The Rebirth of a Nation[/trx_title]
This past week, my telephone was ringing off the hook. While colleagues and family members were disturbed to the core by George Floyd’s murder, we began asking each other, “What’s next?”
Like so many black Americans, we have seen this before: outrage, protest and then . . . nothing. Hundreds of years of racism and inequality have been so tightly woven into the fabric of our culture we fear that George Floyd will become yet another face frozen in time. Like Yousef Hawkins, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile, these are the young men and boys that were unceremoniously murdered by the police. Many other names never gained attention. Some of them faded from national memory, which is indicative of this crisis.
These are not killings, these are murders, plain and simple. To shoot an unarmed man, or to do physical harm that results in death, like pushing a knee in a human being’s neck and choking the life out of them is murder, straight up. We have seen this over and over again. Witnesses described Michael Brown holding his hands up in surrender before he was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson. His body lay lifeless on the street for hours before it was finally recovered. In Cleveland, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice played on a snowy winter morning with a toy gun before he was murdered by a white police officer. Eric Garner told white NYPD officers who placed him in a banned choke-hold that he could not breathe. He repeated the phrase eleven times before he was murdered. And now, seven years later, we eerily witness the videotaped murder of George Floyd as he repeatedly exclaimed, “I can’t breathe,” while calling for his deceased mother. But this is only part of the story.
While these horrific deaths of unarmed black men and boys have become part of a vicious cycle that has repeated itself year after year, generation upon generation, we have forgotten the women and little girls. I think back to 1984, when Eleanor Bumpers, a sixty-six-year-old woman who suffered from mental illness, was murdered by an NYPD officer who was assisting marshals to evict her because she was behind in her rent. Her shocking murder made it clear to all black women that we are susceptible to police brutality. In the ensuing years, there would be more murders: Alberta Spruill suffered a heart attack when NYPD officers mistakenly executed a “no-knock” warrant on her Harlem apartment. Little girls Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit and Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta were killed in their homes due to no knock warrants and drug raids. Sandra Bland, the twenty-eight-year old from Naperville, Illinois who was arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer during a traffic stop in Waller County, Texas was found mysteriously dead in a jail cell three days later. The police murders of Rekia Boyd, Tanisha Anderson, Atatiana Jefferson, Charleena Lyles, Mya Hall, Alexia Christian, Meagan Hockaday, Pamela Turner, and Domonique Clayton were covered in the local press, and some even made national headlines, but their names never became a rallying cry in the same way as Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and now, George Floyd.
Although black women have been routinely killed, raped, and beaten by the police, their stories simply do not garner the same kind of attention men’s do. In fact, we learned of Breonna Taylor only after George Floyd’s death eclipsed hers in the media, even though she was murdered nearly two months earlier. Black women are rarely the first thought in our outrage over police shootings, even though they are surely worthy of more than secondary outrage. It is a cycle that is seemingly endless.
What is more confounding is the normalization of these collective murders. The scenario is a now familiar one: a police officer, allegedly attempting an arrest, murders a black citizen. Word spreads quickly throughout the community that the person was unarmed. Crowds gather. There are protests and more arrests. The following day, a community leader charges that the murder was unjustified and demands the immediate arrest and indictment of the officer involved. The prosecutor or district attorney announces there is not enough evidence until there is a full investigation. The police chief refuses to arrest the officer involved, but as a means of appeasement, places the officer on desk duty or paid leave. The police union steps in to defend the officer. The officer claims he feared for his life. Eventually the prosecutor does not indict the officer on grounds that there is insufficient evidence of any wrongdoing, even if there is a video, and the next several days are marked by demonstrations, stepped-up police patrols, and further arrests. Finally, the reaction subsides, and the police and protesters settle into an uneasy truce. For this reason, while we have been impressed by the outrage over George Floyd, we keep asking each other, “What’s next?”
