These Three Words, Part II

Author’s Preamble: This series tries to find an explanation for why BLM affects different sectors of our population differently. Accordingly, there is a deep look into policing of this country that can seemingly portray me as anti-cop. I am anything but. I truly understand that it is a small minority of police who have managed to smear the word “police” with the taint of their hatred or fear, and my research may seem as if I too am filled with bias based on hatred. It is quite the opposite. Instead, because two local police departments went over and above what was expected of them, keeping my family safe, their extra measures may be the only reason that we are alive.

The majority of my active legal career involved the bilingual representation of homeless victims of family violence. In one instance, I procured a divorce for a client and sent her to one of five facilities around the country to guarantee her family’s safety. This was predicated upon the condition that she never contact me again. Why? I knew from experience that once her ex-husband was released, he would haul me into court accusing me of hiding his wife.

That scenario came to pass. After the case was dismissed, the adverse party began harassing me by phone at my place of employment. Soon, that segued into his stalking me. He would show up in the Presiding district court when I was working with other clients, and he sat facing me, no matter where I was located in the courtroom; moreover, his empty truck was seen in my neighborhood outside of San Antonio.

One problem with “Orders of Protection” is that they provide no safety for the person representing the petitioner. Yet, in this case, the SAPD worked in conjunction with my local police department, and together they went the extra mile to serve this attorney and protect her family. The SAPD precinct that worked in my client’s neighborhood was familiar with the family. An officer from there first gave me the license plate number of the adverse party’s truck, just in case I saw an empty truck parked anywhere

I went. The officer knew the adverse party well for that was exactly what happened; often, it is used as a method of exerting power and control over a victim by instilling fear in the victim so that she becomes terrified to go anywhere.

Most importantly, they explained everything to my local police department. One needs to understand that, when this happened, I begged my husband NOT to purchase any kind of weapon even though as a retired United State Air Force veteran, he had extensive knowledge about guns. We had two small boys in our home, and I was not going to be responsible for the death of ANY curious child. Thus, a different plan was developed: The police of my city would drive past my home, at regularly timed intervals, lights a-blazing, day and night, for months—long enough for the gentleman finally to get the memo that he was not going to get me.

I have great respect for our public servants. It is one of the reasons that the growing numbers of acts of brutality perplex me . . . .

Vestiges of Slavery. In Part I of this series, I discussed some of the history of policing blacks because the form and methodology used by those who police the United States in the twenty-first century go directly back to 1619, when Africans were first brought to this country. Slave Codes, that were used to control behavior as opposed to stopping crime, were the underpinning for the development of Slave Patrols. Once the slave population grew to greatly outnumber those in control, these slave patrols morphed into the bases for Police Departments. With the passage of time, Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws—though illegal by their very nature—continued to guarantee the dominance of the white population by criminalizing any and all behavior of black people that could be deemed as threatening to the dominance of white people. Again, this was a behavior-based system, enforcing serious repercussions for actions as simple as a casual glance or the failure to refer to a white person as “Mr.” or “Miss” and creating an entirely separate system for housing, recreation, dining, and working for black people, instituting a grossly inferior way of life for them and carrying over the vestiges of slavery long after the end of the Civil War.

Time Goes By. The struggle for equality for black Americans from the time of slavery to today has been marked by slow milestones of progress followed by measures to thwart that progress. Consider that nine decades passed between a President proclaiming that slaves would be free and the Supreme Court’s holding unconstitutional the school segregation of descendants of those slaves. The advances won by black Americans in the decades following emancipation were mirrored by racist backlash. It is no accident that the Ku Klux Klan was formed during Reconstruction, in an effort to counteract the protection afforded blacks by federal troops stationed in the South. In 1877, the federal government abandoned Reconstruction and withdrew its troops, leaving the former Confederate States free to implement laws that restored and reinforced the racial, social, and economic hierarchy of the antebellum period. These efforts were sanctioned in the Supreme Court’s 7-1 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Even after the separate but equal doctrine was overturned by the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, black students integrating schools—from six-yearold Ruby Bridges to twenty-nine-year old college student James Meredith—needed protection from federal law enforcement.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the efforts by black Americans to secure the rights guaranteed to them by law were met with violent resistance by white Americans. In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old, was lynched and his murderers were acquitted. 2 In the summer of 1961, Freedom Riders (including future United States Representative John Lewis) were met with violent protests while police declined to intervene. Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was killed on June 12, 1963, and it would be thirty years before his murderer, a white man, was convicted. A few months later, on September 15, 1963, a bombing at a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four little girls. One defendant was convicted in 1977, but it would be twenty-five years before two of his accomplices were convicted, and a fourth man died without ever being charged.

