The Crisis of Police Brutality and Misconduct in America
The Causes and the Cure
The police killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed twenty-two-year-old street vendor from Guinea, West Africa, by officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD) on February 4, 1999, was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The forty-one shots fired at Diallo, nineteen of which hit his body, reverberated around this country, Africa, and the world, a telling sign that something was terribly wrong in American society in terms of police-community relations. The killing of Diallo provoked such a firestorm of reaction because his death was the tip of the iceberg of police brutality and misconduct in this society. The acquittal of the four officers who killed Diallo does not mitigate the outrage in communities of color. America is in the throes of yet another epidemic of police violence and abuse—an epidemic that is generating outrage all across the country, particularly in Black communities and communities of color. In my capacity as executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), virtually every conversation I have with people about the most critical issues facing their communities includes police brutality. It is once again a major problem in communities of color in this country.
The growing crisis of police brutality and misconduct first came to our attention at CCR in 1996. During regular monthly meetings with representatives of community-based organizations through CCR’s Movement Support Resource Center, the issue of police brutality began to dominate the discussions. Whether the scheduled topic was workfare, environmental justice, or poorly performing schools, police brutality would find its way into the conversation, particularly if young African Americans and Latinos were participating in it. At the request of participants of the MSRC, we decided to convene a series of special meetings dealing exclusively with the issue of police brutality and misconduct.
At the first meeting, the conference room was packed with people, the overflow spilling out into the hallway. What unfolded was a picture of young people relentlessly harassed through random stops and frisks and massive sweeps of Black and Latino neighborhoods in New York. Worse still, people complained of an increasing incidence of police beatings and use of deadly force. During one of these special sessions, we heard an urgent appeal for help from a group that was then called Mothers against Police Brutality (later renamed Parents against Police Brutality). It was at this meeting that I first met Iris Baez, whose son Anthony Baez was killed by an officer administering a chokehold, and Margarita Rosario, whose son Anthony Rosario and nephew Hilton Vega were both killed execution style by officers of the NYPD as they lay face down on the floor. Mrs. Baez and Mrs. Rosario would emerge as key leaders in the struggle against police brutality in New York.
These special meetings led to a call for CCR to convene a national conference to bring activists and lawyers together to assess the extent of the problem of police brutality nationally and to explore strategies for police reform and accountability. The sentiment was that the conference should be held in New York, which many activists believe to be the police brutality capital of America. Among the New York/New Jersey–based organizations that agreed to assist with the local and national mobilization for the conference were the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, the Committee against Anti-Asian Violence, the Black Panther Collective, the December 12 Movement, Black Cops against Police Brutality, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, Refuse and Resist, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. In terms of the national mobilization, CCR reached out to Amnesty International, the National Black Police Association, the National Coalition for Police Accountability, the National Lawyers Guild, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, Concerned Citizens against Police Abuse in Syracuse, United Concerned Christians at Work in Pittsburgh, and the Coalition against Police Abuse in Los Angeles.
