to all to “mind their place.” Cross burnings, rocks thrown through windows, and other acts of violence did the same.

Fifty years ago Martin Luther King, in an essay urging social scientists to take a more active role in the civil rights movement, wrote words that hold very true today: “All too many white Americans are horrified not with the conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions – the Negro himself.”20 And he quoted Victor Hugo: “If a soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”

Are we, as a nation, becoming more content with leaving conditions as they are? Thinking that somehow we can wall them off and obliterate them through force? Over the past few decades zero-tolerance policing,draconian drug laws, indeterminate sentencing, and similar policies have resulted in a tremendous growth in incarceration as well as the number of people on probation or parole, or otherwise constrained and monitoring by the legal system. All of which takes a disproportionate toll on, not just black America, but on lower-income populations without the financial wherewithal to pay their way out of legal trouble, or buy their way out of so-called “high crime” neighborhoods.

And they get policed to an unprecedented extent. I mentioned before the billions that have been distributed by Homeland Security to law enforcement agencies around the country. While some Americans may feelsafer others feel the opposite. “Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a license”.21 20 The Role of the Social Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement by Martin Luther King. 21 “Cops or Soldiers” The Economist, May 22, 2014. http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-americas-police-have-

Since the 1990s, local police forces have also been taking advantage of opportunities to purchase million of dollars worth of surplus military equipment at great discounts. The use of military gear by theFerguson police to confront demonstrators was seen by many as a contributing factor to animosities between the police and many residents. The process is coming under greater scrutiny and some politicians are questioning it. “While some of the equipment may be useful to these agencies, a number of these items appear more suited for war rather than for use in our communities,” said NJ State SenatorNia Gill.22

Policing policies in many communities around the country often amount to little more than punishing sectors of American society who have largely been marginalized by the economic and political trends of the past three decades. Major areas of the country have been abandoned by private sector. Capital flight has left them neglected and deteriorated with little opportunity for escape. And government has largely failed to step in to create something positive in areas that global capitalism has mostly written off. Political leaders claim there is no money while protecting the growing fortunes of the top fraction of American society. Jobs are scarce, pay is low, social services are inadequate, housing is unaffordable, and police are called in to handle problems that would be better addressed by other people through different methods. And those who are left behind get the discipline, the whip, the noose, the chokehold, the bullet, the flashbang grenade, and far too much of the blame.

Calls for better training of police officers and for Congress to compel all police departments to report shootings to the Justice Department, are important and necessary steps.23 But policing society is an instrument of social control that does not get at the roots of conflict and it does not undo the damage done by more than two centuries of sometimes blatant and sometimes hidden racially discriminatory practices. It is a difficult task the nation needs to address institutional, structural and cultural components that promoteinequality and conflict. Capital flight, neoliberal government

become-too-militarised-cops-or-soldiers 22 http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/15/02/19/military-equipment/ 23 For example: “The Walter Scott Murder” NYTIMES April 8, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/opinion/the-walter-scott-murder.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0

policies, growing economic inequality, and beliefs that problems are solved through force, all need to be countered in order to reduce the level of stress, fear, conflict, and violence that so many are experiencing. It’s no simple task but ultimately the policy must shiftfrom managing inequality to fighting it.