When lay citizens are charged with offenses, such as assault, manslaughter, or murder, the outcome is different, in comparison to accusations against police officers. In one case in Chattanooga, the district attorney charged three men with first-degree murder after they beat sixty-four-year-old James Sanders to death.16 No one questioned that arrest or conviction. It was viewed as a criminal act deserving of punishment. All things being equal, if the perpetrators had been police officers, they might well have been rewarded with a week off with pay and full exoneration. That was our experience, one of receiving no support from the district attorney, a former police officer. I saw little difference between the death of Mr. Sanders and that of Leslie Prater, except there were four perpetrators in our case and those responsible were police officers, who were not arrested, indicted, or convicted. Is that a double standard, or what?
Anyone, regardless of race, economic status, or any other demographic variable, can be a victim of cruel, violent, and inhuman acts of terrorism, resulting in death. Consider the domestic terrorist attacks in the Oklahoma City bombing or the infamous September 11, 2001, attacks. Unfortunately, terrorism is not new to Americans, especially African Americans. Our experiences with terrorism predate Americans’ experiences with al Qaida and other terrorist groups. Black people have experienced terrorism in America for decades, even within their own neighborhoods.17 When persons bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, and killed four children in Sunday School, that was terrorism. During that time in our country’s history, bombings were so common that Birmingham became known as Bombingham.18 When Klan members burned crosses in the yards of African Americans, those were terrorist acts. When police released vicious dogs on people and used water hoses to spray unarmed people to prevent them from participating in peaceful protests in Alabama, those were acts of terrorism, used to intimidate a group of people. Some of these terrorist acts were featured in the book The Butler19 and subsequently in the film Lee Daniels’ The Butler, released in the summer of 2013. Furthermore, Medgar Evers was a victim of a terrorist act when he was gunned down in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963.20 Did you know that the Evers’s home was the only one on their street in which the main entrance was on the side of the house? That design was deliberate, because the family feared that a front door might attract snipers.
When black men were routinely lynched from the nearest tree, persons committing those crimes were terrorists. As reported in the previous chapter, thousands of black men have been lynched.21 Unfortunately, lynching is alive and well today, because there is more than one way to lynch: There are burnings, beatings, shootings, and dragging people behind cars. Again, I stress that among the common features of lynching is group participation in the killing, which is motivated by twisted notions of justice or racial hatred.22 From that perspective, death from brutality by a group of police officers is indeed an example of a modern-day lynching.
Amnesty International, as reported by researcher Budimir Babovic, defined police brutality as the use of excessive force, or any type of unwarranted physical force used by police officers in a given incident, that can be deadly or non-deadly. Often the physical force greatly exceeds the threat encountered. Sometimes force is used when there is no threat. Instances of such excessive force include the following: fatal and non-fatal shootings, use of electro-shock weapons, beatings, misuse of batons and chemical sprays, dangerous restraint holds that sometimes lead to death, positional asphyxia, and ill-treatment within prisons. More simply stated, police brutality is inhuman, cruel, and violent behavior.23
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has joined this discussion, publishing Fighting Police Abuse: A Community Action Manual. An operating assumption in the manual is that police abuse is a serious problem with a long history and seems to defy all attempts at eradication. The problem is national, considering that the nineteen thousand law enforcement agencies across the nation are essentially independent. No police department in the country is known to be completely free of misconduct. According to the manual, the Department of Justice has been insufficiently aggressive in prosecuting cases of police abuse.24 This perceived lack of support from the Justice Department could be a contributing factor in violent community responses to this injustice, such as the case in Baltimore after the questionable circumstances surrounding the death of Freddie Gray.25 Simply stated, people are getting tired of the unjustified murders of their family members and neighbors by persons who are paid to serve and protect them. The community wants justice and accountability.
Victims of these brutal acts are from all races and ethnic backgrounds. However, it appears that a disproportionate number of victims are men of color, and white police officers are the perpetrators. This seems to be a fact that cannot be denied. It is not a myth. A letter in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch questioned why no one talks about black police officers who kill unarmed young white men.26 Maybe it is because those situations are rare or not reported as often. Until a friend sent me information about a case that she discovered, I had not seen one report of that scenario. It was an account of a black police officer who shot an unarmed white teenager in Mobile, Alabama, in 2014. According to the Mobile county grand jury, the officer acted in self-defense.27 That outcome is similar to other cases when unarmed citizens are killed by police officers, regardless of skin color. The color of significance is blue, as in the “Blue Wall of Silence.”
Because I am an African American mother and my personal experience is with my son, an African American male victim, more of my discussion is focused on African Americans. I hasten to say that I realize that non–African Americans have also been victims of police brutality, and their families have suffered as much as we have. I am sensitive to those families dealing with their tragedies. I personally know some of these families, especially the mothers. We have a common bond that transcends race.