On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared in Mississippi, and their buried bodies were discovered six weeks later. During the investigation, it was rumored that law enforcement officers were involved in the crime. In 2005, a single defendant was convicted of the murders, and the cases were closed by state and federal authorities, foreclosing the possibility of further investigation.

On Sunday, March 25, 1965, about six hundred voting rights advocates (including John Lewis) set out from Selma, Alabama, on a march toward the state capital of Montgomery, but only got as far as the city’s Edmund Pettus Bridge before they were stopped and beaten by state troopers, a day that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Illustrating the insidious nature of white supremacy in the South, the Edmund Pettus for whom that infamous bridge was named was a Confederate general, a leader in the Alabama KKK, and a United States Senator in the 1890s.

And on April 4, 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s murder is commonly marked as the end of the Civil Rights Movement.

Stop and Frisk. Despite the legal and economic gains made by and for black citizens, the more things changed, the more they have stayed the same. As demonstrated above, much of the backlash against the increasing social, economic, and political power of black Americans was aided and abetted by (at best) the indifference or (at worst) complicity of law enforcement and judicial officials. The vestiges of slavery continue to animate law enforcement procedures and attitudes of the populace. While equal treatment may have been the letter of the law, that was not always the experience of black citizens.

A cornerstone of criminal justice is the protection accorded each citizen that they cannot be questioned, searched, hauled into jailed and/or imprisoned indefinitely by any peace officer or entity without there first being probable cause for such action. In most instances, an officer is prohibited from conducting any unreasonable search or seizure of a person or place. However, there are many methods of getting around this prerequisite that have been deemed legal and allowable. One of the most infamous techniques is called “Stop and Frisk.”

While the black population of the South had been accustomed to seemingly unending methods of being interrogated, inspected, or incarcerated, as they migrated from the rural South to other urban parts of the nation— moving in increasing numbers especially after World War II—blacks seemed to be accorded more local, state, and national protections. Nonetheless, the strategy of harassment and intimidation continued and, until very recently, was even deemed legal. An officer of the law was permitted to stop and frisk without probable cause for an arrest if he could “articulate a reasonable basis” for the stop or suspected that the person was armed and/or dangerous. Few places indulged in the practice more than New York City. In New York, it was acceptable for the police to halt pedestrians and question and inspect someone, if the office had “reasonable suspicion” that the person in question was in possession of contraband or illegal weapons. Likewise, the individual could be stopped if the officer felt that the individual was committing, had committed, or was about to commit a felony or penal law misdemeanor. It is the last part of that phrase that was most disturbing. Suddenly, officers were authorized to be fortune tellers.

While stop and frisk had been legal since 1968, the numbers of stops began to escalate during Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral terms (1994- 2001). It was then that data began to show the disparate effect that stop and frisk had on black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Giuliani adopted a zero-tolerance policy for low-level offenses, claiming that stop and frisk saved lives. His stated goal was to catch persons who had committed more serious crimes. Elite teams were dispersed among “high crime” areas, detaining thousands of individuals. In 1998, there were 27,061 reported stops. However, it was Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration (2002-2013) that could be called “Cops Gone Wild.” Over 685,000 people were stopped in 2011, the highest number under his tenure. Nearly 90% of the individuals stopped were African-American or Hispanic, although the population of those two minorities combined only totaled approximately 50% of New York’s residents. The more disturbing statistic was that 88% of those stopped were found to be innocent of any crime. Thus, the stops did not identify perpetrators of serious crimes, but they did create an environment of fear among the people targeted.

Questionable behavior that might have been prohibited elsewhere was given the green light in New York. Mirroring the beliefs of many white officers of the South, northern police operated on the misbelief that black people, particularly the men, had an innate inclination to commit crimes. Consequently, black people were arrested and roughed up at incredibly disproportionate rates when compared to their statistical makeup of the general public. Still, authorities justified their actions of consistently surveilling, restricting, and hampering the movements of black people in New York as they had all across the nation. This continued until 2013, when Judge Shira A. Scheindlin finally put a stop to it. Contrary to the finding in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), the court found that the policy of pulling over or apprehending pedestrians without probable cause was in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The fact that stop and frisk had an amazingly adverse effect on people of color only added to its being unconstitutional.