On April 25–27, 1997, more than seven hundred people from fifty-two cities and sixteen states gathered at Hunter College for the National Emergency Conference on Police Brutality and Misconduct. The testimony at this crucial conference validated what civil and human rights activists suspected. What could only be described as police terror was on the rise around the country. One of its most frightening manifestations was a dramatic increase in police killings of African American, Latino, and Asian American youth, mostly men. From virtually every community represented at the conference came stories of controversial cases of police killings that had sparked local protests. The tragic list of police killings spanned every region of the country:
• In Pittsburgh, Jonny Gammage, a cousin of the Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman Ray Seals, was asphyxiated by police in 1995 after they stopped him in his late-model Jaguar in a predominantly White suburb of the city. The officers involved claimed that Gammage, who was unarmed and had no prior police record, was acting suspiciously.1
• Archie Elliot, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was killed in 1993 in Prince Georges County, Maryland. He was shot fourteen times by two police officers while his hands were handcuffed behind his back as he sat in the front seat of a police cruiser. The officers said that Elliot was able to get his hands on a gun and was threatening them.2
• Rudy Buchanan, a twenty-two-year-old Latino man, was killed in a housing project in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1995. Buchanan was fatally wounded when thirteen officers fired a fusillade of eighty-nine shots at him.3
• Malice Green, a Black man, was killed in Detroit in 1992 by two White police officers who kicked and punched him after he allegedly refused to comply with their orders. Other officers at the scene failed to stop the beating. Green suffered a seizure and died on the way to the hospital.4
• Kim Groves, a Black woman, was executed in 1994 in New Orleans by Officer Len Davis, a Black man, who learned that Groves had filed a police abuse complaint against him.5
• Esequiel Hernandez Jr., a Latino man, was killed in 1997 in Redford, Texas, by four U.S. Marines on drug patrol. This case triggered a national debate about the role of the military in civilian policing.6
• Ivory McQueen, a forty-three-year-old Black woman with a history of mental problems, was killed when she was shot multiple times by sheriff’s deputies in Cumberland County, North Carolina, because she was holding a kitchen knife.7
But it was New York City that surfaced as the epicenter of the crisis, with scores of cases of police beatings and killings in the last decade. The case of the torture and sodomizing of Abner Louima, an emigrant from Haiti, in 1997, focused the national spotlight on New York, two years before the police shooting of Amadou Diallo. It was in New York that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, assigned himself the task of innovating a strategy for crime reduction that he hoped would be emulated nationally. The essence of his approach is to promote “aggressive policing,” targeting “high crime” neighborhoods in Black and Latino communities. These neighborhoods are subjected to extensive random stops and frisks and massive dragnet-type sweeps, ostensibly to get guns off the streets and to capture drug dealers and petty criminals.
According to data published in the New York Times on February 15, 1999, the NYPD’s infamous Street Crime Unit (it was officers from this unit who killed Amadou Diallo) conducted some 45,084 reported stops and frisks in 1997 and 1998 in search of guns. (It is important to note that these are reported stops. Officials of the NYPD admit that only 1 in 3 or 1 in 5 or even 1 in 10 stops are ever recorded. Using the most conservative estimate of 1 in 3, this would mean that nearly 150,000 people were actually stopped by the NYPD from 1997 to 1998.) Of the 45,084 reported stops, 9,546 people were arrested. Of those arrested, some 5,000 cases were dismissed. About 40,000 innocent people were stopped solely on the basis of the fact that they either lived in a “high crime” neighborhood or fit the “profile” of a “probable suspect.”
A random survey conducted by the New York Daily News on March 26, 1999, in selected Black and Latino neighborhoods found that out of one hundred people interviewed, eighty-eight had been stopped and frisked by the NYPD. On March 8, 1999, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal civil rights class action lawsuit against the NYPD, seeking to shut the Street Crime Unit down. The suit argued that the practices of this unit violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure and the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because of the use of racial profiling.
In addition to stops and frisks and massive sweeps, Giuliani launched a campaign of “zero tolerance” of “quality of life” crimes. These included consuming alcohol in public, being a squeegee person (offering to clean car windshields for money), aggressive panhandling, and jaywalking. The theory behind the zero tolerance campaign is that petty infractions of the law eventually lead people to commit more serious crimes, hence the need for stringent enforcement of laws dealing with any and all violations, no matter how petty. Under the Giuliani administration, the NYPD has come to encapsulate much of what is wrong with policing in America today in the minds of advocates for police reform—crime reduction strategies that trample on the constitutional rights of people of color and the poor and give police officers the green light to brutalize and even kill “suspects” with impunity.
In discussing the crisis of police brutality in America today, I have deliberately referred to “the most recent wave” of police brutality and misconduct. It is no secret that police brutality has been a persistent problem for Black people and other people of color in this country. Those of us who grew up in inner-city ghettos developed a fear, suspicion, and distrust of the cops because all too often they behaved like a corrupt, occupying army, terrorizing and exploiting our community.