There are attitudes that serve to excuse police when their behavior is inappropriate. Acts of police brutality are often camouflaged as police doing their jobs to serve and protect. Such behavior is unconstitutional and controversial, as in the often-debated Stop-and-Frisk policy in New York City, which overwhelmingly negatively impacted persons of color, because a disproportionate number of those individuals were stopped.28 Stop and Frisk, identified as a crime prevention tactic, allows a police officer to stop a person based on “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity and frisk based on reasonable suspicion that the person is armed and dangerous. This practice was first approved by the Supreme Court in 1968. From the available empirical data, the practice is growing and has clearly targeted minorities. Data from New York City demonstrate the best landmark examples of the problems with Stop and Frisk. In 2008, there were three hundred fourteen thousand stops. By 2011, the number had grown to six hundred eighty-six thousand stops, which represented 8 percent of New York’s population. Of that number of stops, 83 percent involved African American and Hispanic individuals, compared to 10 percent of whites. Eighty-eight percent of the stops resulted in no further law enforcement actions, which would cause one to believe that possibly those individuals were not dangerous or involved in criminal activity. In frisking for weapons, only 1.5 percent of those incidents found weapons, with more weapons found among white individuals stopped.29 In the Stop-and-Frisk situations, minorities can certainly identify with the cartoon character Charlie Brown, as featured in the song by the Coasters, an African American pop group. In their “Charlie Brown” song, the repeated refrain is “Why’s everybody always picking on me?” Considering immigration policies proposed in 2017, I fear “Stop and Frisk” practices will expand.
There are explanations offered that police work is stressful, a particular officer was having a bad day, or the adrenaline started to flow, which caused the officers to resort to mob behavior. Researchers have proposed other views to explain police brutality, especially in communities with low income. One research study reported, “When the
perceived threat of underclass violence is great, all that is required for political explanations for police killings is for the powerful to be less willing to interfere with police methods, which seems to be a common occurrence.”30 Another concluded that police officers have long-standing negative attitudes toward black males stereotyped as criminals, pimps, drug dealers, and “gangsta-thugs.”31 I might also mention that the word “thugs” is now being identified as the new “N” word. These attitudes can serve to justify aggressive behavior in urban communities in particular. In general, it appears that it is only when there is a well-publicized incident of police brutality, with video and numerous television reports, that the attitudes of the general population are influenced.32 Otherwise, the assumption is that police officers are the good guys and black men are the bad guys.33 In the unfortunate and tragic situation in which police officers are killed by citizens, those citizens have rarely been black men.34 More recently, passive acceptance is changing and there are visible social justice movements in urban communities, often described as “taking it to the streets” through protest marches. Sadly, some individuals have also used these opportunities to riot and burn neighborhood businesses. I don’t deny that police work can be difficult, dangerous, and challenging, but that is no excuse for police officers to commit unwarranted criminal acts of assault and homicide as part of their duty to serve and protect.
One might question whether police misconduct is learned behavior, as proposed by researchers Allison Chappell and Alex Piquero. Their premise is that police officers are encouraged to be abusive in response to internal peer pressure.35 Their theory is supported by Thomas Barker in his belief that officers indulge in corrupt behavior as a way of gaining peer approval and acceptance.36 It’s true that police work requires personal risks that are an inseparable part of the job. These risks allow officers an excuse to use violence, even when it is not warranted. In the presence of African American men, even unarmed and law-abiding African American men, it appears that police officers have an unusual and unwarranted fear for their personal safety. In deaths from officers using firearms, one would think that white officers are trained to shoot black men on sight and ask questions later, even when the black male is a twelve-year-old child on the playground with a toy gun.37 Then there was the case of the North Miami Beach Police using images of black men for target practice. This was discovered by a woman who recognized her brother’s picture at a shooting range where police snipers had been practicing. When confronted with this information, the police chief told NBC news, “The decision to use the mug shots of black men was ill-considered, but that no rules were broken.”38
These shootings can occur when a black male victim is unarmed and clearly committing no crime. There are numerous examples of these incidents, such as the case of John Henderson, previously mentioned. His homicide occurred approximately eight months before Leslie was killed. The situation, leading up to Mr. Henderson’s death, is an example of what can still happen to an innocent unarmed black man when he precisely follows the commands of the officer. The Henderson case was just one of many in which a police officer received no sentence resulting in incarceration for killing an unarmed black man or youth. Patrolman Gaynor, who killed Mr. Henderson, was fired from the Chattanooga Police Department on September 22, 2003, after the grand jury returned an indictment.39 Gaynor was charged with criminally negligent homicide, which resulted in two trials. The first trial ended in a mistrial40 and the second acquitted Officer Gaynor.41 Subsequently, Gaynor was hired by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department. On May 8, 2009, Gaynor received an award as the “Communications Officer of the Year.”42
What is the root of this irrational fear that white police officers appear to have of black men? In the research literature, Jerome Skolnick identified the stereotype of the “symbolic assailant” as a contributing factor. According to Skolnick, the symbolic assailant is someone who by their dress, language, and manner of walking is perceived by the police as posing a threat.43 In policing literature, the symbolic assailant is a young, African American male living in an economically deprived community. This stereotyping is very dangerous and can easily result in the abuse or killing of innocent black men and in unfairly blaming black men for society’s crime problems.44