There are reasons for having a lack of faith in the justice system. The truth of the matter is that the police are rarely prosecuted for murder — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use force on the job. In reality, prosecutors often refuse to take cases involving the police to court because they fear they will be unable to push jurors to take the word of an eyewitness over an officer who has been entrusted to protect and serve. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence is so heavily tilted in favor of police officers who “feared for their life” under §1983 Fourth Amendment (Tennessee v. Garner, 1985), that claimants have little chance of recovery. There is also “qualified immunity,” which presents a double-edged sword: the need to hold public officials accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably (Pearson v. Callahan, 2009). It is this legal doctrine that has shielded police officers for decades. Add to this mix the police unions, who have emerged in recent years as one of the most significant roadblocks for change, and who aggressively protect the rights of their members accused of misconduct. They have also been remarkably effective at fending off broader change, using their political clout and influence to derail efforts to increase accountability.
What has been made clear is that even as more of these incidents are caught on video, it does not seem to make much of a difference to prosecutors, judges and juries. Remember, it was Minneapolis’ Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s statement, “But my job in the end is to prove that he violated criminal statute and there is other evidence that doesn’t support a criminal charge. . . .” which drew criticism and helped ignite the protests. It is why George Floyd’s case was taken out of Freeman’s hands and reassigned to Attorney General Keith Ellison. Bob Kroll, the president of the city’s police union denounced political leaders, accusing them of selling out his members and firing four officers without due process. By the way, Kroll, who is himself the subject of at least twenty-nine complaints, has praised Trump as someone who “put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”
Why do police, prosecutors, district or county attorneys, judges and jurors, and even every day white citizens believe it is okay to murder black citizens in cold blood in the name of law and order? Part of it is embedded in a racist ideology that goes back hundreds of years that holds that black people, particularly black men, are automatically deemed criminal and dangerous. It is also because white people have a very different relationship with the police and cannot understand what it is like to be abused by them. Prosecutors who must face voters at election time and work with police officers every day are often loathe to bring charges. Police officers facing questions about their use of force do not always tell the truth. More often than not, the victim is blamed for their own murder, and their character is demonized in the process.
The truth is that black Americans live in fear of the police. We fear law enforcement officials armed with weapons, who monitor our every behavior, and who can attack us on the street and in our homes for the slightest alleged provocation. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that modern-day American police departments are the descendants of violent slave patrols that existed in southern states before the Civil War. After the war ended, they managed the legal enforcement of racist Black Codes, followed by Jim Crow laws, often working in conjunction with the Ku Klux Klan for the untold numbers of beatings, murders, and disappearance of black people who forgot their place.
Early police departments in growing U.S. cities that were overwhelmingly white brutalized vulnerable communities routinely. It was not unusual for police officers to join white mobs as they attacked black homeowners attempting to move into white neighborhoods, or to abuse their discretion to stop, question and arrest black citizens at will. Thousands of lynchings of black Americans by white vigilantes went unpunished by the judicial system, with some of those vigilantes members of the police department. And during the civil rights era, peaceful protests were harshly suppressed by officers sworn to protect and serve.
But as black Americans gained more rights that made these actions illegal, lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle looked for other ways to criminalize the black community, legally. In 1971, the Nixon administration launched the war on drugs, resulting in increased arrests and harsher prison sentences largely aimed at black people. During the 1970s, the numbers of arrests and court caseloads increased, and prosecutors and judges became harsher in their charging and sentencing. In the 1980s, after Reagan took office and started appointing tough conservative judges, the law became a weapon against crime and convicted defendants became more likely to serve prison time. This upward trend continued with tough-on-crime policies through the 1990s, and while Clinton enacted the 1994 crime bill, to lay the blame for the incarceration trend entirely, or even mostly on that bill, ignores the overall historical trend. It was Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, which helped birth the Black Lives Matter movement, when we witnessed a resurgence of protests over police brutality throughout the country.
