Cop Under Fire

by David Clarke

  Other classes taught them basic life lessons. For example, I brought in an economist to explain how a dollar works and how to balance a checkbook. These guys didn’t have a lot of money, and they wouldn’t have a lot when they got out of jail. But they tended to let money go through their hands as soon as they had it—spending it on dope, potato chips, or whatever else. They had no sense of how money is supposed to work. I helped them understand that if you put a little away gradually, suddenly you might have an extra fifteen dollars.

  The program was an astounding success. The participants—some of whom had never finished anything in their lives—received a certificate when they completed DOTS. Many of them had family and friends attend the graduation ceremony. You could see the sense of accomplishment etched on their faces. Some of them had not graduated from high school or even middle school. Going through this program gave them the chance to hold their heads up high, walk across the stage, and receive a diploma. It wouldn’t magically change their lives.

  “What you do with this is up to you,” I said as I congratulated the men on their success.

  One guy wrote me a letter that I’ve kept all these years:

  The reason for this letter, sir, is to thank you. The DOTS program you came up with is brilliant, sir. It’s helped me to become a better man in today’s society. Being in this program has opened my eyes. When the captain described the program, I knew it was what I wanted—a change in my life and in my attitude … My life hasn’t been the greatest, but not a lot of people’s are. I made bad choices, had a bad attitude, and a bad outlook on life. This program let me see the error of my ways. It has also given me the tools to make a positive change.

  What’s even more impressive about the handwritten letter is that the guy wrote me on the very evening that he was scheduled to get out of jail, and he wanted to stay in longer:

  Unfortunately, I leave tonight and I am sad to go. I asked the captain if I could stay past my outdate so I could continue the program and graduate. He told me I couldn’t.

  Isn’t that astonishing? An inmate who would rather stay in jail for the program so he could keep learning and improving his life. The very personal, touching letter went on to say that his mother was recovering from cancer, so it would be good for him to get out of jail to take care of her. I’ve kept this letter to remind me that people’s lives were changed through this program.

  I’d like to tell you that conservatives and liberals all over Milwaukee welcomed this program, but that never happens, does it? The reporter I’d brought in—who even interviewed the people at the Michigan Department of Corrections—totally sabotaged what we were trying to do by using two words in his initial article: “Boot camp.”

  The words boot camp have a negative connotation with the Left, so suddenly all of the county supervisors were against my new program before it had barely begun.

  Editorials showed up in the newspaper about my “Draconian measures.” People complained that I’d taken the mattresses away from the inmates and said I gave them essentially bread and water. The political pressure to destroy the program I’d taken so much care to create was intense.

  “We’re not funding it,” the county supervisors told me.

  “I didn’t ask for one penny,” I shot back.

  Then they threatened to cut the overall jail budget so we couldn’t have it anymore. The entire time that I was trying to teach those guys how to balance a checkbook, I had to fight lefty politics. I felt as if I was roller-skating up a hill backward in my efforts to help those inmates.

  Sometimes I get weary of the fight—the constant, nagging fight—but God knows when I need a little boost. When I get down about all of the criticism, that’s when he places in my path someone like that woman I met in Target. Or I might receive a handwritten letter from an inmate whose life is back on track. Those moments remind me that even though I’m not perfect, my work is meaningful. I’ve actually been in the trenches helping to change these men’s lives, no matter how many editorials accuse me of being mean and heartless.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech made in 1910 at the Sorbonne in France comes to mind:

  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

  5

  American Education Embraces and Enforces Poverty

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS WAS BORN as a slave sometime around 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland. As a young child, he wondered why the white kids knew their actual birthdays, but he didn’t. He also witnessed his Aunt Hester get savagely beaten after she fell in love with another slave. Like most in his situation, he grew up without a father; his mother died when he was ten years old.

  That’s when he was sent to Baltimore to serve the Auld family. Douglass described the matriarch of the household, Sofia, as a “kind and tender hearted woman,” though she did require two things of the young slave. First, she made him stop cowering, improve his posture, and stand up straight. Second, she required him to look her in the eye when they spoke. For the first time in his life, Douglass was being treated like a human being. Soon, Sofia took a risk and began teaching him the alphabet.

