by James Comey
In the months after the shooting, the federal investigation discovered some important truths. The Ferguson police had been engaged in a pattern of discriminatory behavior directed at African Americans, and the town governance—from ticketing practices to the bail system—operated to oppress black people. As in so many American towns and cities, the police needed to change before African Americans would trust them. It was understandable that Michael Brown’s death was a tragic spark that ignited a powder keg built by oppressive policing in that community.
But in the end, the Department of Justice found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to charge that police officer with federal civil rights crimes for shooting Michael Brown. FBI agents knocked on hundreds of doors throughout Ferguson and discovered not only that there was not sufficient evidence but also that early media accounts of the shooting were factually wrong and misleading.
Contrary to what most of the public had heard or thought they had seen, there was reliable evidence that Michael Brown was not surrendering when he was shot, and there was DNA evidence that he had assaulted the officer and tried to take his gun. In one sense, those conclusions by federal investigators—reached months after Michael Brown’s death—didn’t matter; most of the world had already heard false reports and believed Brown was gunned down while surrendering with his hands up. In the time it took for the truth to get its boots on, false information had circled the earth many times.
The Department of Justice’s conclusions were important, but late. By spring 2015, when the department completed its work and publicly released a detailed account of the investigation and its conclusions, several highly publicized videotaped encounters between police and African Americans had dramatically increased the focus on police use of force. Millions watched videos of violent police encounters, including NYPD officers killing Eric Garner with a chokehold and Cleveland police officers shooting twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in a city park. Millions more watched as Walter Scott was murdered by a South Carolina police officer, who, after shooting Scott in the back, was then captured on video appearing to alter the crime scene to cover up what he had done. Still more watched Baltimore officers drag Freddie Gray into the back of a police van for a ride he did not survive. These tragic deaths dominated perceptions of the police. They swamped and overshadowed millions of positive, professional encounters between citizens and police officers, and extraordinary anger was building toward all uniformed law enforcement.
During this volatile period, in December 2014, two NYPD officers were executed by a killer claiming to be acting in retaliation by “putting wings on pigs.” President Obama asked me to attend one of the NYPD funerals as his representative. As I spoke to the family of Officer Wenjian Liu in a small Brooklyn funeral home, the grief was so thick as to be suffocating. Outside, thousands of stone-faced police officers stood for miles in a cold wind.
I had felt the pain and anger of black communities since Ferguson, and now I could feel the pain and anger of law enforcement. Police officers didn’t feel safe or appreciated on streets they were trying to protect, and communities didn’t trust the police.
Law enforcement and the black community in America have long been separate parallel lines—closer in some communities, farther apart in others—but now those lines were arcing away from each other everywhere, each video depicting the death of a civilian at the hands of police driving one line away, each killing of a police officer arcing the other line away.
I struggled with whether there was something I could say or do that would make a difference, to help bend the lines back toward each other. The FBI was a federal investigative agency, but we were deeply involved in local policing, both as a trainer of police leaders and as a key partner to uniformed law enforcement. I decided I could do two things. I could use the high profile of the director’s job to say some things I believed to be true, in the hope it would foster better dialogue. And then I could use the FBI’s nationwide presence to drive that dialogue. So, in February 2015, I went to Georgetown University and talked about four “hard truths” that all of us need to know.
First, I said, we in law enforcement need to acknowledge the truth that we have long been the enforcers of a status quo in America that abused black people; we need to acknowledge our history because the people we serve and protect cannot forget it. Second, we all need to acknowledge that we carry implicit biases inside us, and if we aren’t careful, they can lead to assumptions and injustice. Third, something can happen to people in law enforcement who must respond to incidents resulting in the arrest of so many young men of color; it can warp perspectives and lead to cynicism. Finally, I said, we all must acknowledge that the police are not the root cause of the most challenging problems in our country’s worst neighborhoods, but that the actual causes and solutions are so hard that it is easier to talk only about the police. I then ordered all fifty-six FBI offices around the country to convene meetings between law enforcement and communities to talk about what is true and how to build the trust needed to bend those lines back toward each other. It is hard to hate up close, and the FBI could bring people up close.
The public reaction to the Georgetown speech was positive. As a white FBI director with long law enforcement experience, I could say things about law enforcement history and biases that others couldn’t, and many police chiefs were privately grateful. But the lines stayed far apart, and by the middle of 2015, something ominous was happening. In late summer, more than forty of the country’s largest cities reported to the FBI that they were experiencing jumps in the number of murders, starting in late 2014. What was particularly unusual about the numbers was that the rise in the murder rate wasn’t uniform and didn’t follow any obvious pattern. In fact, about twenty of the sixty largest cities in America were not seeing increases. Some had seen fewer murders. And the cities, some with huge increases, some without, were mixed together on the American map.
Even while I was speaking at Georgetown, murders were climbing, and the victims were overwhelmingly young black men. The cities with dramatic increases had different gang problems and different illegal drug patterns. What they appeared to have in common were large and concentrated poor black neighborhoods where more young black men were being shot and killed by other young black men.
