by Steve Early
Vernon Whitmore was, at the time, operating the Globe, a black community weekly paper founded in 2004, shortly before Magnus arrived in Richmond. The Globe tried to provide its 25,000 African American readers in the East Bay with “good news—no shootings, no murders,” its publisher explained. Yet, as a Richmond resident, Whitmore knew that the city’s policing had to be drastically changed, which led him to reject appeals to racial solidarity made by critics of the chief. “The Globe was the only local newspaper that supported Chris Magnus,” Whitmore told me, noting that he “lost some friends over it.”
Other backers of Magnus, from across the political spectrum in Richmond, formed a committee to support him. The group included Mike Parker, a leading RPA activist, and Felix Hunziker, who often disagrees with the RPA and finds it too uncompromising in its views. Their ad hoc committee set up a website and encouraged residents to attend the trial, where the bias claims were heard. After deliberating in April 2012, jurors concluded that the plaintiffs were past beneficiaries of a “buddy system that facilitated their rise to the highest positions in the department through intimidation, race baiting tactics, and backroom dealing.”10 Racial discrimination was not a factor in the alleged sidelining of their careers. The plaintiffs lost every single claim, including their bid for $3 million each for “emotional distress.”
During these proceedings, officers who sued Magnus and the city remained on active duty. Afterward, four of the seven retired or departed for jobs elsewhere. Some had to declare personal bankruptcy to avoid being assessed hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs awarded to the city by the judge. Richmond’s total legal bill was about $5 million. After his courtroom victory, Magnus pledged: “We’ll have to work together and show respect to each other and focus on reducing crime and working with the community.”
FAIR AND IMPARTIAL POLICING?
As chief of the RPD, Magnus not only curbed explicit racism. The department sought to improve its day-to-day interaction with the public by getting new recruits and experienced officers to examine their own unconscious biases related to race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Amid the wave of police brutality protests that swept the nation from 2014 to 2015, police critics, academic observers, and even leading law enforcement officials all agreed that unconscious bias was part of the problem.
A New York Times/CBS News poll found, not surprisingly, that four in ten blacks—and nearly two-thirds of all black men—said they felt they had been stopped by police just because of their race or ethnicity, compared to only one in twenty whites.11 Stanford University law professor Richard T. Ford, the author of Racial Culture, argues that such disparate treatment is “a recurrent theme of American law enforcement.” In Ford’s view, the recent rash of misconduct cases involving officers from Ferguson, Missouri, to New York City is “a product of the racially divided society in which they work”—and, more specifically, their assignment to “poor, high-crime neighborhoods of color,” which leads to “countless experiences that reinforce racial prejudice.” Given that “many officers will consider race when approaching people suspected of wrongdoing,” Ford believes “the best we can hope for is to limit the injury that these encounters cause. . . . Demands to root out and punish biased officers are necessary and understandable but real improvement will require comprehensive institutional reform.”12
In a widely reported speech at Georgetown University in early 2015, FBI director James Comey similarly noted that urban police officers “often work in environments where a hugely disproportionate percentage of street crime is committed by young men of color.”13 In such a setting, he acknowledged, “no one’s really color blind” and “everyone makes judgments based on race.” Whether an individual officer is white or black, Comey contended, he or she views young whites and blacks differently, because the latter “look like so many others the officer has locked up.”
To make policing more fair and impartial, both New York City police commissioner William Bratton and Comey called for better training, a policy panacea now almost universally embraced but still viewed with suspicion by those skeptical about police reform in general. One of the leading proponents of “fair and impartial policing” (FIP) is Lorie Fridell, a criminologist from the University of South Florida. Her public safety consulting business began to boom after Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, followed by the fatal choking of Eric Garner in New York City and the police killings of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Samuel Dubose in Cincinnati, not to mention Freddie Gray’s fatal “rough ride” in a Baltimore “paddy wagon” (the very name of which, as Comey noted, is an enduring testament to mid-nineteenth-century nativist bias against poor Irish immigrants, then widely considered to be nothing more than “drunks, ruffians, and criminals”). As the Wall Street Journal disclosed, Baltimore already ranked high among US cities incurring legal costs due to police misconduct. In 2014 the ten US cities with the largest police departments experienced a 48 percent increase in the dollar value of such settlements and court judgments over the previous year. Between 2010 and 2014, they collectively paid out $1.02 billion to civilians who suffered beatings, shootings, or wrongful imprisonment.14
Fridell’s fellow FIP trainers include six retired police officers similarly dedicated to altering problematic behavior. Since 2010, Fridell has conducted seminars on unconscious bias for law enforcement officers from 250 local, state, and federal agencies. The Department of Justice’s Office on Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) has invested more than $1 million in FIP training, and additional funds have come from local police departments, particularly those facing costly civil rights litigation or DOJ pressure to clean up their act.
