Nationwide protests were already well underway after a grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown a week prior in Ferguson, Missouri. This latest incident further cemented the perception, particularly amongst African Americans, that white police officers would face no consequences for killing unarmed black men under dubious circumstances.
Garner died after NYPD officers brought him to the ground for resisting arrest over the alleged crime of selling untaxed cigarettes. While the events surrounding the death of Brown were much murkier due to wildly conflicting eyewitness testimony, the case against Officer Pantaleo, the plainclothes officer who grabbed Garner around the neck, was presumably a slam-dunk, as the entire incident was caught on video.
Furthermore, an NYC medical examiner determined that Garner's death was a "homicide," due to "a heart attack resulting from the compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by the police," although his asthma, heart problems, and obesity were contributing factors. In other words, Garner was in poor health, but his death was still ultimately the result of Officer Pantaleo's actions. This apparently wasn't convincing enough for a majority of the 23 members of the Staten Island jury, however. Protests erupted immediately in NYC after the news broke, and Eric Garner's last words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying cry that reverberated across the nation.
Numerous law professors and legal commentators were also dismayed with the grand jury's decision. For example, Columbia law school professors Jeffrey Fagan and Bernard Harcourt argued that there was probable cause to indict for criminal homicide in this Fact Sheet:
"Although Officer Pantaleo was permitted by law to “reasonably” use “necessary force” to effectuate the arrest of Mr. Garner, once Mr. Garner was on the ground and subdued, and while he repeatedly stated that he could not breathe, the continued use of force was objectively unreasonable. The standard on justification for police officers in New York under NYPL §35.30 is an objective one. Reasonableness is to be determined from the perspective of a reasonable police officer on the scene. In this case, once the suspect was subdued and no longer resisting, the continued application of force may have become unreasonable. This would be a question for a petit jury at trial."Indeed, there was initially widespread agreement on both sides of the partisan divide that our justice system had royally fucked this one up. Conservative commentator Andrew McCarthy published a piece for the National Review Online, in which he, like the Columbia law school professors, questioned whether Officer Pantaleo's use of force was reasonably necessary:
"So let's assume Pantaleo did not use deadly force. That still leaves open the question at the heart of the matter: Was the force that he did use reasonable under the circumstances? This is why I think the debate over the chokehold is mainly an academic diversion. The salient issue is reasonableness. Even if we assume that a banned chokehold was not used, it is still entirely possible that the forcible tactics Pantaleo did employ were excessive. It is here that the grand jury's conclusion that there was no probable cause to indict is most vulnerable to attack. Again, we do not know all the evidence in the record so it is perilous to opine. But as the confrontation is depicted on the video, there is a good argument that Officer Pantaleo used more force than was reasonably necessary to effect the arrest, prevent flight, or prevent injury to himself or other officers."Alas, many of those sympathetic conservative commentators reverted back to their authoritarian, police-worshiping roots after Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a mentally ill man from Baltimore, decided to take a trip to New York to execute officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu on Dec. 20th. The attack was an apparent retaliation for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Prior to the ambush, Brinsley had posted "I'm putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours...let's take 2 of theirs," on his Instagram account, along with a "shootthepolice" hashtag, and hashtags featuring the names of Garner and Brown.
Suddenly, Fox News was tripping over itself to pin some of the blame for the officer's deaths on the protesters, as well as President Obama, Rev. Al Sharpton, and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. Remarkably, this was after the entire panel of the Special Report with Bret Baier expressed shock over the grand jury's decision to not proceed with criminal charges against Officer Pantaleo. Initial coverage of the protests was largely favorable, as the network explicitly described the participants as "peaceful." After the deaths of Officers Ramos and Liu, however, Fox News personalities sought to portray them in a more negative light by devoting heavy coverage to a small group of protesters that were taped chanting "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!" Unsurprisingly, the network deceptively spliced this footage in NYC with footage of Rev. Al Sharpton speaking to a crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., insinuating that the "dead cops" crowd was actually associated with the peacefully assembled Sharpton rally.