I was hearing from police leaders that the increases might be connected to changes in behavior, among police and civilians, connected to the narratives driven by viral videos. I didn’t know for sure, and didn’t have the expertise or the data to figure it out, but I was determined to raise the issue. It would be too easy for the country to ignore more deaths of black men, too easy for the country to “drive around” the problem because it was happening to “those people, over there.” Somebody had to say something to force a conversation about what was happening. My fondest wish was to be wrong and find out that something simple explained the numbers, or that this was some random but widespread statistical anomaly.
At the same time, the Obama administration and an interesting alliance of liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans in Congress were working together to reduce punishments for some federal criminal offenses. It was one of the only policy areas on which some self-described Tea Party Republicans and President Obama could agree. I had no heartburn with the specific proposals, which all seemed quite modest and reasonable to me. But a national conversation about murder spikes—and what might be causing it—was the last thing advocates of criminal justice reform wanted. I understood that. But I just couldn’t bear to be silent about the deaths of so many young black men and the possibility that broad changes in human behavior might be some part of that.
So I talked about the subject again, in Chicago, in late October 2015. I talked about the lines of community and police arcing away from each other and the competing narratives pushing the lines apart, and used two popular Twitter hashtags to make my point:
I actually see an example and a demonstration of that arcing through hashtags, through the hashtag #blacklivesmatter and
the hashtag #policelivesmatter. Of course, each of those hashtags and what they represent adds a voice to an important conversation. But each time somebody interprets the hashtag #blacklivesmatter as anti–law enforcement, one line moves away. And each time that someone interprets the hashtag #policelivesmatter as antiblack, the other line moves away. I actually feel the lines continuing to arc away and maybe accelerating, incident by incident, video by video, hashtag by hashtag. And that’s a terrible place for us to be.
Then I turned to the rising murders, saying that “just as those lines are arcing away from each other, and maybe, just maybe, in some places because those lines are arcing away from each other,” we are seeing huge jumps in homicide in vulnerable neighborhoods, and the dead are almost all young black men. I said that communities, academics, and law enforcement need to demand answers. I reviewed some of the theories I had heard—guns, drugs, gangs, release of jailed offenders—and said none of them seemed to explain the map and the calendar: all over the United States and all at the same time.
I then said I had heard another theory: “Almost nobody says it on the record, but police and elected officials are saying it quietly to themselves all over the country. And it’s the one theory that to my mind, to my common sense, does explain the map and the calendar. And of the explanations I have heard, it’s the one that makes the most sense to me. Maybe something has changed in policing.”
I said, “I don’t know for sure whether that’s the case. I don’t know for sure that even if it is the case it explains it entirely. But I do have a strong sense that some part of what’s going on is likely a chill wind that has blown through law enforcement over the last year.”
I finished with a plea:
We need to figure out what’s happening and deal with it now. I have heard some folks suggest that it’s too early, it’s only October, we should wait to the end of the year and then see what the crime stats look like. I refuse to wait. Especially given the information that we have from all the big-city chiefs and especially because these are not just data points, these are lives. Law enforcement leaders must not wait to push their folks to police well. By that I mean firmly, fairly, and professionally. And as important, community leaders must not wait to demand and assist those officers in policing well. And to insist those officers get the space, time, and respect to do it effectively and professionally.
I knew these comments would anger some people in the Obama administration, but I felt strongly that the FBI director should be an independent voice on criminal justice issues like this. Independence was what President Obama told me he was looking for when he selected me. Issues of crime, race, and law enforcement are complicated and emotional, but they don’t get better by not talking about them.
I was right about one thing. Everybody was upset by my comments. In fact, more people than I expected. My goal had been to highlight a serious problem, give a nuanced treatment of it, and ignite a discussion about possible causes and solutions. I wanted to force a conversation about a hard thing. I wanted to stimulate people to ask difficult questions about what could be true, to drive collection of data, and to push for the study of that data. And I hoped that it might even change behavior and save lives by encouraging both better policing and more supportive community relationships. Instead, I got to see another demonstration of tribalism in America.
Police unions complained I was blaming cops and calling them cowards. Voices from the left said I was asserting a “Ferguson effect” without evidence and it couldn’t possibly be true. They said I was against scrutiny of the police. Voices from the right said the country was experiencing a murder epidemic and blamed President Obama. Too few people asked, “What is true?” Too few people actually considered the possibilities and asked what might be going on, even if they believed I was out to lunch. Instead, folks rushed to their team, their side. Very few voices in the public square took the time to ask, “So what is this guy worried about and what is he saying, exactly?”
One person—in the very center of the public square—did. A day or two after I returned from Chicago, my chief of staff came in to tell me the president would like to speak with me in the Oval Office. No topic was given and no information on who else would be there. It turned out to be just the two of us, my first meeting alone with President Obama.