America the Beautiful. The justifications for New York City’s stop and frisk policy showcase a detrimental law enforcement philosophy. Too often, the people authorized to secure the safety of the public see themselves as being in constant danger and believe that the only way to protect their community— and most importantly themselves and their brothers and sisters in blue—is to dominate black people. This fear has caused a small number of law enforcement officers to commit growing numbers of attacks, often by escalating encounters that begin as quasiinnocent inquiries and end with inhumane actions. Thus, the hatred that motivated the slave patrols to inhibit the behavior of enslaved black people, regardless of innocence, continues to be a vital justification of overly aggressive acts even when, seemingly, no crime has been committed. The deep-seated stereotype of black people as violent or aggressive makes some officers feel attacked even when no threat truly exists. Conditioned to fear black people in general, and especially to fear any reversal of power structures rooted in concepts of white supremacy, officers can merely feel disrespected and decide to exert force in order to reestablish their edge of power, often with tragic results.

A House Divided. What is even more unnerving is the fear or refusal of honest police officers to turn in or report their outof-control colleagues. What could explain such callous behavior by good people? Loyalty to the badge, which is paramount to police. Thus, the reporting of excessive force or use of racial slurs by a colleague could be seen as an act of treason. There seems to be a siege mentality among some officers.

Many officers see themselves as engaged in combat against an armed enemy. In turn, success within their profession is based on their success in this fight (i.e., arrest numbers, crime rates). This causes friction with the people that they are paid to protect. The 2017 Pew Report found that 86% of police feel underappreciated by the general public, for if one is not a member of the blue line, it is hard to understand all of the risks and challenges of the job. Instead of feeling a part of the community, they feel “at war” with it. As a result, officers of the law believe they only have two choices when they see wrongs committed by fellow officers: They can either participate or ignore it.

In 2017, Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, a sociologist at Colorado State University– Pueblo, conducted a study of 7,000 protests from 1960-95. She discovered that police were more likely to put down a protest than speak harshly about police who conduct such behavior. An example of this is the chaos created after Terence Monahan, a white officer who was then the Chief of the NYPD, knelt in unison with Black Lives Matters protestors. At the time, Monahan said he felt the pain of the protestors, having witnessed horrors against women in his own department. He agreed with the message that public safety officers should not be causing fights but stopping them. His photo was all over social media, kneeling in unison with protestors, even hugging them. While some praised him, many law enforcement officers questioned his judgment and his loyalties.

Monahan retired the very next year, after having served in the police force for thirtynine years. Before leaving his position to take a post as an advisor to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, overseeing recovery, safety and planning for NYC, Chief Monahan wrote three emails, apologizing for his act. He declared that he had made a “horrible” decision to display such a sympathetic act with a mutinous group. He just could not win. He was damned when he committed the act, and he was feeling damnation if he did not participate with people with whom he agreed in his heart. Monahan initially stated that he kneeled with the protestors because he believed that some of them were not anti-cop, but wanted to “embrace change.” Though he announced that he felt that in order for there to be real change in the NYPD, both sides would need to come together and work with each other—not attack and blame the other side—he still caught flak from the President of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Ed Mullins, who claimed that Monahan was leaving the police to soften the upcoming blows that would probably emerge from the multiple complaints filed by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the group that handled hearings about improper police tactics, the same group that was to hold hearings about Monahan and his actions during multiple George Floyd protests.

Social Dominance Orientation. Psychological research suggests that white officers are disproportionately likely to demonstrate a personality trait called “social dominance orientation.” White officers of the law who score high for the likelihood of possessing this trait tend to use force more frequently than those who do not. People with high levels of this trait tend to believe that the existing social hierarchies are not only necessary, but morally justified. If one feels that social hierarchy is good, then maybe one will be more willing to use state-sanctioned violence to enforce that hierarchy and to think that it is one’s job to do so.

