What’s New? The Truth, As Usual
Recent events such as the sodomizing of the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by the New York police officer Justin A. Volpe in a Brooklyn station house make it very obvious that brutal acts by those who go to work with badges and guns must not be taken less than seriously. Bigotry and excessive force have been problems stretching across the history of how those in law enforcement respond to Black Americans. The numbers of those who have been mistreated, framed, crippled, and killed would be sobering if we went far back enough, and the feeble ways in which our system traditionally handled these cases might bring on a melancholic or bitter or angry mood, if not a feeling made up of all of those emotions. Negroes, quite simply, had a hard way to go when it came to authority and the meting out of both justice and injustice.
Beyond the racial angle, Americans have always resented police abuse. One of the things that distinguishes this nation from most places in the world is that the individual in the street has, over the long haul, gotten more and more respect from those who enforce the law, whether that person is rich or poor or in between. That is due not to sweetness in the halls of power but to agitation and the ongoing scrutiny of the press that is basic to our form of government, which has a built-in suspicion of power and functions with a certainty based in the human condition, a certainty that demands vigilance because of the inevitable twisting, bending, and breaking of the rules by some of those in stations of authority, elected and not.
I know a bit about this sort of thing. Almost thirty-five years ago, my younger brother, who was then about sixteen and liked to heckle and harass police officers whenever he had the chance, was standing outside of my mother’s home in what is now called South Central Los Angeles, where the big riot of 1965 had taken place a year or two before. Two White cops were pursuing a Negro guy in a stolen vehicle who jumped out of the car, ran up the driveway, and disappeared over the fence into the next block. My brother was outside on the grass and began laughing at the cops and making fun of them when they came back from the chase with no suspect in cuffs.
According to the buddy of his who was with my brother, one of the cops got very angry and started talking to my brother as though he would arrest him if he didn’t shut his trap. That wasn’t my brother’s way. He loved to poke at a lion through the bars of his cage, even if the cage was unlocked. His assumption was that, if the lion broke loose, fate would play a card in his favor and vanquish the beast. It had before, when he hosed down a couple of plainclothes cops with whom he got into an angry verbal exchange, as they were walking away. That was not long after the Watts riot, which made White cops wary of getting into physical confrontations during the day, while neighborhood people were looking on. This, however, took place perhaps a year later and at night. The rules were different. My brother, long, lean, and, from his point of view, deliciously arrogant, told the two police officers that they were on private property and needed go somewhere and see if they could catch somebody guilty of a crime before the night was over. That snapped it. The angry cop jumped him, and the two were tussling on the ground when I was called out of the house to see what was going on.
When they got up, the small blond cop with molten blue eyes was saying, “You’re going to jail.” My brother, meanwhile, was saying that he hadn’t done anything and that he wasn’t going anywhere. When the cop lunged at him again, my brother ran up the steps of the house, pushing some chairs behind him and throwing a flashlight at the cop’s head, which missed its flesh-and-blood target. The blond one’s partner was an older cop. Throughout the whole scuffle and during the shouting, he had been trying to calm things down and moved around to the back of the house to see whether my brother was fleeing that way. He wasn’t; he was inside.
My mother, hearing all the commotion and trying to make sense of my brother’s absolute rage, was alarmed now. When I went into the house, she wanted to know what happened. The cops remained in the front yard talking. The one struggling with my brother was hopped up; the older cop was calm but seemed caught in the middle of something he would have preferred to be out of. Both were eyeing the front door. Then they came to the steps.
As my mother talked to the older cop, the younger one, still saying my brother was going to jail, put his foot in the door so that it couldn’t be closed. The two cops wanted her to send my brother out. While this talk was going on, back and forth, with my brother standing behind my mother and me, cop cars arrived in swarms on the street and the blue wave started trotting up the walkway to the porch. Before anything else could be said, they had swept through the door and grabbed my brother. They pushed him backwards—from the dining room to the living room and past a bedroom and the bathroom—all the way into the kitchen, where he began resisting, screaming for them to take their hands off of him. Having followed this blue-and-white burst of muscle, leather, pistols, and helmets into the kitchen, I watched with my mother as a couple of cops, their hands on their guns, held us at bay. The others were really putting it on my brother—billy clubs and fists—snatching him by the hair, snapping on handcuffs, and dragging him back to the front door of the house, onto the porch, and into one of the cars. With the whole mess of cops gone, sharp tweaks of violence remained in the air.