More consequential, though, was the reaction of the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, a union representing NYPD officers, and its leader, Patrick Lynch. Lynch was perhaps most explicit in blaming elected officials for the deaths of the officers when he stated that "there's blood on many hands tonight," and "that blood on the hands, starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor." Indeed, Mayor de Blasio has found himself the most prominent target throughout this fiasco. In addition to Lynch's remarks, some NYPD police officers turned their backs to him as he appeared at the hospital to pay his respects to the two slain officers, and when he spoke at their funerals. Fox News host Bill O'Reilly called for his resignation, stating that he "associated with provocateurs and he has disgraced the office of mayor of New York City." And former New York Gov. George Pataki criticized the mayor for "divisive anti-cop rhetoric" on Twitter.
What exactly did Mayor de Blasio say to earn himself the ire of such irredeemable shitheads? As far as I can tell, his greatest sins were to express sympathy for the family of Eric Garner, offer tepid support to peaceful protesters, and to share his concerns that his biracial son, Dante, could one day find himself the target of racial profiling by police officers:
"Chirlane [de Blasio's wife] and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face - good young man, law abiding young man, never would think to do anything wrong, and yet because of the history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face. We've had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with police officers who are there to protect him."This, apparently, was the "anti-cop" rhetoric his detractors were referring to. To my mind, however, de Blasio is doing nothing more than being a responsible parent, as the empirical evidence demonstrates that he is correct to worry for his son. A cornerstone of Mayor de Blasio's campaign was to put an end to the NYPD's controversial "stop-and-frisk" program, or the practice of stopping residents for "suspicious" behavior, asking them to step out of their vehicles, and frisking them. De Blasio's victory, in conjunction with a federal judge ruling it unconstitutional, has largely brought the practice to an end. Nevertheless, research conducted by the New York Civil Liberties Union exposed widespread racial disparities during the program's heyday:
"Young black and Latino men were the targets of a hugely disproportionate number of stops. Though they account for only 4.7 percent of the city's population, black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6 percent of stops in 2011. The number of stops of young black men exceeded the entire city population of young black men (168,126 as compared to 158,406). Ninety percent of young black and Latino men stopped were innocent."
***
"What one would not expect and what raises further concerns about racial bias in the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program is that blacks and Latinos were more likely to be frisked and, among those frisked, are far less likely to be found with a weapon. Of blacks and Latinos who were stopped, 57.5 percent were frisked, while 44.2 percent of whites who were stopped were frisked. Yet, a weapon was found in only 1.8 percent of blacks and Latinos frisked, as compared to a weapon being found in 3.8 percent of whites frisked. These figures strongly indicate that race is a factor in officer decisions to frisk a person.""Stop-and-frisk" wasn't just a minor inconvenience for those that were pulled over. Many times, officers resorted to the use of force:
"In some circumstances, officers are authorized to use physical force in conjunction with a stop. On the form officers complete in conjunction with stops, they are to indicate if force is used and, if it is, to check one of the following boxes: hands on suspect, suspect on ground, pointing firearm at suspect, handcuffing suspect, suspect against wall/car, drawing firearm, baton, pepper spray, and other. In 148,079 of recorded stops (21.6 percent) in 2011, at least one act of force was recorded. In many cases more than one act of force was used, with a total of 179,707 acts of force being used in those 148,079 stops."
***
Far more black and Latino New Yorkers had force used against them in 2011 than did whites (129,590 as compared to 9,765). This is not simply the result of more blacks and Latinos being stopped. Rather, NYPD data show that blacks and Latinos who are stopped are significantly more likely to have force used against them than are whites."
As the case of Eric Garner demonstrates, escalation to the use of force puts lives at risk. I'm under no impression that Daniel Pantaleo intended to kill Garner with his bare hands that day. Nevertheless, that's exactly what happened, specifically because he resorted to physical force. As such, Mayor de Blasio was correct to educate and warn his son about a police force that has a proven history of racially profiling minorities, and using physical force against them.
At the end of the day, he was simply being a good parent.
There's a broader point here. Mayor de Blasio spoke of "the history that still hangs over us" when he shared his concerns regarding his son. In the wake of the Brown and Garner grand jury decisions, the hashtag "BlackLivesMatter" became popular in social media. Some irked white people, including those on my Facebook feed, sought to change it to "AllLivesMatter," in an effort to move the discussion away from racism. There's nothing inherently wrong with recognizing that the targets of police brutality are not always people of color. But they frequently are. And it behooves us to recognize that some matters are explicitly about race; this is one of them.