Because of the “we against them” fraternity mentality and the “blue wall of silence” within police departments, it has always been difficult to prove police brutality cases. Police officers often refuse to come forward to expose brutal and corrupt fellow officers. Police departments seldom vigorously investigate allegations of police misconduct. Police officers are also invested with a special dispensation of trust, which affords them the benefit of the doubt in court proceedings. When a police officer arrests a person or testifies in court, there is an automatic assumption that he or she is telling the truth. Although police brutality has always been a fact of life for people of color, we have often felt powerless to do anything about it.
Race and class distinctions also contribute to the problem. Much of White America has an entirely different experience with and perception of the police. Cops do not behave like an occupying army in middle- and upper-class White communities. The view of the police is radically different in these communities. If the Rodney King police beating had not been captured live on videotape, most White Americans would never have believed that the police were capable of such violent and deplorable conduct. Even so, the officers were acquitted of criminal charges. As happened in the case of the Rodney King police beating, Black people and other people of color have periodically risen up in rebellion against persistent patterns of police brutality and misconduct. Indeed, the 1968 Kerner Commission Report, which examined the causes of urban rebellion in the 1960s, concluded that with few exceptions these insurrections were triggered by acts of police brutality. The angry reaction across the nation to both the death of Amadou Diallo and the acquittal of the four police officers who killed him clearly suggests that attitudes in the Black community and other communities of color have reached the boiling point again in terms of the tolerance level for police brutality. This is the cumulative effect of years of escalating abuse at the hands of policing authorities.
The crisis of police brutality and misconduct that is making headlines throughout the country is the bitter harvest of nearly two decades of misguided public policies. As the conservative backlash and counteroffensive against the gains of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s deepened, right-wing politicians mounted a furious campaign demanding the implementation of one-sided, punitive policies ostensibly aimed at combating crime and lifting the burden of government off the backs of the middle class. Cleverly utilizing code words and negative images cultivated by mass media, the “burden of government” and “crime” increasingly became associated with Black people and other people of color in the consciousness of much of White America. The consensus on the goals of the Civil Rights movement forged by a “coalition of conscience” involving Blacks, Jews, labor and liberal Whites was shattered. In addition, the national concern for the plight of the poor that was the foundation for the War on Poverty, Model Cities, and other social programs gave way to “empathy fatigue” in the face of the conservative tide that swept the nation. This tide was fueled by latent and overt racism, which the right wing successfully tapped to attack programs that were effective in meeting the needs not only of people of color but also of poor and working-class people in general. Racism was used as a wedge to divide and exploit.
As the conservative tide gained momentum, the social safety network, which provided basic relief for poor people in this country, was shredded. Programs for the hungry and homeless were dismantled as attitudes toward the poor became less tolerant. Indeed, blaming the victim gained new currency as a twentieth-century form of Social Darwinism became popular in conservative circles. The American people were told that, to the degree that poverty was still a problem in this country, it was because poor people either chose to languish in poverty or suffered from cultural or ethnic defects that make them incapable of breaking the “cycle of poverty.” Similar arguments were propagated to fuel the assault on affirmative action and other civil rights programs. Racism against Blacks was declared a problem of the past. According to conservative propagandists, the real problem was “Black racism” and “reverse discrimination,” which was encroaching on the rights of decent, hardworking Whites—taxpayers whose tax dollars were paying for ill-conceived civil rights initiatives and social programs that benefit people of color to the detriment of White people.
Finally, conservatives told the American people that the same groups that were benefiting from unnecessary social programs and civil rights initiatives were disproportionately inclined toward violence and crime, hence the increase in crime and lawlessness in urban ghettos. Crime and lawlessness came to be perceived as a threat to “our cherished American way of life.” Who can forget the sinister Willie Horton commercials used by George Bush during the 1988 presidential campaign. The image of a dark and dangerous Black male parolee, who betrayed the public trust by failing to return from a forty-eight-hour furlough and subsequently beating and raping a White woman, reinforced the deepest stereotypes and played to the basest fears of White America about Black people in general and Black men in particular. Indeed, the symbol of Willie Horton became a metaphor for the demonization of Black men in the media and society at large. In the law enforcement community, virtually every Black man became a “suspect”—a potential “menace to society” who could legitimately be stopped and frisked, harassed, intimidated, and brutalized, if necessary, in the interest of maintaining public safety.