Until I met my wife, I didn’t know what listening really was. Neither, at least in my experience, do most people in Washington, D.C. To them, listening is a period of silence, where someone else talks before you say what you were planning to say all along. We see these exchanges in nearly every “debate” on television. It’s the candidate sitting on the stool, waiting for the light to go on, then standing up and saying their prearranged talking points, while someone else says their prearranged talking points back at them. It’s just words reaching ears, but not getting into a conscious brain. That’s the “Washington listen.”
My marriage has taught me that what I thought of as listening really isn’t listening, either. Like a lot of people, I thought that listening involved sitting silently as someone else talked, and then perceiving what they say.
I was wrong. True listening is actually that period of silence and allowing someone’s words to reach your conscious brain, but it also includes something else that’s a little weird: with your posture, your face, and your sounds, you signal to someone, “I want what you have, I need to know what you know, and I want you to keep telling me the things you’re telling me.” Two good friends talking to each other is a stenographer’s worst nightmare. They are talking over each other. When one is speaking formed words, the other is making sounds—“Uh-huh.” “Ooh.” “I know.” “Yup, yup, oh, I’ve seen it, yup. They’ll do that.” They’re listening to each other in a way where each is both pushing information to the other and pulling information out of the other. Push, pull, push, pull. When they are really connecting, it actually runs together—pushpullpushpull. That’s real listening.
To be effective at the FBI, I spent a lot of time listening, something we all struggle to do well. It is hard for leaders to listen well because it requires us to be vulnerable, to risk our superior position. Barack Obama surprised me by picking me as FBI director. And this is where Barack Obama surprised me yet again. He was an extraordinary listener, as good as any I’ve seen in leadership. In various meetings with the president, I watched him work hard to draw as many viewpoints as possible into a conversation, frequently disregarding the hierarchy reflected in seating arrangements—principals at the table, lower-ranked folks in chairs against the wall. I can recall a meeting in the Situation Room about a classified technology topic where President Obama asked some Silicon Valley whiz kid without a tie sitting against the wall what he thought of the discussion the formally dressed leaders of the nation’s military and intelligence agencies had just had at the table. The shaggy dude then contradicted several of us. Obama hunted for points of view. Maybe it was a legacy of his life as a professor, cold-calling someone in the back row. This approach often led to chaotic conversations, but it allowed him to hear views that, in the Bush administration, would have been watered down by rank or by fear of being teased. No guy without a tie would have been in the Bush Situation Room, and if he somehow snuck into a back-row seat, he would not be called upon, and if he spoke anyway, he would be mocked for his attire.
Obama had the ability to really discuss something, leveling the field to draw out perspectives different from his own. He would turn and face the speaker, giving them long periods without interruption to share their view. And although he was quiet, he was using his face, his posture, and sometimes small sounds to draw the person out. He was carefully tracking what they said, something he would prove by asking questions when they finished; the questions were often drawn from throughout the minutes he had been listening.
President Obama was also more than willing to discuss things that people weren’t sure he wanted to hear. I learned this firsthand after I made those controversial comments about la
w enforcement and race. It turns out they caused considerable concern at the White House. When I joined President Obama in the Oval Office after returning from Chicago, I discovered that he had intentionally excluded his senior staff and the Justice Department from the room. It was to be our first one-on-one meeting in the twenty-six months I had been FBI director. As I walked through the door by the grandfather clock and saw nobody else, I thought maybe I was about to get an ass-chewing. The president sat in his usual seat—the armchair to the right of the fireplace. I sat on the couch just to his left.
There was no chewing out. Instead, the president began the meeting by saying, “I asked you to come because I know your head and your heart and I want to understand what you are seeing and thinking.” We then spoke with each other for about an hour. And I use the word “with” intentionally. It was a true conversation, with pushing and pulling, pushing and pulling.
The president asked a question that invited an open-ended response: “What are you seeing and what’s worrying you?” I talked for about ten minutes. I talked about the map and the calendar—more than forty of the nation’s sixty largest cities seeing rises in killings of young black men, all coming at the same time, in a pattern that didn’t line up with other crime trends, and mixed geographically with large cities that were not seeing a murder increase. I explained my worry that most of the country could just ignore the problem because it was black men dying, and only in “those” neighborhoods. I also noted my concern that the increases were connected to changes in behavior following the viral videos. I said my goal was to call it out, raise the question of whether the police and the communities were pulling back from each other in small ways that added up to something big. I said my hope was that by raising the question, I could help change behaviors if that was what was happening.
When I was done, he expressed appreciation for my focus on the issue, then laid out some of the things I had said publicly that struck a discordant note with him. For example, I had used the term “weed and seed” to describe what I thought was needed—pulling out the bad guys and working to grow something healthy in the space created by the arrests. He asked, “Can you see how that might sound to black people? Calling young men in their community ‘weeds’?” He spoke of how black people often resented a trade-off that their circumstances forced them to make: they welcomed the security police bring, but resented the conditions that make that police presence necessary in their neighborhoods—poor schools, few jobs, addiction, and broken families.