As research conducted by the New York Civil Liberties Union suggests, our nation's largest police force demonstrably targets minorities for traffic stops. Of course, they're not the only ones. Voluminous empirical research leads us to the conclusion that the deck is stacked against minorities when it comes to the American justice system. African Americans are not wrong to think they are disproportionately shot and killed by police officers; a ProPublica research piece concludes that "young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts - 21 times greater, according to an analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings." The recent controversial shootings of John Crawford III and 12-year-old Tamir Rice seemingly reaffirm this gruesome statistic.
The "War on Drugs" is another realm in which minorities find themselves on the receiving end of a racist justice system. Per the New York Times, "black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data." This is an immensely important data point, as the "War on Drugs" is disproportionally driving up incarceration rates of African Americans, per the Drug Policy Alliance:
"Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, and are consistently documented by the U.S. government to use drugs at similar rates to people of other races. But black people comprise 30 percent of those arrested for drug law violations - and nearly 40 percent of those incarcerated in state or federal prison for drug law violations."
Since blacks and Latinos are as likely to be drug users as any other race in this country, but are significantly more likely to be arrested and incarcerated, it would appear that they are systematically targeted by police officers. As the New York Times piece above suggests, "police departments, partly driven by a desire to increase their drug arrest statistics, can concentrate on minority or poorer neighborhoods to meet numerical goals, focusing on low-level offenses that are easier, quicker and cheaper than investigating serious felony crimes." The high incarceration rates of minorities has taken a devastating toll on their communities, per The Atlantic:
"The quadrupling of the incarceration rate in America since 1970 has had devastating collateral consequences. Already economically-fragile communities sank into depths of poverty unknown for generations, simply because anyone with a criminal record is forever "marked" as dangerous and thus rendered all but permanently unemployable. Also, with blacks incarcerated at six times and Latinos at three times the rate of whites by 2010, millions of children living in communities of color have effectively been orphaned. Worse yet, these kids often experience high rates of post-traumatic shock from having witnessed the often-brutal arrests of their parents and having been suddenly ripped from them."The racial disparities don't end at the point of arrest; minorities are also statistically more likely to be convicted than whites for committing the same crimes because their lower status on the economic ladder puts them at a disadvantage in a justice system in which money matters. According to the Sentencing Project (an advocacy group for reform in the American prison system):
"The crippled state of indigent defense in the United States disproportionately affects racial minorities because black and Hispanic defendants are far more likely to need the services of a public defender than their white counterparts. The median income for black and Hispanic Americans is roughly $20,000 less than the median income for white Americans. The poverty rate is roughly 25% for both black and Hispanic Americans, compared to 9% for white Americans. In the criminal justice context, such statistics mean that black and Hispanic defendants are often more likely than white defendants to rely on an indigent defense system of overworked, underpaid attorneys - therefore increasing their chances of being convicted."This is typically the point in the conversation where someone postulates that blacks wouldn't be incarcerated at such high rates if they didn't commit so many crimes. This is missing the point, of course; blacks are, as I've demonstrated above, unfairly targeted in the "War on Drugs" and statistically more likely to be convicted than whites for committing the same crimes. These empirical facts alone are enough to make the case that implicit racial biases are baked within our American justice system.
Furthermore, it's often overlooked that most crime, particularly violent crime, is intraracial. For example, a 2013 FBI Uniform Crime Report indicated that 83% of white homicide victims were killed by white offenders, while 90% of black victims were killed by black offenders. Although a 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that blacks were more likely to commit homicide than whites (34.4 blacks per 100,000 vs. 4.5 whites per 100,000), they were, by extension of most violent crime being intraracial, more likely to be homicide victims than whites (27.8 blacks per 100,000 vs. 4.5 whites per 100,000). This imbalance in crime offender rates is, once again, the result of economic discrepancies, according to the Sentencing Project:
"One contributing factor to the disparity in arrest rates is that racial minorities commit certain crimes at higher rates. Specifically, data suggests that black Americans - particularly males - tend to commit violent and property crimes at higher rates than other racial groups. Other studies, however, demonstrate that higher crime rates are better explained by socioeconomic factors than race: extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods experience higher rates of crime regardless of racial composition. Because African Americans constitute a disproportionate share of those living in poverty in the United States, they are more likely to reside in low-income communities in which socioeconomic factors contribute to higher crime rates. As such, Ohio State University researchers Lauren Krivo and Ruth Peterson found that "it is these differences in disadvantage that explain the overwhelming portion of the difference in crime, especially violent crime, between white and African American communities.""This segues into another realm in which the deck is stacked against minorities: inequality of economic opportunity. I don't feel the need to delve too deeply into the lengthy history of systematic racism within the United States. Most Americans get a cursory history lesson on slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the Civil Rights movement in school. For the members of my generation, these are abstract concepts. We read about such things, and wonder how men could don white hoods and enact such violence upon their fellow Americans.