Simultaneously, it became expedient for aspiring politicians to exploit the law-and-order, get-tough-on-crime issue as a tactic for gaining or retaining public office. Serious analysis and deliberations about the root causes of crime became a casualty of political demagoguery. Shallow and self-serving analysis was followed by shallow and self-serving prescriptions for solving the “problem”: the addition of hundreds of thousands of new police officers across the country, tougher sentencing, the federalization of more crimes requiring the death penalty, and the construction of more prisons. The police were unleashed against our communities, and people of color, particularly Black and Latino young men, became chattels and commodities for one of the fastest-growing sectors of the American economy, the prison-industrial complex.
In that regard, the “war on drugs,” perhaps more than any other single factor, has contributed to the current wave of police brutality and misconduct. As one commentator put it, “The War on Drugs is a war on us.”
When the highly addictive and relatively inexpensive drug crack cocaine burst onto the market in the 1980s, it set off an alarm bell in the law enforcement community at all levels. No one can deny that many impoverished inner-city communities were racked by dramatic increases in crime, violence, and fratricide as drug dealers, large and small, and rival gangs battled for control over the illicit drug economy. It is important to note that the rise in crack cocaine trafficking in inner-city communities coincided with the calculated deemphasis on urban policy and the systematic gutting of social and economic support programs designed to ameliorate the plight of poor people, a disproportionate number of whom are people of color.
This shift in public policy was directly related to the pronounced drift to the right of both political parties in response to the conservative tide sweeping the country. As a consequence, the interests and aspirations of inner-city communities, which are heavily populated by people of color, were sacrificed as politicians curried favor with outer-city and suburban voters, most of whom are White. Rather than advocating investment in inner-city communities to alleviate poverty, unemployment, and underemployment, public officials deemed it far more popular politically to propound get-tough-on-crime strategies that called for major increases in allocations for police and prisons.
As Timothy Egan observed in an article in the New York Times (February 15, 1998), “In the 1980s crack cocaine scared the country, and the criminal justice system has never been the same.” The “scare” produced dramatic changes in policing strategies, sentencing policy in the courts, and the growth of prisons and jails. When I testified at a national summit on police-community relations convened by Attorney General Janet Reno in June 1999, I pointed out that what distinguishes the current epidemic of police brutality and misconduct from previous crises is racial profiling and the militarization of the police. The war on drugs is in large measure predicated on the presumption that stopping drug trafficking in communities of color is the key to “victory.”
The adoption of the “war” paradigm of policing has led to the creation of paramilitary special units like narcotics squads, the Street Crime Unit in New York, and heavily armed SWAT teams. These units employ quasi-military tactics, such as the targeting of “suspect” populations and the “pacification” of high-crime areas through the cordoning off of neighborhoods and the use of massive dragnet-type sweeps. Commenting on the trend toward the militarization of the police, in an article entitled “SWAT Nation” in the May 31, 1999, issue of The Nation magazine, Christian Parenti wrote, “Throughout the nation, paramilitary, SWAT or tactical policing—that is, law enforcement that uses the equipment, training, rhetoric and group tactics of war—is on the rise.” Parenti cited a study by the sociologist Peter Kraska indicating that “the nation has more than 30,000 such heavily armed, militarily trained police units.”
The deployment of these paramilitary units in communities of color in cities and locales across the country, and the targeting of their residents, with an emphasis on Black and Latino youth, is a key source of tension and conflict with the police. Racial profiling is an integral component of the war on drugs. The notorious practice of racially based traffic stops or “driving while black” (DWB), is part of a racist drug interdiction strategy widely utilized by policing authorities across the country. The practice of racial profiling in traffic stops and the targeting of people of color communities have also transformed the complexion of the prison population in the United States. Timothy Egan further observed that “more whites than blacks use crack, according to surveys, but as the war on drugs focused on poor city neighborhoods, blacks went to prison at a far higher rate.” The war on drugs is a war on us.