Black people want the same things as white people: to live peacefully in safe neighborhoods and be able to rely on police safety and protection. But it is clear that when white police are in our neighborhoods, they do not communicate with us, they do not even acknowledge us. Instead, they look upon us disdainfully and keep to themselves, until they decide to pounce on yet another black body and humiliate them. If the police patrolled white communities with the same violence that they patrol black neighborhoods, there would be outrage. Let me put it to you another way: when police make a minor stop, for example, a broken tail light, they do so with contempt; the way they talk to you, the tone in their voice, their body language, the way they look at you as if you are nothing and not worthy of any respect whatsoever. I know; I have had first-hand experience. And you have to be very careful with your body language and the tone of your voice because in one quick instant, you instinctively know you could be murdered on the spot. That is right: murdered for a broken tail light. Murdered for a twenty dollar bill. Murdered for being black.
When you chalk it up, black people’s interaction with the police is part of the worst manifestations of countless slights and indignities that builds until there is an explosion. It appears that after all of the murders we have witnessed in recent years, George Floyd’s murder was that explosion. So how do you take this historical moment to evoke change with a system that refuses to deliver justice to black folks?
Everything is connected. While George Floyd’s murder has incited outrage, it has been quickly linked to a growing concern expressed over injustices brought to light by COVID-19, and the stark reality of what this legacy of racism and bias has done in communities of color. Despite calls from politicians not to defy the lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, protesters have taken to the streets throughout the United States and around the world. And if you look into those crowds, it consists of a multiracial, multigenerational group of people.
One thing is clear: While I applaud the protesters who are shining a brilliant light on our need to move our country and culture forward, I remain perplexed on the endgame. That nagging question remains, “What happens next?” Smart politicians, like New York’s Governor Cuomo, have already taken the initiative by proposing a national ban on chokeholds, and he has proposed to the state legislature the “Say Their Name” agenda, which will make prior disciplinary records of law enforcement officers transparent, ban chokeholds, make false race-based 911 reports a hate crime, and automatically have all investigations and disputes handled by New York’s Attorney General. A few cities and states have followed similar legislation. Some in Congress have talked about legislation, including the reexamination of qualified immunity, which shields law enforcement from lawsuits for constitutional violations. But there does not seem to be a national agenda from the protesters that includes a list of demands and objectives. There is also a notable absence of black American community leaders uniformly engaging in the national public discourse. It is clear we want change, but what is it specifically, and how do we go about getting it? What is the plan? What comes next after the protests? It is the moral responsibility of every American, black, brown and white, when armed agents of the state are harming people in our names, to ask why and to take action.
People in favor of police accountability have rallied, and that is a good start, but there must be a way forward. Besides pressing politicians and candidates about how they would approach cases involving police misconduct, they need to field their positions on plea agreements, mass incarceration, prosecuting low level crimes, holding the poor in jail who are unable to pay bail for minor crimes and prosecuting juveniles as adults. There should be the same level of accountability for the countless black women and girls murdered by police by the same state-sanctioned police violence that our black men and boys have experienced. There should be a demand for smart policing where police officers participate as active members of the black community they are sworn to protect; are capable of telling the difference between petty crimes and serious threats; and know the distinction between the majority of law-abiding residents and the small minority of lawbreakers in a community. This is not an impossible task because it happens every day in white communities across the U.S.
Finally, if you want change, are ready to participate in change, and are prepared to do the work for the long-haul, then as President Obama has often remarked, “VOTE.” Protesting brings attention to a matter while voting empowers action. Young people must take their vote to the polls, and then must be willing to become active agents of change. Without that commitment, we will continue to see more of the same tyranny we are witnessing today.
I understand that we are experiencing a lot of hurt in the world that has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. While in the beginning many of us were just hoping to get back to our pre-COVID, “normal” lives, the killing of George Floyd reminds us that we need our collective focus to be on something bigger than getting back to normalcy. Rather, this should be a turning point where together we look beyond our politics, class, and race, and move toward embracing our similarities and our humanness. We need this to be a sustained movement that creates a new normal built on a foundation of seeing and valuing one another. It means we need this to be the commitment of our lifetime, rather than just several weeks of protests. Let us not make this one of those moments where we look back and remember George Floyd as yet another face frozen in time.