Therein lies the problem; since so many in my generation think this stuff is ancient history, we think that the consequences of such actions have dissipated. They have not. For one, it isn't, by any objective standard, ancient history. There are people alive today who marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the height of the Civil Rights movement. And it takes more than several decades to wipe the slate of racist policies enacted over two centuries, including more recent discriminatory housing measures, clean. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his highly-praised piece for The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations," "These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government - through housing policies - engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day."
It's commonly understood that the ghettos and "parts of town you don't want to go to after dark" in every major metropolitan area are the parts in which minorities typically reside. The dilapidated, shitty schools you don't want to send your children to are populated with black and brown students. This wasn't a mistake; it's the direct result of government backed policies that segregated minorities away from the white parts of town, and sapped them of their potential to accumulate any real wealth. As such, that "wealth gap" that Ta-Nehisi Coates referred to looks like this: "The wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households (or, $141,900 vs. $11,000) in 2013," according to the Pew Research Center:
This is a staggering level of inequality built along racial lines, which has only gotten worse since the Great Recession. It's impossible to deny the role housing discrimination played in creating the modern wealth gap. As Slate business and economics correspondent Jordan Weissmann writes:
"Because of racist policies like redlining, midcentury black families were regularly cut off from the housing market, forced into predatory lending arrangements when they did buy, and settled in neighborhoods that were eventually decimated by white flight and urban decay. For the American middle class, homeownership is wealth, and without it, blacks weren't able to save and build assets to pass on to the next generation. In more recent years, subprime lenders specifically targeted minority communities with the risky loans that later led to the foreclosure crisis."As I've written previously, your likelihood of economic success is largely dependent upon whether your parents were economically successful. Poverty begets poverty, and the probability of black youth improving their lot in life is hampered by their parent's dismal position on the economic totem pole.
It doesn't end there. Current research suggests that it is objectively more difficult for blacks to acquire jobs than whites. Such research includes experiments conducted by Professor Devah Pager of Princeton University, in which she found that whites with a felony conviction were just as likely to receive a callback for a job interview as black applicants with no felonies:
"Among those with no criminal record, white applicants were more than twice as likely to receive a callback relative to equally qualified black applicants. Even more troubling, whites with a felony conviction fared just as well, if not better, than a black applicant with a clean background. Racial disparities have been documented in many contexts, but here, comparing the two job applicants side by side, we are confronted with a troubling reality: Being black in America today is just about the same as having a felony conviction in terms of one's chances of finding a job. The young black men posing as job applicants in this study were bright college kids, models of discipline and hard work; and yet, even in this best case scenario, these applicants were routinely overlooked simply on the basis of the color of their skin."Other independent researchers have reached similar conclusions. For example, the non-profit Young Invincibles found that young African Americans must attain higher levels of education in order to have a similar level of probability of obtaining employment as their white counterparts. As a result, African American males without a high school diploma are about 15% less likely than white male high school dropouts to find a job, and African American males with an Associate's Degree have about the same level of probability of obtaining employment as whites with a high school diploma:
In fact, blacks have a lower probability of obtaining employment at every level of education attainment than whites, though the difference gets smaller and smaller the higher one climbs up the degree chain. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2003 might help explain this - they found that resumes submitted by people with white names received 50% more callbacks than those with very African American sounding names. Racism, it would seem, permeates everything.
It isn't difficult to understood why protests and riots erupt every time a cop kills an unarmed black kid. Blacks are fucking tired of it. Why wouldn't they be? As "The Case for Reparations" begins: "Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole." Add an explicitly racist "War on Drugs" and employers that discriminate against African Americans based simply on the color of their skin to that already volatile mix, and suddenly, riots appear much less unreasonable. I do not condone the destruction of property as a means of protest. Nevertheless, rioting over the death of an 18-year-old strikes me as much more understandable than rioting over your favorite sports team losing...or over pumpkins.
No comments:
Post a Comment