The problem of police brutality must be understood in a larger social, economic, and political context. As Jerome Miller, president of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, asserted in an article on increasing rates of Black imprisonment, in the February 28, 1999, issue of the Boston Globe, “Over the past 20 years there has been a terrible propensity on the part of politicians to deal with difficult economic, social, family, and personal problems with a meat axe approach to the criminal justice system.” The policy of more police and prisons has been used as a substitute for policies that promote social, economic, and racial justice for people of color. This formula of ill-conceived public policy and policing practices has produced a highly combustible situation in communities of color throughout the nation.
Frederick Douglass once declared, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. And these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those who they oppress.”8 After almost two decades of largely tolerating the intolerable in terms of blatant neglect and escalating police abuse, the police shooting of Amadou Diallo galvanized Black America and people of conscience and good will to cry out, “Enough is Enough!”
It is not that there was no outrage and protest in the country prior to the death of Diallo. As we discovered at the National Emergency Conference on Police Brutality and Misconduct, numerous organizations had been engaged in protest demonstrations and lobbying local officials for change around the country. In Pittsburgh, the police killing of Jonny Gammage provoked a protracted struggle for justice. In November 1996, thousands of Black high school students staged a massive walkout, marched to the heart of downtown, and called for a boycott of the city by tourists and conventiongoers. In St. Petersburg, Florida, the Black community erupted in rebellion in response to the 1996 killing of eighteen-year-old TyRon Lewis, who police claimed lunged at them with his car when they directed him to stop. In San Francisco in 1997, Bay Area Police Watch led a series of rallies and marches at City Hall, demanding police reform in response to a rash of incidents of police brutality and police killings. On October 22, 1996, a broad-based coalition staged demonstrations across the country and launched the Stolen Lives Project, which produced a book that documents police killings nationwide since 1990.
In New York City, the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights, working in concert with a coalition of police reform advocates, was at the forefront of fighting for justice in the Anthony Baez case; it also organized family members of victims of police brutality to fight for police reform. The December 12 Movement continued to agitate around the case of Aswan Watson, an unarmed Black youth who was shot twenty-four times by three White officers in Brooklyn. The National Action Network, under the leadership of the Reverend Al Sharpton, took up the cause of Kevin Cedeno, a sixteen-year-old Black youth who was shot and killed in 1997 by a police officer who claimed that Cedeno lunged at him with a machete (the medical examiner’s report indicated that Cedeno was shot in the back).9 The officer responsible for the shooting, Anthony Pellegrini, was not indicted.10 And there was the mass mobilization around the case of Abner Louima, the highlight of which occurred when more than ten thousand people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to One Police Plaza, the headquarters of the NYPD, in August of 1997.
The slaughter of Amadou Diallo, however, became the defining moment, a critical turning point in the struggle against police brutality and misconduct in New York and the nation. On February 25, 1999, Hugh Price, president and CEO of the National Urban League, convened an extraordinary press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Leaders from across the spectrum of the civil and human rights community were in attendance, among them the Reverend Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, Kwesi Mfume, president and CEO of the NAACP, Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Raul Yzaguirre, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, Karen Naragaski, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Congressman John Conyers Jr., ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, Ed Lewis, publisher of Essence magazine, and the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, president of the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition, to mention a few.
Against the backdrop of growing outrage over the murder of Diallo, Hugh Price was intent on using the press conference to appeal directly to President Clinton to speak out boldly and forcefully on the issue of police brutality and misconduct. Speaker after speaker rose to underscore Price’s appeal to the president. As executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, I used the occasion to call for a National Emergency March for Justice on April 3, 1999, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Weekend, in Washington, D.C. The call rang out across the nation, and people began to spontaneously organize to march on Washington.
In the corridor after the press conference, the Reverend Sharpton asked my opinion whether it was better to hold a massive rally to protest the death of Amadou Diallo at City Hall in New York or on Wall Street. Apparently, the Reverend Jackson was advising that City Hall was the better venue. The Reverend Sharpton was inclined toward a protest on Wall Street. For whatever it was worth, I agreed with the Reverend Sharpton, arguing that a massive demonstration on Wall Street, the capital of U.S. and world capitalism, would send a clear message to America’s corporate and commercial elite that business as usual as it relates to police brutality would no longer be tolerated. The Reverend Sharpton also indicated that he was leaning toward engaging in civil disobedience by conducting a sit-down demonstration in the middle of Wall Street to block traffic and dramatize the demand for justice in the Diallo case. I told the Reverend Sharpton that if he decided to engage in civil disobedience, I would join him.