  At one time in this great country, it was against the law to educate “negroes” as they called them. Any attempt to educate slaves had to occur underground. The slave-owning culture of the South frowned upon masters teaching their slaves to read and write. The prevailing orthodoxy then was that education would open the eyes of slaves and incite rebellion toward their oppressors. Eventually they would demand their freedom. The following language appeared in the state of Virginia’s Revised Code of 1819:

  That all meetings or assemblages of slaves, or free negroes or mulattoes mixing and associating with such slaves at any meeting-house or houses, &c., in the night; or at any SCHOOL OR SCHOOLS for teaching them READING OR WRITING, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be deemed and considered an UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY; and any justice of a county, &c., wherein such assemblage shall be, either from his own knowledge or the information of others, of such unlawful assemblage, &c., may issue his warrant, directed to any sworn officer or officers, authorizing him or them to enter the house or houses where such unlawful assemblages, &c., may be, for the purpose of apprehending or dispersing such slaves, and to inflict corporal punishment on the offender or offenders, at the discretion of any justice of the peace, not exceeding twenty lashes.1

  “Learning would spoil the best n—in the world,” Douglass’s master, Hugh Auld, said when he discovered his wife had been teaching him the alphabet. If Douglass learned to read, Mr. Auld warned his wife, he’d no longer be content to be merely a slave.

  He was right about that last part. Though Mrs. Auld stopped teaching him the alphabet, Douglass realized education would be his path out of slavery. He bribed poor white children with bread for tutorials and devised clever games to trick the white children into teaching him how to read.

  But he wasn’t content with just reading. He realized that to escape slavery, he also needed to learn how to write. Over the years, he gradually taught himself how to do just that. After he accomplished that goal, neither he nor our country was ever the same.

  Douglass, as you now know, turned out to be one of our nation’s most prominent civil rights advocates, a powerful orator, and an eloquent abolitionist writer.

  What Douglass realized but our politicians have yet to
grasp is that education opens minds. It teaches people to think for themselves. It connects people to the past and prepares them for the future. Education has always been the vehicle for upward mobility in the United States. My parents understood the value of an education and poured what little money they had into providing me with a solid educational base. They knew that in a sometimes unfair and unjust world, I would have to be doubly prepared to overcome obstacles.

  That’s why I’m so disappointed in the way that modern politicians have neglected their moral obligation to help black children thrive educationally.

  The situation is dire.

  A Cycle of Failure

  Never in the history of our nation have the wealthy and the poor had such different lives. There’s a cycle of failure that I’ve seen too frequently in all of my years as a cop. Generations of black kids are functionally illiterate because their parents were functionally illiterate. It doesn’t take an education specialist to predict that the next generation will be functionally illiterate as well. In a way, it’s a self-inflicted pathology, but we taxpayers who support an inadequate government are responsible for it too. As long as the government ties the hands of parents, forcing them to keep their kids in failing public schools, how can we hold them responsible? Even black parents who are totally engaged with their children end up sending their kids to an inferior school system for lack of options. Kids get up every morning, go to school, and do their homework in the evenings. But once they’ve completed their education, they’re unprepared for much in the real world.

  University of Kansas researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley studied the ways in which parents and children interact with one another and discovered what we’re up against. They found the number of words heard by children varied greatly according to the social standing of the parents. Parents on welfare had half as much verbal interaction with their children than working-class parents had with theirs. High-income families interacted verbally with their kids the most. Children from families on welfare heard about 616 words per hour; children from working-class families heard around 1,251 words per hour; kids from professional families heard roughly 2,153 words per hour.2

  The study also revealed that higher-income parents praised their kids more frequently than lower-income parents.

  Children from families with professional backgrounds experienced a ratio of six encouragements for every discouragement. For children from working-class families this ratio was two encouragements to one discouragement. Finally, children from families on welfare received on average two discouragements for every encouragement. Therefore, children from families on welfare seemed to experience more negative vocabulary than children from professional and working-class families.3

  Another marked difference is obvious when it comes to reading. White parents are more likely to read to their kids before they tuck them into bed. Of parents with a college degree, 71 percent read to their children every day. Only 33 percent of parents with a high school diploma or less read to their kids daily.4

  Imagine how that one difference affects lower-income kids. They do not show up to school in a state of educational readiness. Teachers can teach, but they can’t perform miracles for the poorer children from such disadvantaged backgrounds. The level of education determines how much money the children will be able to earn later in life. Poor kids receive less education and—consequently—earn less money.

  And the cycle continues.

  Failing Families

  How do you think the United States ranks in overall education compared to the rest of the world? Number one? Top ten? Not even close. In 2014, we were twenty-ninth, behind Russia, Vietnam, and the Slovak Republic. Every day, on average, seven thousand students drop out of high school, bringing the annual tally to 1.2 million kids.5

  Take a look at Milwaukee Public School District, the largest in the state of Wisconsin. The State Department of Public Instruction graded the district with an F. Only 18 percent of black Milwaukee kids tested proficiently at reading, and their graduation rate was 59 percent. That is a poor return for the very high price tag of $1.1 billion.6

  Families frequently choose where they live to make sure they’re zoned for the right school district, but what if you can’t afford to live in the vicinity of the better schools?