My brother was supposed to be arraigned in juvenile court on the following Thursday, which was a few days away. When my mother, our lawyer, and I got there, we were told that he couldn’t be brought to court, because of a mixup. According to my brother, they had beaten him so badly that his destination on the night of the arrest had been changed en route. The two cops who were transporting him took a look at all the proof of excessive force and, intending to protect their fellow peace officers, erased the original destination on the transferal document and entered that of a facility where he couldn’t be photographed. As they arrived there with him, he recalled, the guy reading the document laughed about their changing it and they all chuckled together conspiratorially. The reason why he wasn’t in court when he should have been was that there was a holiday that Friday, which made it a long weekend. By Monday, his bruises would have gone down enough to corroborate the official version of the arrest and the struggle, not his.
In juvenile court, my brother was found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon—the thrown flashlight that had missed the hotheaded officer—and resisting arrest. An ample number of neighborhood witnesses had seen the whole business in front of the house, the younger cop arguing with my brother and then leaping on him, which clarified how out of control he had become under the weight of his own anger. That didn’t do it. While the older cop, who was obviously conflicted, couldn’t go so far as to say that he had seen the flashlight bounce off the face of his partner, he did lie in his testimony and say that his fellow peace officer had sustained an easily observable bruise beneath one of his eyes from the assault. Along the way, it didn’t help that the lone judge deciding the verdict in juvenile court wasn’t really a trained jurist and didn’t take too well to our lawyer’s pointing out a number of things he had to look up in the law book on his desk. Nor did he like it when my brother’s version of the incident was read in court and he referred to the officer who had attacked him as “a pure one, with blond hair and blue eyes.” The air was soon heavy with the smell of a goose cooked in excrement. The White folks had done it again.
I was told by another lawyer at the time that it would have been rough on the older officer if he had not backed his partner and instead told the truth. The LAPD was supposed to have had ways of disciplining those who refused to adhere to the idea that the police were the thin blue line between civilization and chaos, which meant that you did not go against your partner over something as trivial as smacking someone around who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. In fact, a few years before my brother’s trouble, a veteran cop I had met in downtown Los Angeles was directing traffic and being moved from one intersection to another all day, which required him to quick-step his way in order to avoid being written up for doing a bad job. He was White and had intervened one night in his station house when a prisoner was getting roughed up. Soon after that, he was out of a squad car and back on his feet as a traffic cop.
Three years later, I too was picked up outside my apartment house and taken to the station, supposedly because I talked too much stuff when the light was shone in my eyes. While I was being booked, a drunken Mexican guy in a cell was going on about how Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California were rightfully the land of Mexico. This was the late sixties, and the imperial histories of non-European countries—including slavery, female genital mutilation, foot-binding, and slaughters of the innocent—were less important than similar things, or exactly the same things, in Western countries such the United States. What the guy was proclaiming had been said many, many times but, as we learned, could have an irritating sting. You people have it now, all these states, you know, all of this land, he continued, but someday, someday. A small White officer with dark hair and a dark mustache said that he had heard enough. He took off his gun, put it on his desk, and opened the cell. The Mexican lifted up his dukes and stepped out, expecting a chance to let the gringo have it. The cop gave him the first martial arts drop kick to the head I had ever seen. When the man went down, the peace officer continued beating and kicking him for a while. Then, satisfied, he dragged the prisoner back into the cell, straightened himself up, and went back to work. If anything, I was sure the Mexican would be charged with assaulting a police officer and there would be plenty of uniformed witnesses to back the story.
In Los Angeles, things historically were that way because, on one plane, the police force has long been too small: the very large number of people it had to handle stretched out over a sprawling landmass. As in imperial Rome at the height of its expansion, the sea of authority was broad but not very deep. That had become the burden of law enforcement in an enormous two-story town. The tactic that evolved into convention was to intimidate with confident ferocity so that the people would never think too much about how many more of them there were than cops. A protocol existed to end all disagreements by immediately arresting the apparent troublemakers or disputants and leaving the area in a puff of exhaust. Such tactics helped avoid small riots and made people think twice about arguing with a member of the LAPD. Another problem in Los Angeles, at least from a racial perspective, was that the police were often recruited from the South, as they were in Oakland, California, where the Black Panthers made their name. Southern cops and Negroes were not always a good mix. When things got nasty and the smoke cleared or calm had returned, those who bore the greatest part of the burden were not the ones who wore the badges.