If New York City emerged as the epicenter of police brutality under the mean-spirited reign of Mayor Giuliani, it also became the eye of the storm of national protest that exploded across the country in the wake of the death of Amadou Diallo. On March 3, the Reverend Sharpton did indeed mobilize hundreds of people for a demonstration on Wall Street. At the appointed time, a select group of eleven people, including the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, a veteran of the anti–police brutality crusades of the 1970s and 1980s, Charles Barron of the Unity Party, a key activist in the Free South Africa Movement, and Wyatt Tee Walker, pastor of the Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem and former chief of staff for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., locked arms with the Reverend Sharpton, walked to the center of Wall Street, and kneeled down for prayer. The police moved in and arrested the group for disorderly conduct and took us off to jail. The stage was set for a historic civil disobedience campaign in New York.
In the weeks and days leading up to the Wall Street action and thereafter, numerous coalitions of organizations, as well as women’s and youth groups, staged large demonstrations at City Hall. At a meeting called by the Reverend Sharpton and hosted by the Reverend Daughtry at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, the discussion turned to how to maintain the momentum of the movement following the success of the Wall Street demonstration and the other rallies and demonstrations that had occurred. Charles Barron and the Reverend Daughtry proposed that the leaders assembled launch a civil disobedience campaign modeled after the Free South Africa Movement with daily demonstrations and arrests at One Police Plaza in lower Manhattan, the headquarters of the NYPD.
I expressed skepticism that enough people could be mobilized to sustain the arrests on a daily basis. I suggested that, perhaps, a demonstration a week would be more likely to be sustained. The consensus was that to have maximum impact daily demonstrations and arrests were necessary, even if only a few people were arrested each day. Various pastors of churches and leaders of organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, pledged to mobilize their constituencies to take a day at One Police Plaza. On March 9, the Reverend Sharpton, along with Charles Barron and the Reverend Daughtry, led the first group of protesters to One Police Plaza. With a multitude of local, regional, and national press on the scene, the group staged a sit-down demonstration blocking the entrance to the headquarters of the NYPD. They were arrested and taken to jail. The civil disobedience campaign was on. In the heart of winter, New York City was on fire and the nation and the world were watching.
On April 3, some five thousand people from across the nation gathered in Washington, D.C., for the National Emergency March for Justice/Against Police Brutality, the largest march there against police brutality in recent history. The march was endorsed by nearly a hundred local, regional, and national civil and human rights organizations and police reform advocacy groups, including the NAACP, the National Urban League, the National Action Network, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Council of Churches National Ministries Unit, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Lawyers Guild, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. The Reverend Al Sharpton, who traveled to the march with members of the Diallo family, Kwesi Mfume, Jaribu Hill, Ron Hampton, Liz Ou Yang, Walter Fauntroy, Jane Bai, Richie Perez, Will Harrell, Gabriel Torres, Mark Thompson, Joe Madison, Dick Gregory, Efia Mwangaza, Meghan Ortiz, and Martin Luther King III were among the leaders who addressed the rally.
At the center and in the lead of the march, however, were scores of family members of victims of police brutality who journeyed to Washington, D.C., from as far away as Arizona and California to tell their stories. There was massive press coverage of the march and rally, and the event was recorded and broadcast on C-SPAN. In addition to providing a voice for family members and victims of police brutality, the march was intended to demand action by the federal government to combat the scourge of police brutality and misconduct. The demands reflected a growing agreement among civil and human rights organizations and community-based police reform organizations around the nation about some basic steps that various branches of the federal government should take to achieve police reform and accountability. The following demands were articulated at the National Emergency March:
We demand immediate action from the President, Attorney General and Congress of the United States:
1. President Clinton should immediately speak out on this issue and empower a national commission to investigate the epidemic of police brutality and misconduct which is afflicting communities of color and poor communities across the nation.