The reality is that many innocent black men have spent years in prison for crimes they did not commit. This fact has been documented by the Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy initiative dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system, to prevent future injustices.45 Coincidently, The Innocence Project was founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, attorneys from the New York law firm who were part of our legal team.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 159 persons in the United States have been exonerated and released from death row since 1973. The most recent at this writing was Ralph Daniel Wright Jr., released on May 11, 2017.46 Anthony Ray Hinton, another innocent man, was one of those “lucky” death row inmates. He managed to escape “Yellow Mama,” the name given to Alabama’s electric chair. He was released on April 3, 2015, after spending twenty-eight years in a prison cell. Attorney Bryan Stevenson, director of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, referred to Hinton’s situation as a case study in how poverty and racial bias can lead to a wrongful conviction. Mr. Hinton was twenty-nine years old when he was arrested. In June 2015, he was fifty-nine years old. Stevenson fought for sixteen years for the case to be reopened. Mr. Hinton was innocent of the 1985 conviction of two murders in two separate robberies in Birmingham, Alabama. New ballistics tests contradicted the only evidence used to convict him. At the time the crimes were committed, Mr. Hinton was working at a grocery store warehouse, located fifteen miles from the scene of the killings. The fact that he wasn’t near the location of the murders didn’t seem to matter. The prosecution’s case was upheld because “they” said bullet casings, matching those from a gun belonging to Mr. Hinton’s mother, were found at the scene.47 Obviously, someone lied.
When a black man is a suspect, he is characterized as a potential menace to society who can legitimately be stopped and frisked, harassed, intimidated, and brutalized or killed, if necessary, in the interest of maintaining public safety.48 A comparison of racial victimization rates clearly documents that the rate of police killings is much greater for blacks than for non-Hispanic whites.49 Thus, there is a disproportionate probability that blacks, and especially black men, will be killed by the police, in comparison to other racial and gender groups. Based on the outcome of the interactions between law enforcement officers and African American males, I think that black men have many more reasons to fear police officers than for police officers to fear them. Researchers support this premise and report that, in the unfortunate situations in which police are killed by citizens, those citizens are usually not black men.50
Black men, whether incarcerated or free, innocent or guilty, must carry the stigma of “suspect.” Other members of society are aware of this stereotyped profile and use it to their advantage. Consider the case of Charles Stuart, a Boston resident who murdered his pregnant wife in 1989 and fabricated a story that a black male assailant killed his spouse. The Boston police immediately invaded black neighborhoods to threaten and interrogate black males who vaguely resembled the phantom suspect’s description. I would imagine that many black males were profiled, because some people feel that all blacks look alike. Then there was the lie told by Susan Smith of South Carolina. She killed her two children in 1994 by drowning them in a car. Initially, she told police that she had been carjacked by a black man who took her car and kidnapped her children. Again, without any investigation or critical thinking, the police immediately initiated a manhunt for another phantom African American man.51 There was also the case of Jesse Michael Anderson, who killed his wife by stabbing her five times in the head and face, and slightly cutting himself. He told the authorities that two Afr
ican American men had attacked the couple. This was another “racial hoax,” a term used to fabricate a crime and use race when blaming another person. After Anderson’s conviction and imprisonment, he was a fellow inmate of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Ironically, both Anderson and Dahmer were killed by inmate Christopher Scarver.52 In my opinion, these are extreme examples of racial profiling. Black men have a high probability of being stopped and harassed by the police. This appears to be true whether they are driving while black, walking while black, running while black, standing while black, sitting while black, bicycling while black, or just being black.53
Overall, neighborhoods in which there is a high concentration of black families tend to have less social capital and resources. In residential areas where people have more money and influence, police treatment of citizens is better. Police tend to use less aggression, regardless of the criminal actions of persons living in those neighborhoods. Unlike in “inner-city” neighborhoods, these residents are given the benefit of the doubt. In contrast, the focus is more on control through force in neighborhoods where residents are economically disenfranchised.54 Overall, the powerless residents are vulnerable and the powerful law enforcement officers maintain domination through surveillance, manipulation, coercion, or physical force.55
When black people complain about white officers’ use of force against them, often people ask, “What about black-on-black crime?” I would not deny that black-on-black crime is a concern, but what about white-on-white crime? White-on-white crime exceeds black-on-black crime. Seventy percent of arrests in cities and rural areas are of whites, but the penal institutions are overcrowded with black men.56 Consider the report that in 2011, there were more cases of whites killing whites than blacks killing blacks.57 I know this situation would surprise most people. The mainstream media obsesses over black-on-black violence, in comparison to white-on-white violence. Furthermore, violent crimes committed by whites are explained as the result of deviant behavior, but when black men commit violent crimes, their behavior is attributed to race. When James Holmes killed twelve people and injured seventy in the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting in July 2012, no one blamed all young white males. I believe that discussing black-on-black crime within the same context of police brutality only helps to reinforce the unfair stereotype that most black men are violent criminals.
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