That is, even so, only part of the story. Over the last thirty years, much has changed for the better. We have seen more than a few cases in which police officers who had stepped across the line in dealing with Black people were brought to justice, sometimes many years after an incident. We have recently had to soberly look at the corruption in the Philadelphia Police Department that, uncovered, might result in hundreds of inmates being released from prison because of planted evidence. In New York, just a few years ago, we saw Francis X. Livoti found not guilty in a criminal trial for the wrongful death of Anthony Baez, whom he killed by using a chokehold that the NYPD had outlawed. We also saw Livoti investigated by the department, fired after the findings came in, and called an unapologetic disgrace to law enforcement by Howard Safir, the commissioner of police. Finally, Livoti was found guilty of trampling on Baez’s civil rights, and he now sits behind bars. In the Louima case, the fellow officers of Justin Volpe testified quite strongly against him; the accused then changed his plea and confessed to having sodomized Louima with a stick. Volpe was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Louima, as things go, will become some version of a millionaire when his suit against the City of New York is resolved. That’s a very hard way to make a buck, but, as we all know, in Haiti, where Louima is from, there would have been no case at all.
That is exactly why the alienation between the police and the community has a very serious genesis. I heard it put most eloquently when I was a member of the task force that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani appointed soon after the Louima case became front-page news in and out of New York. In a meeting at City Hall in which a cross section of Brooklyn’s Haitian community was invited to talk with and be questioned by Giuliani, Safir, and the task force, a noble and voluptuous woman in her forties said that whenever a police officer commits a brutal, justified act against a citizen, there is a very deep feeling of betrayal—betrayal by one who is supposed to be on your side, working to protect you from the anarchy of the criminal world.
That sense of betrayal, she said, does not deny the greater danger of criminals but brings with it a different kind of hurt, a disillusionment and a resentment. One might conclude that such incidents have created a predictable set of rhetorical flourishes in which, exaggeration being the demon that it always is, police are depicted as the central danger to life and limb in the black community. I don’t believe that. Something else is going on when we hear such distortions, since people actually know better, even those who you assume would take the conventional liberal position of totally condemning law enforcement. For instance, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, who is not a card-carrying but a billboard-carrying liberal, cosponsored in 1999 the Violent and Repeat Juvenile Offender Accountability and Rehabilitation Act (S254)1 because, over a two-year span, more than three thousand Californians had lost their lives as a result of gang-related violence.
This statistic reflects a situation we can only look at in horror. Let me give you a historical comparison. Between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the turn of the century in 1900, there were three thousand lynchings, the highest number in the history of the country. This period witnessed the most sustained brutality experienced by Negroes outside of slavery (an institution, by the way, that would not have countenanced the killing of what were considered three thousand rather valuable work animals; more often than not, other measures would have been taken). So, in sunny California, the activities of Black and Mexican gangs resulted in more people’s being murdered over a two-year period in this state alone than were lynched over a thirty-year period in the entire country.
How do these kinds of body counts compare with the numbers of so-called minority citizens who meet their ends through police homicides? Well, on the average, in even the largest cities, police homicides average between fifteen and thirty people annually. This is fifteen to thirty people too many, but ten to twenty times fewer than the number of civilians murdered by those who do not wear badges.
Does this mean that, when the cops go across the line, we should just look at some statistics and forget about it? Not at all. What it means is that we need new angles of discussion; and we have to face the fact that antipathy between the community and the police works to the advantage of criminals with and without badges. A gang-banger or a dope dealer or a rapist or any other kind of criminal enjoys much better odds against being removed from the streets when the people and the police distrust or dislike each other. This is equally true of the rogue cop, who is clearly no more than another kind of criminal. The community bad guy and the bad guy in law enforcement can both count on that alienation working in their favor, since the community will not cooperate with the police, and the other cops, feeling that the community hates them anyway, will neither take the actions certain situations call for nor speak up when they see one of their own do something disgraceful. So the worst among both groups are liberated.
The problem continues because those who claim to speak for the community do not at all give an accurate report of community attitudes. When I was on the post-Louima task force appointed by Mayor Giuliani to examine police-community relations, I was confronted by the same attitudes that I had encountered talking with Negroes in high-crime communities across this country for the last twenty-five years. A common complaint made by the community residents was that their male children suffer greater risk of being harmed by the police than by anyone else. They say that when their sons leave home, they hope and pray that the young men will not be shot dead by police officers. When one moves the questions up into the arena of specificity, they admit that far, far more kids have been killed by other kids than by the police and that their largest fear is actually that their children, male and female, might become gunshot victims of gang violence, intentionally or accidentally. The next point they make is that they want the bad cops removed from their communities as soon as possible—yesterday, in fact, if anyone could bring that off. Then, given the ways in which their lives are oppressed by crime and violence within their communities, they go on to say that they want more police. Right: more police.