  School choice gives parents who want to get their kids out of a failing school system a lifeline. Why would anyone want to interfere with parents trying to help their kids? In the year 2017, we shouldn’t be putting parents on a list to get their kids into grade school. It seems medieval. School choice allows public education funds to be used for schools that best fit students’ needs—whether that’s public school, private school, home school, or charter school.

  Publicly funded charter schools are free from many rules and regulations of other public schools. Frequently, charters receive more applications than they have desks available, so they use a lottery to decide which students get into the school. Charter schools substantially outperform traditional public schools. According to Timothy Benson at National Review:

  • Charter schools close racial achievement gaps, for example, at a much higher rate than do traditional public schools.

  • New York charters easily outpace traditional public schools in math and English language arts.

  • The student bodies of New York charters are comprised of 92 percent minorities, and these institutions account for 38 percent of the top fifty schools in the city.

  • Charters suspend students at lower rates than neighboring public schools.7

  To our great national shame, however, the opening of charter schools has become a political issue. In 2016, the NAACP passed a resolution calling for a pause on privately managed charter schools. It claimed charter schools “increase segregation,” use “disproportionately high” levels of “punitive and exclusionary discipline,” and could have “psychologically harmful environments.” Even worse, it said that charter schools are spreading in “low-income communities” just like “predatory lending practices that led to the sub-prime mortgage disaster.”8

  What? Targeting low-income areas and communities of color?

  Let’s think about this a second. Why would charter schools open in black neighborhoods? Because that’s where schools have failed. That’s where they’re needed. One size doesn’t fit all in education reform, and our K-12 school system was designed for a different century. We need to give parents every opportunity to make sure their kids are educated. The NAACP should be investigating this abject failure instead of opposing the one program that is advantageous to black children.

  For the nation’s most premier civil rights organization to oppose charter schools because they’re opening at a higher rate in inner cities is the height of lunacy. Does anyone really believe that charter schools create “psychologically harmful environments” when these schools are voluntary—frequently with long waiting lists? Benson put it nicely:

  If the NAACP truly wants to help black children, it should pass a resolution affirming that black parents should have the freedom to choose the schools their children attend and should not be penalized financially for choosing a private school, whether religious or secular. Empirical evidence shows that school-choice programs work, and polls show that they are broadly popular. In a poll taken in January, the American Federation for Children found that 65 percent of parents support private-school choice, 75 percent support public charter schools, 65 percent support education savings accounts, and 53 percent support school vouchers. All forms of school choice, public and private, should be on the table for the NAACP. The goals for the NAACP should be not only school choice for every black parent but, for every school educating black children, the requirement that it compete—and for every black child, an opportunity to attend a quality school.9

  Charter schooling is just one way that black parents can be empowered to educate their children. If charter schools aren’t available in a child’s neighborhood, vouchers give parents the option of choo
sing a private school. Under such a program, funds typically spent by a school district on the child would be given to a participating family through a voucher system that could be used to pay partial or full private school tuition.

  My hope is that these options could get poorer kids into schools that don’t promote kids regardless of whether they learn to read.

  Whenever I bring up the controversial topic of social promotion, people ask me, “Well, we can’t flunk all these kids, can we?”

  I always respond in the same way: “Why are you asking me? I’m just a cop.” But I guarantee, I see the consequences of our failed public schools more than anyone else. On the streets, I see kids who are stuck in this perpetual cycle of poverty and crime; they never seemed to really have a chance. My thirty-eight years on the police force tell me that if something doesn’t work, you stop doing it. Heck, I probably understood that when I was just a kid. What if parents started suing these school systems for not making good on their promise to educate their kids? Is that what it will take to get their attention?

  Reading, ’Riting, and Undermining Our National Greatness

  Although schools these days fail at educating our kids, they succeed in indoctrinating them. We used to regard schools as places where children were sent to learn about our country, our values, our shared heritage, and our collective knowledge. Now teachers are instructing children that they need to radically transform the nation. Schools are no longer institutions of learning. They are laboratories of progressive indoctrination. Encouraging critical thought has been replaced by demanding regurgitation of leftist ideology to get a passing grade. These days, students know how to address the transgendered with the proper pronouns, but they aren’t able to do basic math. Textbooks emphasize America’s failures and minimize our accomplishments.