2. Attorney General Janet Reno, under the provisions of the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994, should issue a directive to the Justice Department to intensify pattern and practices investigations in communities with a high incidence of complaints of police brutality. In addition, we call on the Attorney General to press for the expedited investigation of ongoing civil rights cases and to hear appeals for the re-opening of cases which may not have received appropriate priority.
3. The House Judiciary Committee should immediately convene formal hearings to take testimony on the scope and breadth of police brutality and misconduct and formulate recommendations for legislation accordingly.
4. The Congress of the United States should:
a. Pass legislation to provide funds for the Justice Department to systematically collect data on police brutality as mandated by the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994.
b. Enact legislation that would provide for independent federal prosecutors to investigate allegations of police misconduct where the use of illegal choke holds or deadly force results in the injury or death of the victim—The Jonny Gammage Law.11
Coupled with the massive civil disobedience campaign in New York, the National Emergency March helped propel the issue of brutality to the center of national focus and deliberations. Rose Ochi, the director of the Community Relations Division of the Department of Justice, attended the march as an observer. Other high-level officials of the Justice Department monitored the news coverage and watched the proceedings on C-SPAN. The moving testimonies of family member after family member telling the stories of the tragic loss of their loved ones made a powerful impression.
In the aftermath of the National Emergency March, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, under the leadership of Martin Luther King III, moved to hold community-based hearings on police brutality in several cities across the country. Activists from around the nation joined in the demonstrations in Riverside, California, protesting the death of Tyisha Miller, a young Black woman who was shot twelve times by four police officers as she sat in her car at a gas station. On April 15, twelve days after the National Emergency March, a coalition of labor, religious, civic, and political leaders, spearheaded by former Mayor David Dinkins, Dennis Rivera, president of the Health and Hospital Workers Union, and the Reverend Al Sharpton, led a march of upwards of twenty thousand people across the Brooklyn Bridge in support of a ten-point agenda for police reform and accountability in New York.
In the face of escalating movement around the issue of police brutality and misconduct across the nation, the federal government began to act. In response to the February press conference convened by Hugh Price, President Clinton did, in fact, speak out on the issue of police brutality during one of his weekly radio broadcasts. The president directed Attorney General Janet Reno to begin a series of conversations about police brutality and police community relations with civil and human rights leaders, heads of community-based organizations, and officials in law enforcement. The Congressional Black Caucus held a hearing in Washington, D.C., and subsequently in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights also conducted a hearing in New York. In June 1999, Janet Reno convened a national summit on police-community relations where President Clinton addressed the group and issued an executive order banning the use of racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies. The president also participated in a roundtable discussion on police brutality and misconduct at the summit.
Within the Congress, Congressman José Serrano of New York, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, teamed up with Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde of Chicago, an unlikely ally, to introduce a bill calling for the creation of a national commission to study the issue of police brutality and misconduct. John Conyers, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill to ban traffic stops based on racial profiling. Congressman Conyers is also considering introducing a bill entitled the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act, which would empower the attorney general to withhold Justice Department funds from police departments that engage in racial profiling and other forms of police misconduct.
The Justice Department, which has been pursuing a pattern-and-practice investigation of the NYPD since the Louima incident, has finally indicated that its investigation reveals a pattern of lax discipline toward officers implicated in incidents of police abuse. The U.S. District Office is sending signals that it may take legal action against the city if Mayor Giuliani refuses to enter a consent degree to remedy the problems uncovered by the investigation. In the meantime, under pressure from various quarters, the mayor and police chief have begun to hint at modest reforms in policing practices of the NYPD. However, no one expects serious changes in the NYPD in the absence of sustained pressure in the streets, the courts, and the City Council.