Is this because Negroes are confused? Not exactly. What happens in our society is that many of us repeat what we have heard over and over, even if it doesn’t actually apply to us. Pavlovian recitations. Yet few of us are so removed from our own realities that we cannot be reminded of what we actually think and feel and have experienced. For instance, no one hates violent Black youth criminals more than Black youth, because these knuckleheads are the people who might attack or kill a kid for something as trivial as “eye fornication”—looking at them in a way that they don’t like. These are the people who bring unrest to school campuses and who, as reported by my daughter, who was at a 1994 party in Los Angeles, angrily went out to their car, removed their pistols, and shot through the windows because they weren’t invited and weren’t allowed in to the event. Such violence, I maintain, has created learning difficulties among some of the Black kids in Chicago whose defensive brains now retain only as much as necessary because of the great hurt experienced through the trauma of witnessing someone wounded or killed by a firearm. The stories go on. That is why no one hates these people more than do other young people from the same backgrounds. What all of those young people know is that the overwhelming majority of them don’t brutalize or murder other people, which is why they don’t buy all of the sociological mumbo jumbo. If more than 90 percent of us can come through this and not sink down into this kind of buck wild behavior, they could, too—IF they wanted to act right. That is the attitude one encounters from coast to coast, and it is quite reasonable. In short, barbaric behavior is the result of more than poverty or the problems that can arrive as a result of skin color.
But let us look at how things actually occur when young Black men are stopped and searched by the police. From the perspective of the cop, the idea is that if a kid who looks as if he’s carrying an illegal gun is stopped, searched, and arrested because the kid is armed, the case might be thrown out of court on the basis of insufficient probable cause. But it is justified by the fact that one more potential murder weapon will be off the streets. Shouting about such harassment by those who purport to hold the freedoms of our system quite high are not to be ignored. That is why the cops know they will be lectured in court for stopping those guys and hope that, on a good day, both the kid and the next gun he has might be removed from circulation. They don’t assume that any circumstances other than the martial law attending a riot will make it acceptable for them to stop young guys on the basis of “a gut feeling.” They see this as an expedient way to address a problem that has everyone climbing the walls, especially those who are usually the receiving ends of the bullets, so-called minorities themselves. In short, this is a nonviolent way of handling violent people.
What community people think about this tactic is fairly consistent. You hear the same thing over and over. As one example, a cab driver in East New York—one of the most crime-plagued areas of the city before the cops clamped down—told me that he was glad the cops were putting so much pressure on the kids out in the street. He no longer heard gunfire all night and had overheard a number of them say that they had stopped carrying their pistols into the streets for fear of an automatic year in jail if the issue of probable cause worked against them. Were the police to pull him over and search him from out of the blue, his tune might change, or it might not.
Another element of law enforcement that Black, brown, and yellow people have known for some time is that the most dangerous cop is one of their own on a bad night. It doesn’t seem to matter what the racial composition is, either. It used to be that there was surely no rougher police officer than the Black one coupled with a White partner. This guy could go out of his way to prove that he wasn’t showing any favoritism, which amounted to treating a Negro worse than he might be treated by a Day-Glo redneck. Two Black cops working together usually had no patience whatsoever for any line of jive and were known for whipping heads when they didn’t like what they heard or were suspicious of what they saw. Although there are now organizations for cops who are not White, those kinds of encounters, like those between White cops and Black people, have in general not gone away, simply because those ethnic groups have complaints about the racial nature of behavior in the departments across the nation.
What is needed now, as much as it ever has been needed, is a strong alliance between the civilians and the police. In New York, at the Police Academy, one can attend classes and watch all the role-playing cops who now recognize they must learn how to deal with many different cultural attitudes in order to keep things from boiling over into chaos or physical force. Cops of different ethnic backgrounds conduct classes and help these trainees come to understand that loud talk doesn’t always mean the approach of violence and that one has to develop ways of speaking to people that lower the intensity and defuse prickly situations. The same is true in firearms tactics, which is taken very seriously. The types of drills rookies are taken through demand solid thinking on one’s feet. None of these things, however, will eliminate the arrival of the bad cop any more than genius IQs and affluence prevented Leopold and Loeb from murdering their cousin.
But if police departments make community relations a central function of each precinct house, allowing precinct commanders to have highly visible feelers in the community who go about the job of discerning how each neighborhood works and developing relationships of respect and trust with community leaders, we might finally see a reduction of the double alienation that works against the quality of civilization. It is imperative that we have police. It is imperative that the people the police are hired to serve and protect become so confident in law enforcement that they fully cooperate with those who have what is possibly the most demanding, noblest occupation. Full cooperation is surely something like a golden dream, but so, after all, is the idea of justice. We must persist in attempting to get closer to that dream, which is the ultimate identity of our democracy.
NOTES
1. New York Times, May 21, 1999, sec. A, p. 1.