When Fridell came to Richmond in February 2015 at Chief Magnus’s invitation, to help train RPD patrol officers and commanders, her visit was a homecoming of sorts. Fridell’s father, Leo, was a longtime Richmond public school teacher who compiled a guide to local government for use as a social studies text. His sixty-year-old Story of Richmond includes an idyllic five-page section on the RPD. In it we learn that the much less diverse and more traditionally trained RPD of the last century even helped enforce the city’s election-day closure of bars and liquor stores—not the most popular form of community policing in any era.
When Florida-based Fridell comes to town with her thick workbooks, academic articles, PowerPoint presentation, and small group exercises aimed at identifying and rooting out bias, the local reception is not always friendly. Police audiences “are generally somewhere between defensive and hostile,” she reports, because “this is cops’ least favorite topic.” She believes that other experts in her field have “done a poor job of talking about bias in policing,” so rank-and-file officers undergoing mandatory training report for it “expecting the same old message.” In Richmond, however, she was able to reinforce attitudinal change and better practices already fostered under Magnus, for whom she had fulsome praise.
During the training, Fridell explained, in non-accusatory fashion, how “modern bias is likely to manifest as implicit bias. Implicit biases impact on our perceptions and behavior. They occur below our conscious awareness. And they manifest even in individuals who, at the conscious level, reject biases, prejudices, and stereotyping.” She encouraged Richmond officers to continue harnessing the power of “contact theory,” the idea that, when people have more positive personal contacts with others different from them, it helps erode conscious prejudices and keep implicit biases in check. “Knowing many citizens by face and name improves officers’ abilities to differentiate between suspicious and non-suspicious people on a basis other than race,” she said.
Tamisha Walker attended Fridell’s seminar as a representative of Safe Return, a support group for the formerly incarcerated. Walker is a community organizer and mother of two, whose brother was killed in a police shooting in another city. In the four years she has worked with the RPD, she has seen that “a lot of guys
get it,” a perception of the police not necessarily shared by everyone locally. As she explained to a visiting NBC News crew, many of her Richmond neighbors developed an us-against-them view of local cops during their “cowboy” era. Now, she believes, the relationship between the community and law enforcement is healing. The RPD’s training on unconscious bias gave her further cause for optimism, although she wished that community participation had been broader. “I think the police training, as it relates to Richmond, could go a long way toward helping officers who have not made the transition to having real community relationships,” Walker told me.
Walker has spent time in jail herself. She now helps Richmond residents with a criminal record get job training, employment, and affordable housing so they don’t end up homeless or back in prison. She expressed concern that past convictions can result in a continued stigmatization and disparate treatment. “Law enforcement does not view formerly incarcerated people as having rights like regular community members,” she said. “When a police officer pulls over a white guy, he doesn’t ask if he’s on parole or probation. People in law enforcement are more biased in their dealings with people of color, particularly with those with criminal histories.”
Malcolm Marshall, editor of the community newspaper Richmond Pulse, also attended Fridell’s training. Pulse coverage of Magnus was generally favorable, but the forty-two-year-old African American journalist did not equate the chief with the entire department. “Of course, training can help,” Marshall told me. “It’s a start but not a cure-all. It’s just a step in the right direction and has to be followed up. You can have a Chief Magnus, but filtering it down to the rank-and-file is another issue. I don’t know if it got that deep.”
A PROTESTOR IN BLUE
By 2014, change in the RPD was deep enough and public safety sufficiently improved that Richmond’s homicide rate went down for the fifth straight year. The city’s eleven murders represented the smallest annual number in three decades. Violent crime in general was 23 percent lower and property crime down by 40 percent since Magnus’s arrival. The results of reconnecting police officers to the community looked very good, compared to the consequences of more traditional policing methods still in use elsewhere.
When those old methods failed in cities like Ferguson, Missouri, local authorities responded to ensuing civil unrest by deploying what author Radley Balko calls “warrior cops.” Local law enforcement’s use of hand-me-down Pentagon gear, including battlefield weapons and armored vehicles, in crisis situations became a fresh symbol of its day-to-day dysfunction. Too much US policing takes the form of military-style occupation of minority communities. The resulting “battlefield mentality” among urban police officers has, according to Balko, left them “isolated and alienated . . . putting them on a collision course with the values of a free society.”15
In recognition of Richmond’s steady progress in a different direction, Magnus was named to two Department of Justice Civil Rights Division teams investigating police in other cities. He helped prepare a DOJ report criticizing Ferguson cops for making discriminatory traffic stops that created deep resentment among local blacks long before Michael Brown was killed. After Freddie Gray died in Baltimore police custody, triggering riots in that city, Magnus joined a similar panel of experts investigating whether a “pattern and practice” of misconduct there had contributed to his death.In addition, President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing sought advice from Magnus on its response to law enforcement controversies in other cities.
Testifying in Phoenix, the chief explained how a “team effort between our department and the community” had been key to Richmond’s public safety improvements. On another occasion, Magnus dispatched Erik Oliver, a five-year veteran of the RPD, to the White House for a forty-five-minute meeting with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. There, Oliver also briefed the administration on best practices for engaging police departments with their communities. When Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, toured six cities noted for their “community policing, relationship building, and crime reduction,” Richmond was on her schedule.