Certainly, no issue in recent memory has so stirred the passion of Black people and other people of color as the epidemic of police brutality and misconduct. On May 26, 1999, a grand jury in New York indicted the four police officers who shot Amadou Diallo, charging them with second degree murder. Daily demonstrations at One Police Plaza lasted twenty days and resulted in the arrest of 1,166 people from various races, ethnicities, and religions. All agreed to be arrested because they believed changes in the attitudes and practices of the police were necessary to the preservation of a wholesome and civil society. Whether real change will come to New York and the nation on this issue remains to be seen. What is clear is that a few cosmetic changes will not be sufficient to address the long-standing problem of police abuse in people of color and poor communities.
The reaction of people across the country to the death of Amadou Diallo and other cases of police brutality and police killings should serve as a wake-up call, a warning to public officials and policymakers that unless real change is forthcoming, huge sections of the American populace will completely lose faith in the legitimacy of policing authorities. If America is truly to become one nation under the law, “with liberty and justice for all,” a new paradigm of policing must be developed. The government at all levels must be compelled to institute policies and practices that will restore faith and confidence in those who are entrusted with “protecting” our communities. What we need in this country is community-based, Constitution-compatible policing buttressed by public policies that promote social, economic, and racial justice.
Clearly, this suggests that the paramilitary “war” paradigm used by an increasing number of police departments in the United States must be eliminated. Racial profiling and the practice of conducting massive sweeps of inner-city communities that target, harass, and terrorize young people of color must end. There can be no room for the “us against them” psychology and the “blue wall of silence” within police departments that expect to command the respect of the community. The new paradigm of policing must be based on the principle that police are first and foremost servants of the people. Their job is to function at the behest of and in partnership with communities to carry out a special mandate to maintain peace and security consistent with the Constitution.
In accordance with this view, police officers must be educated and trained to see themselves as a vital part of the community, not outsiders under orders to “occupy” and “pacify” the community. Though ideally police officers should be required to reside in the jurisdictions they are responsible for policing, at a minimum units within the police force should be assigned to work within communities to become acquainted with the customs, cultures, and mannerisms of the people in particular neighborhoods. Police officers should be perceived as friends of the community, not its enemies. To achieve this goal, the composition of a police force should resemble the ethnic and cultural makeup of the communities where police are assigned to serve. In addition, it is essential that police officers receive antiracism and diversity training as an integral part of their education in police academies. Police officers must learn to conduct themselves with sensitivity and responsiveness in multiethnic and multicultural communities.
It is not enough, however, simply to train police to function differently in our communities as they pursue the mission of maintaining peace and security. The familiar slogan “No justice, no peace” is in reality a formula for crime reduction and the creation of wholesome and secure communities. Unless and until this nation makes a firm and irreversible commitment to ensure that all of the people who live in this society will enjoy access to the same social and economic rights—good jobs, quality education, housing, health care, clean environment—instability, violence, and crime will continue to be problems that no amount or method of policing can contain for long. As community-based organizations, civil and human rights organizations, and public-interest advocacy groups struggle against police brutality and misconduct, the fight to create a new paradigm of policing must necessarily be seen as a part of the broader struggle to create a more just and humane society. Therefore, the demand for police reform and accountability must necessarily be coupled with the demand for public policies that promote social, economic, and racial justice. Our goal must be nothing short of creating a just, humane, and peaceful society. If there is no justice, there will be no peace in these United States of America.
NOTES
1. National Lawyers Guild, October 22 Coalition, Anthony Baez Foundation, Stolen Lives: Killed by Law Enforcement, 2nd ed. (New York, 1999), 298.
2. Ibid., 195.
3. Ibid., 33.
4. Ibid., 207.
5. Allyson Collins, Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998), 254–55.
6. National Lawyers Guild, Stolen Lives, 314.
7. David A. Love and Gabriel Torres, Police Brutality and Racism in the United States: Race Convention Report to the United Nations (New York: Center for Constitutional Rights, 1998), 17–19.
8. A Chronology of Notable Events in the History of Africans in America and the Diaspora, 1600 BCE through 1980 (Kent, Ohio: Institute of African American Affairs, Kent State University, 1984), 123.
9. New York Times, May 28, 1997, Section B, p. 1.
10. Daily News (New York), June 1, 1997.
11. Document created by the National Emergency March Coalition, the Center for Constitutional Rights, et al., New York City, April 1999.