The complexity involved with policing one’s community, being on the lookout for wrongs to happen, being always ready to respond quickly, creates the tensions associated with the position. This tension can bring out the worst in any person. Overt racism may prompt some officers to engage in abusive acts towards black people. On the other hand, the police officer could merely be mirroring the overwhelming feelings within the community and reflecting a desire to maintain the traditional social hierarchies. Taking all of this into consideration may begin to explain why black people were 28% of those killed by law enforcement in 2020 despite making up less than 13% of the total population of the nation. They were three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. In fact, police have been shown to kill black people in higher rates than white people in the forty-seven largest United States cities. It is not unusual for most police killings to begin as innocently as a mere traffic stop. Likewise, they can escalate from a mental health call or reported low level offenses. Police-involved killings are not correlated to crime. Why does this continue to occur? From 2013-20, 98.3% of police killings did not result in any officer being charged with a crime. Thus, because there is little accountability, there has been little deterrence of this pervasive problem.

What’s Going On? Black people have been acutely aware of the danger lurking in police forces. However, the rest of the world— the rest of the nation, even—has not been as cognizant of this troubling fact, although there are frozen moments in United States history that have blown this secret wide open. In March 1991, for instance, George Holliday heard a ruckus outside of his apartment. Instinctively, he ran outside to see what was happening, grabbing his video camera to tape the scene. The video of what happened to Rodney King that day was played on the news, blatantly showing that the police were definitely guilty . . . of something. The video became the lynchpin of the prosecution’s argument of abuse by the Los Angeles Police Department officers.

Catch and Release. Confronted with this incontrovertible evidence, many Americans were shocked that the people who were supposed to guard the public were caught doing the exact opposite. Nevertheless, all four of the officers involved in the Rodney King beating were acquitted on state charges, although two of the officers were later convicted on federal civil rights charges. While the world was surprised by the outcome of the Rodney King case, the residents of what was referred to then as “South Central LA” were not. For decades, there had been mounting tension between those with power (the police department) and the powerless (the residents) within South Central. Black residents in South Central could not get justice whether they were the accused or the victim of crime. A mere month before the King beating, a store owner claimed she was being robbed by an armed fifteen-year-old African-American girl who, it was uncovered, was clutching wadded money with which she was going to pay for the juice she was accused of trying to steal. The store owner fatally shot the girl and was convicted of manslaughter. Her sentence? Probation and a fine of $500.

So when the verdict of the four police officers who participated in the beating of Rodney King was announced as “Not Guilty,” the locals knew that the defendants were not innocent in the least. Once the foreman gave the verdict, the city literally caught fire. South Central was fed up with being overwhelmed, overlooked, and overcharged for so long, and they refused to stand idly by and just let the verdict’s announcement trail off into the wind. Probably the most surprising outcome from the Rodney King debacle was the LAPD’s failure to respond to the growing number of looters and the mounting amount of damage that came not long after the trial. There was no response. None. There was no plan to protect the city should the policemen not be held accountable for the acts that were seen all over the world. LAPD Police Chief Darryl Gates spoke at a fundraiser. In fact, he ordered his men to retreat. It was only after Mayor Tom Bradley declared a state of emergency that 2,000 National Guardsmen were ordered to bring order to the city.

I See You. Fast forward through the rest of the 1990s and ten years into the new millennium. One little piece of technology would again change how the world viewed American police tactics: the smartphone. It was not the primary feature, the actual calling part of the apparatus, that was to be central to changing or enlightening opinions of racism in American policing. It was its capability, at least initially, to capture actual photographs and video. And most everyone had smartphones. And those photographs and videos could be shared almost instantaneously by the average person and circulate virally around the world in a matter of hours. After the onslaught of news reporting time after time after time that an unarmed black man had been beaten and/ or killed by white authorities, Alicia Garza, of Oakland, California, coined the phrase Black Lives Matter. Another tsunami of victims (especially the merciless killing of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri) moved Patrisse Cullors, an avid user of the social media platform Twitter, to put the phrase Black Lives Matter into the Twitter-verse, creating the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Ayo Tometi (formerly known as Opal Tometi) joined forces with Garza and Cullors and used her experience with activism and community organizing to turn the hashtag into a political and social movement. #BlackLivesMatter grabbed the entire world’s attention and became the voice of black victims killed in the most heinous manners by an outrageous number of white police officers all over the country.

The Black Lives Matter movement is one of the quickest forming, largest, most controversial—yet most effective— contributors to the Civil Rights Movement ever. Black Lives Matter has also sparked questions. For instance, what effect did the Black Lives Matter movement have on the George Floyd trial? Has the George Floyd verdict brought accountability for heinous, illegal acts by police? Why does the Black Lives Matter agenda include voting reform? The answers to these and other nagging questions will be considered in an upcoming issue of San Antonio Lawyer, in Part III of this series: These Three Words.

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