During her local visit, Lynch went to RPD headquarters, city hall, and the RYSE Youth Center. Although some RYSE members were critical of policing in Richmond high schools, Gemika Henderson praised a Richmond officer who encouraged her to succeed in school. “What was different about him?” Lynch asked Henderson. “He cared,” the young woman replied. “He was a cool dude. You didn’t see him as a uniform because he saw you as a person.”16 The frank exchange with Lynch at RYSE was arranged, Magnus explained, because “we are not here to say ‘mission accomplished.’”
Nothing underlined that self-critical stance more than the chief’s controversial role in a community vigil, sponsored by RYSE, in December 2014. About one hundred people lined up on both sides of Macdonald Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare, for four and a half hours, the period of time that Michael Brown lay in the street in Ferguson after being shot. When a young protestor handed Magnus a hand-painted sign proclaiming that “Black Lives Matter,” he displayed it to passing traffic, while chatting with others at the event. “I’ve never seen anything like it, not in Richmond, not anywhere else,” said longtime resident Mary Square. “The police chief holding a sign calling for an end to police violence. . . . I’m going to tell my kids.”17
The chief’s dramatic gesture of conciliation was praised by city officials, like Lindsay, Butt, and McLaughlin. As local commentators observed, the otherwise uneventful vigil in downtown Richmond stood in sharp contrast to the almost simultaneous street clashes between police and protestors in Berkeley and Oakland, just a few miles away, after grand juries failed to indict Brown’s killer in Ferguson or the officer who fatally choked Eric Garner in New York City.
Yet, after a photo of Magnus and his sign appeared in local and national media outlets, this rare fraternization between a uniformed officer and police brutality protestors was condemned by the Richmond Police Officers Association. “Police chiefs are not above the law,” declared RPOA lawyer Alison Berry Wilkinson. “While many may admire the chief for proactively engaging with the community on one of the most significant political issues of the day, by doing so in uniform, he violated the very laws he is sworn to uphold.”18
The law invoked by Wilkinson was California’s Government Code, which prohibits public employee participation “in political activities of any kind while in uniform.” On Facebook and in his own press interviews, Magnus rejected her accusation. He asked his critics how it became “a political act to acknowledge that ‘black lives matter’ and show respect for the very real concerns of our minority communities?” The chief’s local defenders also pointed out that police union officials had frequently been pictured, in uniform, in past election mailers, paid for by Chevron or RPOA itself.19
The RPOA criticism of Magnus was muted compared to outbursts elsewhere, directed at protestors or public officials who sided with them. Police-union lobbying, contract bargaining, or representation of individual officers is now viewed, by critics on the left and right, as an obstacle to public safety reform. As New York Times columnist David Brooks argues, “If you look at all the proposals that have been discussed since the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York, you find that somewhere or other around the country, police unions have opposed all of them.”20
Within the labor movement some activists demand that unions representing cops be shunned. At the University of California, Brandon Buchanan, a graduate student employee, persuaded his 13,000-member affiliate of the United Auto Workers to seek expulsion of the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) from the AFL-CIO. “We are seeing a number of police unions and associations criticizing black activists for addressing the needs of their communities, and actively working to cover up and dismiss issues of police brutality in their departments,” Buchanan contends. “They always seem to be out there ready to defend and support the status quo.”21
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sp; Although Magnus was a past (and future) target of union criticism himself, he took a more nuanced view, based on his own rank-and-file experience in Lansing, Michigan. There Magnus had joined other union reformers who favored “an alternative way of addressing a lot of the issues we had with management.” His opposition slate defeated long-time incumbents no longer in touch with the concerns of younger officers. “This happens on a larger scale, obviously, in communities and [in] police departments in general,” he explained. “You see departments go through cycles. They go with the status quo for a long time, and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work anymore, and you have to have some change.”
The RPOA underwent a leadership change itself shortly after its much-publicized criticism of Magnus. To clear the air about his “Black Lives Matter” sign holding, the chief held a meeting with new union president Virgil Thomas and other officers that one participant recalled “was not warm and fuzzy.” Afterward, Thomas told the press that “we talked about it, and I understood what he was trying to do. He’s trying to bridge the gap, like we all are.” A Richmond cop for nineteen years, Thomas was among those skeptical of Magnus when he was hired. “I mean, not only was he coming from outside the department, he was coming from Fargo, of all places. But he came in with a plan and stuck to it, and the image of the city and the police has changed dramatically. Morale has improved greatly.”22
By 2014, even Lieutenant Shawn Pickett, a former plaintiff in the race discrimination case against Magnus, was giving the chief his due. “We had generations of families raised to hate and fear the Richmond police,” he said. “A lot of that was the result of our style of policing in the past. It took us a long time to turn that around and we’re seeing the fruits of that now. There is mutual respect, and some mutual compassion.”23
